Jennifer Gilmore Quotes

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

Until I became a nurse, no one had ever asked me to sign a book contract. I had been writing for decades, read thousands of books, and even worked in publishing for 10 years. Who knew that nursing would be my break?

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

Chet loved artists. He did. But he was caught up in the system. He had two hats. He had to have 'em because he did two things: he was an artist, and he was an executive.

Approaching my second novel was, admittedly, a bit of a struggle. But having an amazing team at Atheneum Books, especially my very patient, brilliant editor Namrata Tripathi, took a stressful situation and turned it into a really great learning experience for me.

I had been laid off from 'Entertainment Weekly 'right before I started writing 'Gone Girl.'

I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'

I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.

I worked in videogames for 16 years before writing my first book in 2009.

My first four books were not published because nobody wanted them. They were adult books, not kids' books.

Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I switched to listening to purely instrumental pieces.

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

I taught elementary school and painted apartments for ten years. Now I write full-time and never have to change a thing I write. Every book comes to me in a flash of inspiration and takes me about two seconds to finish. The longer books, like the 'Time Warp Trio' novels, take a little longer to write - more like four seconds.

But we discovered that, although I liked publishing, the commercial side meant nothing at all to me.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

My first novel, 'Housekeeping,' was accepted by the first agent who read it, and bought by the first editor who read it. In general, my experience with publication has been gentle and gratifying.

I'm not sure I can say there is a clean line between me as an individual and me as a lawyer.

I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.

Like most people, I was not able to start selling my stories right away. So I had many other jobs along the way to becoming a writer, including toy maker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and assembly line worker. Eventually, I became an elementary teacher and worked with second and fourth graders.

I worked for many years as a writer for children and then wrote two adult novels of the kind they call 'literary' without any very great disturbance to this kind of life. Then, something went wrong. My third adult novel was rejected by the publisher of the first two. And I could not understand the criticism offered.

The tendency is to think if you are a professional woman, it's because you've turned your back on the traditional side. The tendency is not to recognize that we can excel as professionals without giving up our identity of being mother, wife and homemaker.

I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.