A Plug for Persistence

I often say that publishing a first book is like getting your master's degree. You've got to build up the skills of storytelling, word crafting, description, grammar, plotting, outlining, and don't forget the actual matter of disciplining yourself to complete a long term project. Revising, editing, submitting, revising again, scrapping a project and moving on to something better.

Writing is hard work. But I found an interesting observation from Betsy Lerner in her book, The Forest for the Trees (Revised and Updated): An Editor's Advice to Writers. She pointed out that the only real difference between writers that succeed and writers that don't was this, writers who don't succeed give up. Writers who succeed keep writing.

To be fair, she was talking about a specific type of writer (She breaks the writers she's worked with into six groups. This group was the ambivalent writer...that's the group I feel most at home with.). But I think it's safe to say that if you want to be a writer then you can develop the skills that will get you published. And if you keep working (remember that w word) then you'll likely get published again.

So keep writing. And check her book out. You might find something useful.

Writing and Work Ethics

A member of my writing group brought up the age old problem with being a writer. You have to write. Writing every day is, according to the general consensus, a good way to go about it. Some people set a goal for how much they want to write every day: a page, a paragraph, 500 words, or as this guy(Steve Bohls) does 1639.34 words per day (I cheated a little bit and took his year goal and divided it, but it still works out about right. Good thing it's a leap year or else it would be 1643.84. You should take a look, his stories are engaging and his writing starts out good and gets better.) Fantasy writer David Farland even made writing daily his new year's resolution, and he's coming up on a solid two dozen books published with numerous best sellers.

For me, I often try to set aside a certain amount of time I will be writing instead of a word-count (If you are a writer you will become familiar with word-count. 80k for a novel, 50k for a young adult novel, 20k novelette, 6k for a short story, 120-300k for an epic. The numbers are pretty fluid, but as a writer you'll probably become familiar with those numbers. I'll do another post on length another day.) Man was that ever a long parenthetical. Anyway, like I said, I usually tend to set aside a certain amount of time each day to write and any writing will work. However, if I am on a project I will change my goal to match the number of words per day I need to finish my project on time.

That brings me to my main point. Writing needs to be taken seriously, and it's not always easy. Most successfully published authors that I've talked to or listened to describe their writing as a job.** They sit down for a certain amount of time each day (just like a job) and work on writing. If they are making business decisions then they usually spend some time doing that too. But the biggest part of being a writer is writing. Your words are your product. Imagine if Nabisco suddenly stopped making Oreo cookies. First of all, the world as we know it would cease to exist. But second, they wouldn't sell any more Oreos. We would not be able to buy Oreos because there would be none. That's the same thing with your words as a writer. If you don't produce any, there won't be any...no matter how many good ideas you have.

An important mental shift for any writer is when they decide to make writing a priority-making it a job. Take some time to figure out what your goals are, and above all, write every day. Publishing a book is akin to getting a master's degree when it comes to the amount of effort you need to put in, and just like a master's degree, you don't usually get paid for writing along the way. Keep working, keep honing your craft, keep learning how you can best express your ideas and I'll see you on the other side...the published author side.

**One notable exception is Orson Scott Card who, when asked if he sat down to write every day responded with something like "No. That sounds too much like work." Though he did mention that when he's writing a project he will average about 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the afternoon...hmmm that sounds suspiciously like a job after all.