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PurpleFox
1. The Bad News: Right Now, Your Writing Sucks.
Itâs nothing personal. When I was a teenager, my writing sucked, too. If you donât believe me, check these out: You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. and (God help us all) You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. Yeah, they suck pretty bad. But at the time, I thought they were pretty good. More to the point, at the time they were also the best I could do. No doubt you are also pounding out stories and songs to the best of your ability⊠and chances are pretty good that your best, objectively speaking, isnât all that good.
There are reasons for this.
a) Youâre really young. Being young is good for many things, like being flexible, staying up for days with no ill effects, not having saggy bits, and having hair. For writing deathless, original prose, not so much. Most teenagers lack the experiential vocabulary and grammar for writing well; you lack a certain amount of perspective and wisdom, which is gained through time. In short: You havenât yet developed your true writing voice.
Now, if youâre really good, you can fake perspective and wisdom, and with it a voice, which is almost as good as having the real thing. But usually, sooner or later, itâll catch up to you and your lack of experience will show in your writing. This will particularly be the case when you have a compelling, emotional story, which would require the sort of control and delivery of your writing that you only get through time. You may simply not have the wherewithal to EĂÏrĂ©ĆĄĆĄ your very important story well. Yes, having a great story youâre not equipped to tell pretty much bites. Normally, this is when teens look for help from the writers they admire, which brings us to the next reason your writing sucks:
b) Youâre besotted by your influences. If you look at those two pieces I linked you to earlier, they rather heavily bear the mark of people like whom I wanted to write â humorist James Thurber in the case of the short story, and Pink Floyd lyricist Roger Waters in the case of the would-be concept album. If I were to subject you to other writing of mine from the time (and I wonât), youâd see the rather heavy influence of other favorite authors and lyricists, including Robert Heinlein, Dorothy Parker, HL Mencken, P.J. OâRourke, Bono, Martin Gore and Robert Smith. Why? Because I thought these people wrote really, really well, and I wanted to write like them.
You are not likely to have my influences, but you almost certainly have influences of some sort, who you love and to whom you look as models and teachers. But since youâre young and havenât gotten your own voice worked out, youâre likely to get swamped by your influences. My concept album lyrics arenât just bad because theyâre the work of an immature writer, but also because itâs clear to anyone who cares to look that I was listening to whole hell of a lot of Pink Floyd when I was writing them. Extracting Roger Waters out of those lyrics would require radical surgery. The patient would not likely survive. Thatâs bad.
c) When youâre young, itâs easier to be clever than to be good. Now, when youâre older, itâs easier to be clever than to be good too, and youâll see a lot of writers doing just that, even the good ones. This is because âcleverâ gets laughs and attention and possibly *** (or at least flirting) with that hot little thing over there who thinks youâre so damn amusing. And none of that ever gets old. So this is not just a teenage problem. Where teenage writers are at a disadvantage is that youâre not always aware when youâre genuinely being good, or merely being clever. Itâs that whole lack of experience thing. Yes, the lack of experience thing crops up a whole lot. What are you going to do.
Thereâs nothing wrong with being clever, and itâs possible to be clever and good at the same time. But you need to know when clever is not always the best solution. Even older writers find this a tough nut to crack, and youâll find it even more so.
(Update, 6/18/07: Iâve noticed that in the comment thread, quite a few folks seem to stop reading right about here in order to post messages complaining about how I said that teen writing sucks. If youâre about to be one of them, let me suggest two things. One, read the rest of the article first, particularly the next point. Two, You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now., which covers most of the major complaints people have had about this assertion. If these do not address your particular complaints, then by all means leave a comment. Otherwise, donât, because my response will be to refer you to one or the other. Thanks. Now, back to our regularly scheduled entry.)
So those are some of the reasons your writing sucks right now. There may be others. But, now having told you that your writing sucks and why, youâre ready to hear the next point:
2. The Good News: Itâs Okay That Your Writing Sucks Right Now.
Because, look. Everyoneâs writing sucked when they were teenagers. Why? Simple: Because they were just starting out. Just like you are now.
