If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you’ve got. Just don’t plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living.
The only people who should plan on making money from writing a book are people who made money on their last book. Everyone else should either be in it for passion, trust, referrals, speaking, consulting, change-making, tenure, connections or joy.
Category Archives: Writing
The deep river was running
There are a number of mysteries in [Penelope Fitzgerald’s] life, areas of silence and obscurity. One of these has to do with “lateness”. How much of a late starter, really, was she? She always said in interviews that she started writing her first novel (The Golden Child) to entertain her husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, when he was ill. But, like many of the things she told interviewers, there is something a little too simple about this. At least one story was published before that first novel, and her archive reveals how much was going on in her interior life before she started publishing.
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Fitzgerald’s years of teaching – it’s evident from her letters – were often hard grind, exhausting and frustrating, in that staffroom full of “exhaustion, worry and reproach”. There is a poignant note inside the back cover of her teaching notebook for 1969, a long time before she started to publish: “I’ve come to see art as the most important thing but not to regret I haven’t spent my life on it.” Yet the conversations she was having with writers in her teaching books show that she was always thinking about art and writing: they show how the deep river was running on powerfully, preparing itself to burst out.
Climbing into other lives in other worlds
I never had the goal of being rich, and I have never been super-ambitious. A newspaper’s big enough for me. As long as I was able to make a living from my writing, I was happy. My ambition was to have people consider my writing truly great. Look, I need to be writing because you can’t be more alive than when you’re climbing into other lives in other worlds, whether it’s the Galapagos Islands or the Arctic circle. I’ve felt rich from the beginning – from the day I split the $40,000 advance for my first book.
You learn by failing
I don’t think of myself as an author. I think of myself as a writer, because writing is what I do. I’m always taken aback when others refer to me as “famous” or a “celebrity.” What a weird idea. The concept has no real application. It doesn’t serve a writer to start thinking of herself in those terms because it interferes with the work. Writing is an internal process. Success is external and not something we can control in any event. I foster that disconnect because it keeps me grounded.
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My big gripe about newer writers is they’re not willing to put the time in. Somebody’ll write one book and they’re asking me who my agent and my editor are, and I’m thinking, Don’t you worry, sweetheart, you’re not any good yet. Give yourself time to get better. Writing is really hard to master. You learn by failing over and over, but a lot of people don’t care for that, thanks.
Insecurity, rejection and disappointment
The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. … They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn’t reward persistence, that doesn’t see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn’t trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”
The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry — always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media — has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.
Study history or mathematics or sociology or engineering
I am occasionally asked what you should study in uni (or “college” as USians call it) to prepare for a career as a writer. Should you major in creative writing?
In a word: NO.
The best preparation for a writing career are saleable skills in some other area. If you want to go to college study history or mathematics or sociology or engineering or whatever else takes your fancy. Variety is good. Anything, really, other than creative writing.
What adults read now
I think there’s a worry that if [literary fiction is] funny then perhaps there’s something slight about it. That it’s not as important as a deeply researched, earnest, historical novel, or a kind of humorless tale of contemporary life. I think there possibly was a moment in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the serious books tended to be pretty funny. I don’t know if that’s as true these days. … I think it’s being done, but it’s not as front and center, not as widely read as it used to be, fiction that does that sort of thing. Maybe it’s also linked to readerships, how they’ve changed over the years. Or maybe it all got eaten up by Harry Potter and Twilight. I think, more and more, that’s what adults read now. All the people we’ve talked about are people who write hilarious, heartwrenching, and often horrific fiction, and they wrote for grown-ups. Maybe there aren’t enough grownups who want to read that sort of thing anymore.
Definition of “writing”
[L]anguage and the books they compose may die, but storytelling never will. Like song and dance, stories are eternal to how we humans communicate and express ourselves. People will always write because they will always have something to say. Or teach. Or discover. For a long time, this has been accomplished with bound books, with paper and ink. And for a long time, it will continue to be.
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Forget e-books—they are a question of format, not content. These devices, similar to online literary journals like this one, are simply the first primordial steps in a specialization that will change how the written word tells stories for future generations.
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In the same way that the modern art movement called into question what it meant to call something “art,” this will be an era that both challenges our static definition of “writing” and redefines the relationship between “writer” and “reader.” It will change who publishes, how they publish, and what form they publish in.
The edges of the work
[T]here is a great deal of personal narrative on the Web – some of which carries over to the print world as memoirs, some of which doesn’t. I think the online work is marginally more interesting: because there it’s unclear where the edges of the work are. The reader can pull at it; writing can stretch across time and space. Granted, most of isn’t very interesting. But it does seem like we are moving into a celebrity culture, where readers tend to follow personalities rather than their writing. Maybe ten years ago Momus said that “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people,” and I think the way the web works now does tend to encourage that.
Maintain a Queue
To use an analogy from running, blogging is the daily training that prepares me for my “races.”
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I gave up feeding the blog on a real-time, everyday basis a couple of years ago. … I maintain a queue of roughly 50-100 posts at all times, scheduling the less time-sensitive material at leisure and prioritizing the faster-moving stuff. That way I never get up in the morning dreading the task of tackling the blog. When so moved, I still write in real time, but I make that decision, not the blog. As soon as the blog stopped owning me, I finally began to master the blog form.
So that’s the secret. Huh.
Now, if only I were that organized… 😉
Seriously, a queue of 5-10 posts, I could see. But 50-100 posts?! Dude.
The Remainder Table 