Literary Birthday – 5 June – Evan Marshall

Happy Birthday, Evan Marshall, born 5 June 1956.

Seven Quotes

1. Before you even approach an agent, learn your market inside out and master the techniques of your craft the best you can.
2. New writers erroneously believe that if we don’t know the book’s lead well, and if we don’t know all the circumstances that have led up to her being where she is, we won’t care about that person. But this is untrue.
3. I take a structured approach to creating novels, and so I begin by creating an extremely detailed outline for my books. These outlines contain every detail I know about a story before I begin writing it.
4. When I’m writing a novel, I write at least ten pages a day, working closely from my outline.
5. My most valuable rule has been never to go back (except to check an important fact) while I’m writing. Nor do I allow myself to print out the novel until the first draft is completed.
6. Writers should begin their stories with the event that kicks off the story, and then spoon-feed us background information only when it’s needed to understand what’s going on.
7. The first question you should ask yourself when naming a character in one of your novels is whether a name you have in mind fits the character’s personality as you’ve defined it so far. This is a ‘gut’ thing—we all have preconceived ideas of how people with certain names look and act.

Visit Evan Marshall’s website for more.

Evan Marshall is an American literary agent and an author. He writes non-fiction books, including The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing, and murder mysteries.

  by Amanda Patterson

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