Writing is tricky thing, because everyone assumes that the act of writing to move and amuse people with words is somehow only slightly more difficult than the act of writing to place words into vaguely coherent sentences. This is like saying that playing professional baseball is only slightly more difficult than hitting a beach ball with a stick. Most everyone can hit a beach ball with a stick, but very few people would think that means theyâre ready to play in the World Series. Given that, itâs funny that people think that theyâre going to be really excellent writers from the first time they try to tell a story with the written word.
Excepting the freaks of nature, which very few of us are, anything we decide to do takes us time to get good at. Itâs just that simple. The figure I hear a lot â and which I agree with, mostly â is that it takes about a decade for people to get truly good at and creative with their craft. The prime example of this is the Beatles; at 17 John Lennon and Paul McCartney were beginning their musical collaboration together, and ten years later they were writingSgt. Pepperâs Lonely Hearts Club Band. The âten yearsâ thing is a guideline, not a rule â some people hit their stride earlier, some later, but the point is that there was work involved. This is even true of the people youâve never heard of before â scratch most âovernight sensationsâ in whatever field and youâll find they did their time outside the spotlight.
Understandably, no one wants to hear that youâve got to wait the better part of a decade to hit your stride â who doesnât want to be brilliant now? â but I think thatâs looking at it the wrong way. Knowing youâve got years to grow and learn means youâve got the time to take risks and explore and figure out what works for you and what doesnât. Itâs permission toplay with your muse, not stress out if every single thing you bang out is not flat dead brilliant. Itâs time to gain the life experience that will feed your writing. Itâs time you need to write â and time you need to not write and to give your brain a break. Itâs the time you need to learn from your literary influences, and then to tell them to piss off because youâve got your own voice and itâs not theirs. And itâs the time you need to screw up, make mistakes, learn from them and move on.
The fact that your writing sucks now only means that your writing sucks right now. If you keep working on it itâll very likely get better⊠and then comes the day that you write something that really doesnât suck. Youâll know it when it happens and then youâll get why all that time banging out stuff that sucked was worth it: because itâs made you a writer whodoesnât suck anymore.
So donât worry that your writing sucks right now. âSuckâ is a correctible phenomenon.
3. You Need to Write Every Day.
Iâm sure youâve got this wired, and Iâll note that for teenagers today, itâs easier to write every day, because thereâs an entire social structure revolving around writing that didnât used to exist: Blogs and blog-like things like MySpace, or whatever thing has replaced MySpace by the time you read this. Writing isnât the isolating experience it (mostly) was before.
Now, be aware that writing in your blog or journal isnât the same as writing stories or songs or whatever your writing aspirations might be. Blogging very often takes the form of what writers call âcat vacuuming,â which is to say itâs an activity you do to avoid actual writing. You want to avoid doing too much of that (yes, thereâs some irony in me writing this in a blog entry â particularly a blog entry being written when I could be writing part of a book I have due to a publisher).
âCat vacuumingâ though writing in a blog may be, any sort of daily writing will help build the mental muscle memory of sitting down to put your thoughts into words, and thatâs not a bad thing. So write something today. Now is good.
4. Iâm Not Going to Tell You to Get Good Grades, But, You Know, Try To Pay Attention.
High school is often asinine and lame â Iâm not telling you anything you donât know here â but on the other hand itâs a place where youâre actually encouraged to do two things that are a writerâs bread and butter: to observe and to comment. Provided your teachers are not entirely defeated drones who have bought into the idea that their sole purpose is to detain you in soul-numbing classes so you and your fellow students wonât set fire to the school with them in it, they will actually be pleased if you ask a few pointed questions now and then, and as a result, you might learn something, which is always a nice bonus for your day. School is a resource; use it.
