"Write what you know" is beyond hackneyed, but there's a grain of truth in the old saw. Nicola Keegan, editor and Parisian resident, has penned her first novel and Bill Clegg is representing her interests. You'd like him to be representing your interests as well, but you've never set foot in Paris, have you?
Ms. Keegan's debut novel is centered around a swimmer who breaks down and goes to Paris to see a psychiatrist. Therapy, in turn, leads to a lot of back story that sounds like much of Irish fiction. Nuns and holy cards and addiction and illness are to Irish fiction as shopping on Fifth Avenue is to chick-lit. An editor for Fodor's knows Paris, and should know how to write. Maybe you've not been to Paris, but you've been somewhere, haven't you?
Are you working on your short stories? Nami Mun won a Pushcart Prize and she's won Amy Williams of McCormick & Williams in the agent lottery. If someone else thinks that your prose is good, a literary agent will be that much more likely to ask you for pages. A bit of their work is done, you see. You've been vetted, like someone knowing the password at the door of the speakeasy.
How about promoting your work as a freelance writer and slush reader? Amy MacKinnon is about to be published in book form, and you have to believe that her experiences writing articles for the Christian Science Monitor and NPR, along with a stint reading slush for Post Road, would have helped shape her words and form her sentences into marketable paragraphs.
Read and write. It's actually a lot of work, in spite of sounding so easy that anyone could do it.
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