Jim Butcher tells the story, in various interviews, how he started the wildly successful Dresden Files series with trying to write terrible formulaic genre fict

Jim Butcher tells the story, in various interviews, how he started the wildly successful Dresden Files series with trying to write terrible formulaic genre fiction to prove to his teacher that it would be terrible, and ended up with something marketable. Example interview: https://clarionfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/interview-with-jim-butcher-author-of-the-dresden-files/ https://clarionfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/interview... (search for "Writing the Genre Fiction Novel")