Check out this piece on how writers have managed to get themselves and their books on Oprah, and how they've embarrassed themselves trying.
I once had a writer attend a workshop I was teaching who'd been a guest on Oprah with her book and sold a pile of them, and still wondered if she was "a real writer." Dear God! Does self-doubt never end?
I've never been on the show myself, not that I haven't tried. I collaborated on a book The Healing Power of Doing Good, with Allan Luks who previously had been on the show to talk about the message of the book. When the publication date came, the producers felt they'd already adequately covered the subject.
Then when Oprah came to Raleigh to speak, I hired a courier to take a copy of my novel Sister India to the stage door and do battle through the crowd for me. I was told that somebody there had taken the book off his hands.
That's been a few years ago now, but you never know when Chicago is going to call.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Deadly Serious Career Planning
Here's a writing assignment guaranteed to clarify your goals in your art career and in every thing else: WRITE YOUR OWN OBITUARY. I gave it a try and I promise you, it is immodest.
MY FAKE OBIT:
Nobel laureate and bestselling novelist Peggy Payne, 3-time winner of the National Book Award, died yesterday at the age of 122, at her home after a brief illness.
An outspoken advocate for self-actualization Payne also wrote a number of nonfiction books, including a much-loved biography of painter Elisabeth Chant.
Her books combined her explorations of the supernatural and paranormal with her travels in exotic and enticing locations, including India, Ireland, Greece, Brittany, and the city of New Orleans. Her work has been published in 42 languages. She continued to travel and write and lecture, and to work with other writers, until weeks before her death.
Most of her novels were made into movies and a script she co-authored received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Born in 1949 in Wilmington, NC, to Margaret and Harry Payne, she lived in North Carolina throughout her life. She and her beloved husband psychologist Bob Dick celebrated her hundredth birthday on a round-the-world cruise on the QE2. To the end of her life she maintained a close relationship with her family and friends, continuing to have tea with her writing group each Thursday she was in town.
In the second half of her life, she amassed great wealth and created a foundation to support artists, inventors and start-up businesses in imaginative undertakings.
Having wrestled with obsessive-compulsive disorder in her early years, she achieved in her fifties a state of inner peace that she considered her greatest achievement. Her explorations of the supernatural led her to ecstatic experiences of God and to an intimate connection with spirits.
She is remembered also as an enthusiastic gossip, a fan of old rock and roll, a magazine junkie, connoisseur of thrift shops, slapdash gardener, sometime clothes horse, and reader.
The Duke pep band will play at her funeral.
MY FAKE OBIT:
Nobel laureate and bestselling novelist Peggy Payne, 3-time winner of the National Book Award, died yesterday at the age of 122, at her home after a brief illness.
An outspoken advocate for self-actualization Payne also wrote a number of nonfiction books, including a much-loved biography of painter Elisabeth Chant.
Her books combined her explorations of the supernatural and paranormal with her travels in exotic and enticing locations, including India, Ireland, Greece, Brittany, and the city of New Orleans. Her work has been published in 42 languages. She continued to travel and write and lecture, and to work with other writers, until weeks before her death.
Most of her novels were made into movies and a script she co-authored received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Born in 1949 in Wilmington, NC, to Margaret and Harry Payne, she lived in North Carolina throughout her life. She and her beloved husband psychologist Bob Dick celebrated her hundredth birthday on a round-the-world cruise on the QE2. To the end of her life she maintained a close relationship with her family and friends, continuing to have tea with her writing group each Thursday she was in town.
In the second half of her life, she amassed great wealth and created a foundation to support artists, inventors and start-up businesses in imaginative undertakings.
Having wrestled with obsessive-compulsive disorder in her early years, she achieved in her fifties a state of inner peace that she considered her greatest achievement. Her explorations of the supernatural led her to ecstatic experiences of God and to an intimate connection with spirits.
She is remembered also as an enthusiastic gossip, a fan of old rock and roll, a magazine junkie, connoisseur of thrift shops, slapdash gardener, sometime clothes horse, and reader.
The Duke pep band will play at her funeral.
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