(Also, for the love of all that is holy, please please please pay attention in your English composition class. You should know English language grammar for roughly the same reason you should know road rules before you go driving: It avoids nasty pile-ups later.)
Being writers, I donât need to tell you that observing your fellow students is also hours and hours of fun, but donât just look for the purposes of wry mockery. Any jerk can do that. Work on your empathy â try to understand why people are the way they are. This will achieve two things. One, itâs a good exercise for you to help you one day create characters in your writing who are not merely slightly warped versions of you. Two, itâll make you realize thereâs more to life than wry mockery.
5. Read Everything You Can Get Your Hands On â Even the Crap That Bores You.
And hereâs why the crap that bores you is worth reading: Because someone sold it, which means the writer did something right. Your job is to figure out what it was and what that means for your own writing. It should also give you hope: If this bad writer can sell a book or magazine article, then you should have no problem, right? Excellent.
This suggestion is actually more difficult to follow than you might think. People like to read what they like, and donât like to read what they donât like. Thatâs fine if all you want to be is a reader, but if you want to be a writer, you donât have the luxury of just sticking to the stuff that merely entertains you. Writing thatâs not working for you is still working for someone; take a look and see if you can find out why. Alternately, pinpoint why it doesnât work. Fact is, you can learn as much from writers you donât like as you can from writers you do â and possibly more, because youâre not cutting them slack, like you would your favorite writers.
A corollary to this is: Read writers who are new to you. Donât just stick to the few writers you know you like. Take a few chances. You donât have to spend money to do this: Most towns have this wonderful thing called a library. Weâre talking free reading here, and the publishing industry wonât crack down on you for it. Heck, we like it when you visit the library.
6. You Should Do Something Else With Your Life Than Just Write.
There are practical and philosophical reasons for this. The practical reason: Dude, writers make almost nothing most of the time. Chances are, youâre going to have a day job to support your writing habit, at least at first. So you want to be able to get a day job that doesnât involve asking people if they want fries with that. Just something to keep in mind.
The philosophical reason: the writer who only writes isnât actually experiencing much of life; his or her writing is going to feel inauthentic because it wonât reflect reality. You want to get actual life experience outside of being a writer, otherwise your first novel will be like every other first novel out there, which revolves around a young writer trying to figure out his life, and then sitting down to write about it. People who write books where the main character is a young, questioning writer should be shot out of a cannon into a pit filled with leeches. Donât make us do that to you.
âDoing something else with your life,â incidentally, also includes your college major. There are people who would advise you to be English majors and then go after an MFA, but Iâm not one of them (Iâm a philosophy major myself â useless but interesting). The more things you know about, the more youâre able to incorporate your wide range of knowledge into your work, which means youâll be at a competitive advantage to other writers (this will matter). You might worry that all those English majors and MFAs are learning something you really need to know, but you know what? As long as youâre writing (and reading) regularly and seriously, youâll be fine. Writing is a practical skill as much as or even more than it is an area of study.
Now, Iâm sure many of those English majors and MFAs might disagree with me, but Iâve got ten books and fifteen years of being a professional writer backing me up, so I feel pretty comfortable with my position on this.
7. Try to Learn a Little About the Publishing Industry.
If youâre going to be a writer for a living (or, if not for a living, at least to make a little money here or there), youâre going to have to sell your work, and if youâre going to sell your work, you should learn a little how the business of writing works. The more you know how the publishing industry works, the more youâll realize how and why particular books sell and others donât, and also what you need to do to sell your work to the right people.
This is not to say that at this point you should let this information guide you in what you write â at this point you should write what interests you, not what you think is going to make you money one day, if for no other reason that the publishing industry, like any industry, has its fads and trends. Whatâs going on now isnât going to be whatâs going on when youâre ready to publish. But thereâs nothing wrong about knowing a little bit about the business fundamentals of the industry, if you can stomach them.
