Tip on how to be a Nobel Prize winner in literature and a Great Giveaway!

 

So, you want to be a Nobel Prize winner in literature?

I read this tip in ‘How to Read Novels like a Professor’ by Thomas C. Foster. First, Foster lists two groups of well-known writers.

Column A:                       Column B:

John Updike                      Toni Morrison

F. Scott Fitzgerald             Orhan Pamuk

W. H. Auden                      William Butler Yeats

Iris Murdoch                      Nadine Gordimer

Anthony Burgess              V. S. Naipaul

Geoffrey Hill                      Seamus Heaney

James Joyce                       John Steinbeck

John Fowles                       Naguib Mahfouz

Virginia Woolf                   Gabriel García Márquez

E. M. Forster                      Ernest Hemingway

Then he asks what the similarities are among writers in Column A and Column B respectively. Well, writers in both Column A and Column B are talented.  

But he notices that all writers in Column B write books “oriented to history and social issues.” And all are Nobel Prize winners. None of the writers in Column A are Nobel Prize winners.

So, Foster’s advice to a writer aspiring for a Nobel Prize is to “study history.” In other words, write historical fiction instead of crime, romance, horror, fantasy, blah, blah, blah.

GIVEAWAY: If you want a PDF copy of ‘How to Read Novels like a Professor’ just drop me an email at thewordslinger@yahoo.com.  This giveaway ends one week from the date of this posting.

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