Off the Cuff: Rose Solari's Keys to Writing Success

"[A] thing that is crucial [for up and coming writers] is reading a lot. A professor of mine in college gave me the 100:1 ratio. He said, “You have to read about 100 good poems to write one.” It sounds daunting but it actually makes a kind of sense. I was trained in poetry, I have an MFA in poetry, so when I sat down to write a novel for the first time I knew I had an idea which was too narrative to fit into a poem and that it had to be a novel. One of the things I did was re-read novels I admired in a different way, specifically for structure. This is a really important thing that a beginning writer [should] do. No matter what you’re writing—non-fiction, fiction, poetry—take a couple of books you admire and look at how they’re put together, look at how the chapters are constructed, look at the arc [made] from one section to the next. If you’re doing, as my book had, an historical component, look at how writers who write historical fiction weave their research into the work without making it look clunky. One of my favorite novels is A.S. Byatt’s Possession which [narratively] travels through time periods and [when I was writing A Secret Woman] I literally took her book apart; I took my paper back and pulled it apart and laid out the sections and looked at how she developed the arc of the book. It was as useful as any writing class I’ve ever taken."

-Rose Solari