If you think youâre going to write in a specific genre (science fiction or mystery or whatever) why not learn a little about that field, too? A good place to start is by checking out author blogs, because authors are always blathering on about crap like that. Trust me. Also (quite obviously), authors are prone to offer unsolicited advice to new writers on their sites, because it makes us feel all mature and established to bloviate on the subject. And sometimes our advice is even useful.
Thereâs no reason to be obsessive about acquiring knowledge of the industry at this early age, but it doesnât hurt to know; itâll be one less thing you have to ramp up on when youâre ready to start putting stuff out there. Which reminds me:
8. Be Ready For Rejection.
Itâs very likely the the first few years that you submit material to publishers and editors, or query them for articles, your work and queries are going to come back to you unbought. Why? Because thatâs just how it is. Iâll give you an example: Recently I edited a science fiction magazine. For the issue of the magazine I edited, I had between 400 and 500 submissions. From those, there were about 40 I thought were good enough to buy. And of those, I bought 18. Thatâs a 95.5% rejection rate, and an over 50% rejection rate of stuff Iwanted to buy, but couldnât because I didnât have the space (or the money, because I had a budget, too). Now, as it happens, for this magazine I also managed to give first sales to four writers because I wanted to make a point of finding new writers â but I imagine if you asked them how long theyâd been submitting work before that sale, youâd find most of them had been doing it for a while.
There are things to know about rejection, the first of which is that itâs not about you, itâs about the work. The second is that there are any number of reasons why something gets rejected, not all of them having to do with the piece being bad â remember that I rejected a bunch of pieces I wanted to buy but couldnât. The third is that just because a piece was rejected one place doesnât mean it wonât get accepted somewhere else. I know that at least a couple of pieces that I rejected have since been bought at other places.
Rejection sucks, and thereâs no way to get around that fact. But if youâre smart, when you start submitting youâll consider pieces that are rejected simply as ready to go on to the nextplace. Keep writing and submitting.
(Which brings up the question: If you have pieces now that you want to submit, should you? Well, Iâm sure submissions editors everywhere will hate me for saying this, but, sure, why not? If nothing else itâll get you used to the rejection process, and thereâs always a chance that if it is good, someone might buy it. But, on behalf of the submissions editors, Iimplore you not to submit unless you really think the work in question is the best you can do.)
9. Start Getting Published Now â Yes, That Means the School Newspaper.
I know, I know. But, look, youâre going to have to deal with editors sooner or later. And you know how many editors in the real world were editors of their school newspapers? A whole lot of them. Lots of writers were, too (I was editor-in-chief of both my high school andcollege newspaper, so that makes me a two-time loser). Basically, as a writer youâll never be rid of these guys, so you might as well learn how they work. But also, and to be blunt, school newspapers may be piddly, but they give you clips â examples of your writing you can show to others. You can take those clips to your tiny local newspaper and maybe get a few small writing assignments there â and then youâre professionally published. And then you can take those and use them to get more serious gigs over time, and just keep trading up.
You can also also use those high school clips to help you get on your college paper, and when youâre in college, working at the college newspaper can be very useful. I used my college newspaper clips to freelance with the local indie papers in town and also with one of the major metropolitan newspapers⊠and those clips help me get my first job out of college, as a movie critic at a pretty large newspaper. And all of that started doing little articles for my high school newspaper, the Blue & Gold.
What does this teach us? First, that it can be worth it to deal with the high school newspaper editor, even if he or she is an insufferable dweeb, and second, that all the writing you do can matter, and help you to continue on your writing career.
10. Work on Your Zen.
Being a writer isnât easy; itâs a lot of mental effort for often not a lot of financial reward. It takes a lot of time to get good at it â and even when you are good at it, youâll find thereâs still more you have to learn, and things you have to deal with, in order to keep going in the field. It takes a measure of patience and serenity to keep from completely losing it much of the time, and, alas, âpatienceâ and âserenityâ are two things teenagers are not known to have in great quantities (to be fair, adults arenât much better with this). Despite that, youâll find as a writer that there is a great advantage in keeping your head, being smart and being practical, even when everyone around you is entirely losing their minds. It helps you see things others donât, which is an advantage in your writing, and also in the workaday aspect of being a writer.
