In 1998, an editor at Writers Digest asked me to contribute to an anthology about how to write fiction. I was then in my third decade as an author, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of doing this earlier. After all, I devoted a lot of my life to education and have a Ph D in American literature. For sixteen years, I was a professor at the University of Iowa, teaching Hawthorne and Melville, Hemingway and Faulkner.
Soon I wrote The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing. I also began teaching workshops at writers’ conferences and at schools such as Columbia College in Chicago and Seton Hill University outside Pittsburgh.
At the top of this page, you’ll find links to several of my essays about fiction writing, including “Five Rules for Writing Thrillers,” “What’s In A Name?,” and “Five Further Concepts.”
If you’d like to read a sample chapter from The Successful Novelist, click here.
Watch a 90-second video of David’s writing advice. Click here
