MANSFIELD READS "ONE CITY ONE BOOK"
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
H. G. "Buzz" Bissinger was born November 01, 1954 in New York. He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Bissinger won the Pulitzer Prize for a story on corruption in the court system while reporting for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Three Nights in August, and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He lives in Philadelphia.
From the Barnes & Noble Meet the Writer Series:
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
Before I wrote Friday Night Lights I was a print journalist for 15 years at the Ledger-Star in Norfolk, Virginia, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. When I left the paper and moved with my family to Odessa, Texas to write the book, I had confidence as a reporter, but I really did not know anything about writing a book. I did not use a written outline and it showed terribly. When I turned in the first 30,000 words to my editor Jane Isay at Addison-Wesley, she flipped. The partial draft had no narrative engine, no pace, absolutely no reason for the reader to turn the page. Jane not so politely told me that at the rate I was going, the book was going to be longer than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. We had an emergency meeting in New York where she forced me to finally focus on what I planned to say and where the book needed to go. From then on, I used a written outline. As for the 30,000 words I turned in, about 4,000 of them managed to actually make it into the book. The rest got thrown out.
See the entire interview at barnesandnoble.com
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