For (future) Writers

This pertains to fiction. Nonfiction is an entirely different animal. This is the freebee page for future writers and it’s about stuff you almost certainly didn’t learn in creative writing class.

Like:

“So, you want to be a writer?”

My father had a saying, “If you do something and get paid for it, it’s work. If you do something and don’t get paid for it, it’s a hobby.” Good philosophy.

As with any other occupation, the best reason for becoming a writer isn’t because you have something to say, it’s because you suck at every other thing you’ve done EXCEPT writing, because writing is something you would do for free, and, well maybe because you have some ideas about how the world works. Even then, don’t quit your day job. By everyone’s (and by everyone, I mean the people who have actually made it as writers) will tell you, you have about a one in a thousand (that’s 0.1% or 0.001) chance of making a living as a writer, and this is the best time in history to try. You’d have a better chance of being hit by lightning if you stood on top of a building in St. Petersburg, FL in August holding a steel rod. A lot better, actually.

But it can be done. There are more people alive right now paying their bills by writing than ever before and hey, who knows, in ten years, you might be one.

Ten years? WTF?

Yep, let’s run the numbers. By all estimates (again, those who know such stuff) it takes 10,000 hours to gain proficiency at something more complicated than working at Starbucks (no offense meant, baristas), but we’re talking about engineering, medicine, astrophysics, law, etc. Writing, too. About a million words, more or less. So then, if you have a day job (I hope you aren’t expecting your parents or girlfriend/boyfriend to support your hobby) you work 8 hours a day. You sleep about 8 hours a day. That leaves 8 hours to do all the other stuff you  do, like eat, bathe, shave, floss, exercise, watch TV, piddle with Facebook and Twitter, and read other people’s work. And read other people’s work. If that leaves you with an hour a day to write, that adds up to about 350 hours a year (take a day off once in a while, for cripe’s sake). That’s a thousand hours in 3 years. It will take 30 years, MOL to hit 10,000. Math isn’t hard. Math is easy. It works the same way, every time. Writing’s hard. Adjust your expectations accordingly. If you really want to know what the path looks like, check out Joe Konrath’s blog.

“But,” you say. “I got straight A’s in creative writing in school, and I was on the school newspaper, and, and…”

And? You weren’t asking those people to give you money for your prose. If you want to make money writing, you’d better plan on your stuff being cleaner, sharper and more emotionally engaging that the other guy’s, and that takes time. And effort. And rejection. And constant learning. And being told the thing you worked on for a month sucks and now you have to go home, prop yourself back up, and try again. Because you love telling stories so much, you’d stand on a corner and write them, a thousand words at a time for people, if they’d put spare change in your hat. ‘Cause when you submit a story to a magazine, or a contest, or an agent, that’s the kind of drive you’re competing with.

Every.

Single.

Time.

But. As in any other artistic endeavor, if you actually hear that little intake of breath when a stranger experiences your work that means you got through to him, or your work moved her emotionally, there’s no other feeling quite like it.

So, you want to be a writer? Okay, what’s stopping you?

 

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