So: Relax. Spend your time learning, observing, writing, and preparing. Donât worry about writing the Great American Novel by age 25; donât worry about being the Greatest Writer Ever; donât worry about winning the Pulitzer. Focus on your writing and getting better at it. As they say, luck favors the prepared. When the moment comes, if your skills are there, youâll be ready to take advantage of it and to become the writer youâve been hoping you would be. Your job now is to get yourself ready for the moment.
Youâve got the time to do it. Take it.
Itâs nothing personal. When I was a teenager, my writing sucked, too. If you donât believe me, check these out: You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. and (God help us all) You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. Yeah, they suck pretty bad. But at the time, I thought they were pretty good. More to the point, at the time they were also the best I could do. No doubt you are also pounding out stories and songs to the best of your ability⊠and chances are pretty good that your best, objectively speaking, isnât all that good.
There are reasons for this.
a) Youâre really young. Being young is good for many things, like being flexible, staying up for days with no ill effects, not having saggy bits, and having hair. For writing deathless, original prose, not so much. Most teenagers lack the experiential vocabulary and grammar for writing well; you lack a certain amount of perspective and wisdom, which is gained through time. In short: You havenât yet developed your true writing voice.
Now, if youâre really good, you can fake perspective and wisdom, and with it a voice, which is almost as good as having the real thing. But usually, sooner or later, itâll catch up to you and your lack of experience will show in your writing. This will particularly be the case when you have a compelling, emotional story, which would require the sort of control and delivery of your writing that you only get through time. You may simply not have the wherewithal to EĂÏrĂ©ĆĄĆĄ your very important story well. Yes, having a great story youâre not equipped to tell pretty much bites. Normally, this is when teens look for help from the writers they admire, which brings us to the next reason your writing sucks:
b) Youâre besotted by your influences. If you look at those two pieces I linked you to earlier, they rather heavily bear the mark of people like whom I wanted to write â humorist James Thurber in the case of the short story, and Pink Floyd lyricist Roger Waters in the case of the would-be concept album. If I were to subject you to other writing of mine from the time (and I wonât), youâd see the rather heavy influence of other favorite authors and lyricists, including Robert Heinlein, Dorothy Parker, HL Mencken, P.J. OâRourke, Bono, Martin Gore and Robert Smith. Why? Because I thought these people wrote really, really well, and I wanted to write like them.
You are not likely to have my influences, but you almost certainly have influences of some sort, who you love and to whom you look as models and teachers. But since youâre young and havenât gotten your own voice worked out, youâre likely to get swamped by your influences. My concept album lyrics arenât just bad because theyâre the work of an immature writer, but also because itâs clear to anyone who cares to look that I was listening to whole hell of a lot of Pink Floyd when I was writing them. Extracting Roger Waters out of those lyrics would require radical surgery. The patient would not likely survive. Thatâs bad.
c) When youâre young, itâs easier to be clever than to be good. Now, when youâre older, itâs easier to be clever than to be good too, and youâll see a lot of writers doing just that, even the good ones. This is because âcleverâ gets laughs and attention and possibly *** (or at least flirting) with that hot little thing over there who thinks youâre so damn amusing. And none of that ever gets old. So this is not just a teenage problem. Where teenage writers are at a disadvantage is that youâre not always aware when youâre genuinely being good, or merely being clever. Itâs that whole lack of experience thing. Yes, the lack of experience thing crops up a whole lot. What are you going to do.
Thereâs nothing wrong with being clever, and itâs possible to be clever and good at the same time. But you need to know when clever is not always the best solution. Even older writers find this a tough nut to crack, and youâll find it even more so.
