A Word for Discouraged Writers

Are you a discouraged writer? Take heart and be encouraged from this glimpse into the life of novelist Mary Higgins Clark, who has now sold 80 million copies in the U.S., and millions more around the world.

She grew up in the Bronx during the Depression, the daughter of Irish immigrants who ran a pub.

She worked a secretary, then as a flight attendant for Pan Am, married at age 22, and had a child nine months later. She would have four more children in the next eight years. Then her husband died. To make ends meet, she wrote four-minute-long radio scripts for a show called Portrait of a Patriot.

But in the early mornings, before her kids woke up, she sat at the typewriter and wrote short stories — her true passion. She sent them off to magazines, and she got back dozens of rejection slips. One read: "Mrs. Clark, your stories are light, slight, and trite." Another slip said: "We found the heroine as boring as her husband had."

While she was still writing radio scripts she decided to try writing a novel, a historical one about George Washington. It was published, she said, and then "remaindered as it came off the press."

A group of her radio co-workers went out to lunch and she pointed out her book in a Manhattan bookstore window. When they came back from lunch, the book was not there any more. She insisted that it must have been snapped up. But when they passed by the store again at the end of the workday, the book was there in the window again. She went inside to ask about it, and the bookstore employee told her: "Whoever bought it returned it."

But she was highly encouraged by the fact that she had been published at all, and she decided to try writing a suspense novel inspired by the time that her three-year-old child had gone missing briefly near a deep lake. In 1974, she sold it to a publisher for a modest $3000. Three months later, she found out the paperback rights to the book had sold for $100,000.

Her second suspense novel sold for $1.5 million, and soon she was being paid $12 million per story. Each one of her suspense novels has been a best-seller.