![]() “I desperately wanted to become an author but I didn’t have the courage to quit my job,” Sepetys says, so she started getting up at 4:30 a.m. ![]() So she asked for pointers to improve, and asked if she could revise and resend it to them.Ĭall it what you want-pluckiness, moxie, sheer cheek-but this kind of determined resilience has been a hallmark of Sepetys’s writing career, one that began on the heels of a very successful first career in music management in LA. Sepetys (rhymes with “spaghettis”) still remembers it verbatim: The editor described her writing as “’obnoxious, annoying,’ and my narrative voice was ‘grating.’ If I had to read one more word I would have hung myself.” ![]() The first time #1 New York Times–bestselling and Carnegie medal–winning historical fiction author Ruta Sepetys submitted her writing for professional feedback-at a writers’ conference with a top editor at one of the biggest publishing houses in the business-she got “one of the most notoriously bad critiques in the history of conferences ever.” If you’d like to receive these and my weekly writing craft posts in your in-box you can sign up here. ![]() T his post is part of the monthly How Writers Revise series, where I talk with successful authors about their editing and revisions processes, as well as the challenges and setbacks they’ve faced in their careers and how they overcame them. ![]()
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