(Update, 6/18/07: Iâve noticed that in the comment thread, quite a few folks seem to stop reading right about here in order to post messages complaining about how I said that teen writing sucks. If youâre about to be one of them, let me suggest two things. One, read the rest of the article first, particularly the next point. Two, You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now., which covers most of the major complaints people have had about this assertion. If these do not address your particular complaints, then by all means leave a comment. Otherwise, donât, because my response will be to refer you to one or the other. Thanks. Now, back to our regularly scheduled entry.)
So those are some of the reasons your writing sucks right now. There may be others. But, now having told you that your writing sucks and why, youâre ready to hear the next point:
2. The Good News: Itâs Okay That Your Writing Sucks Right Now.
Because, look. Everyoneâs writing sucked when they were teenagers. Why? Simple: Because they were just starting out. Just like you are now.
Writing is tricky thing, because everyone assumes that the act of writing to move and amuse people with words is somehow only slightly more difficult than the act of writing to place words into vaguely coherent sentences. This is like saying that playing professional baseball is only slightly more difficult than hitting a beach ball with a stick. Most everyone can hit a beach ball with a stick, but very few people would think that means theyâre ready to play in the World Series. Given that, itâs funny that people think that theyâre going to be really excellent writers from the first time they try to tell a story with the written word.
Excepting the freaks of nature, which very few of us are, anything we decide to do takes us time to get good at. Itâs just that simple. The figure I hear a lot â and which I agree with, mostly â is that it takes about a decade for people to get truly good at and creative with their craft. The prime example of this is the Beatles; at 17 John Lennon and Paul McCartney were beginning their musical collaboration together, and ten years later they were writingSgt. Pepperâs Lonely Hearts Club Band. The âten yearsâ thing is a guideline, not a rule â some people hit their stride earlier, some later, but the point is that there was work involved. This is even true of the people youâve never heard of before â scratch most âovernight sensationsâ in whatever field and youâll find they did their time outside the spotlight.
Understandably, no one wants to hear that youâve got to wait the better part of a decade to hit your stride â who doesnât want to be brilliant now? â but I think thatâs looking at it the wrong way. Knowing youâve got years to grow and learn means youâve got the time to take risks and explore and figure out what works for you and what doesnât. Itâs permission toplay with your muse, not stress out if every single thing you bang out is not flat dead brilliant. Itâs time to gain the life experience that will feed your writing. Itâs time you need to write â and time you need to not write and to give your brain a break. Itâs the time you need to learn from your literary influences, and then to tell them to piss off because youâve got your own voice and itâs not theirs. And itâs the time you need to screw up, make mistakes, learn from them and move on.
The fact that your writing sucks now only means that your writing sucks right now. If you keep working on it itâll very likely get better⊠and then comes the day that you write something that really doesnât suck. Youâll know it when it happens and then youâll get why all that time banging out stuff that sucked was worth it: because itâs made you a writer whodoesnât suck anymore.
So donât worry that your writing sucks right now. âSuckâ is a correctible phenomenon.
3. You Need to Write Every Day.
Iâm sure youâve got this wired, and Iâll note that for teenagers today, itâs easier to write every day, because thereâs an entire social structure revolving around writing that didnât used to exist: Blogs and blog-like things like MySpace, or whatever thing has replaced MySpace by the time you read this. Writing isnât the isolating experience it (mostly) was before.
Now, be aware that writing in your blog or journal isnât the same as writing stories or songs or whatever your writing aspirations might be. Blogging very often takes the form of what writers call âcat vacuuming,â which is to say itâs an activity you do to avoid actual writing. You want to avoid doing too much of that (yes, thereâs some irony in me writing this in a blog entry â particularly a blog entry being written when I could be writing part of a book I have due to a publisher).
âCat vacuumingâ though writing in a blog may be, any sort of daily writing will help build the mental muscle memory of sitting down to put your thoughts into words, and thatâs not a bad thing. So write something today. Now is good.
