Writers Never Give Up

Today is the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Judith Guest (books by this author), born in Detroit (1936). She started writing when she was 10, but never got past starting, and had the beginnings of several projects crammed in her desk drawers for many years. In the early 1970s, she read a how-to book on writing by Richard Perry, called One Way to Write Your Novel. She promised herself that, this time, she would start and finish a story. Three years later, she published her best-selling first novel, Ordinary People (1976), the story of a teenage boy, Conrad, and his family in the aftermath of his suicide attempt after his brother Buck dies in a sailing accident. The film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1980.