4. Iâm Not Going to Tell You to Get Good Grades, But, You Know, Try To Pay Attention.
High school is often asinine and lame â Iâm not telling you anything you donât know here â but on the other hand itâs a place where youâre actually encouraged to do two things that are a writerâs bread and butter: to observe and to comment. Provided your teachers are not entirely defeated drones who have bought into the idea that their sole purpose is to detain you in soul-numbing classes so you and your fellow students wonât set fire to the school with them in it, they will actually be pleased if you ask a few pointed questions now and then, and as a result, you might learn something, which is always a nice bonus for your day. School is a resource; use it.
(Also, for the love of all that is holy, please please please pay attention in your English composition class. You should know English language grammar for roughly the same reason you should know road rules before you go driving: It avoids nasty pile-ups later.)
Being writers, I donât need to tell you that observing your fellow students is also hours and hours of fun, but donât just look for the purposes of wry mockery. Any jerk can do that. Work on your empathy â try to understand why people are the way they are. This will achieve two things. One, itâs a good exercise for you to help you one day create characters in your writing who are not merely slightly warped versions of you. Two, itâll make you realize thereâs more to life than wry mockery.
5. Read Everything You Can Get Your Hands On â Even the Crap That Bores You.
And hereâs why the crap that bores you is worth reading: Because someone sold it, which means the writer did something right. Your job is to figure out what it was and what that means for your own writing. It should also give you hope: If this bad writer can sell a book or magazine article, then you should have no problem, right? Excellent.
This suggestion is actually more difficult to follow than you might think. People like to read what they like, and donât like to read what they donât like. Thatâs fine if all you want to be is a reader, but if you want to be a writer, you donât have the luxury of just sticking to the stuff that merely entertains you. Writing thatâs not working for you is still working for someone; take a look and see if you can find out why. Alternately, pinpoint why it doesnât work. Fact is, you can learn as much from writers you donât like as you can from writers you do â and possibly more, because youâre not cutting them slack, like you would your favorite writers.
A corollary to this is: Read writers who are new to you. Donât just stick to the few writers you know you like. Take a few chances. You donât have to spend money to do this: Most towns have this wonderful thing called a library. Weâre talking free reading here, and the publishing industry wonât crack down on you for it. Heck, we like it when you visit the library.
6. You Should Do Something Else With Your Life Than Just Write.
There are practical and philosophical reasons for this. The practical reason: Dude, writers make almost nothing most of the time. Chances are, youâre going to have a day job to support your writing habit, at least at first. So you want to be able to get a day job that doesnât involve asking people if they want fries with that. Just something to keep in mind.
The philosophical reason: the writer who only writes isnât actually experiencing much of life; his or her writing is going to feel inauthentic because it wonât reflect reality. You want to get actual life experience outside of being a writer, otherwise your first novel will be like every other first novel out there, which revolves around a young writer trying to figure out his life, and then sitting down to write about it. People who write books where the main character is a young, questioning writer should be shot out of a cannon into a pit filled with leeches. Donât make us do that to you.
âDoing something else with your life,â incidentally, also includes your college major. There are people who would advise you to be English majors and then go after an MFA, but Iâm not one of them (Iâm a philosophy major myself â useless but interesting). The more things you know about, the more youâre able to incorporate your wide range of knowledge into your work, which means youâll be at a competitive advantage to other writers (this will matter). You might worry that all those English majors and MFAs are learning something you really need to know, but you know what? As long as youâre writing (and reading) regularly and seriously, youâll be fine. Writing is a practical skill as much as or even more than it is an area of study.
Now, Iâm sure many of those English majors and MFAs might disagree with me, but Iâve got ten books and fifteen years of being a professional writer backing me up, so I feel pretty comfortable with my position on this.
7. Try to Learn a Little About the Publishing Industry.
If youâre going to be a writer for a living (or, if not for a living, at least to make a little money here or there), youâre going to have to sell your work, and if youâre going to sell your work, you should learn a little how the business of writing works. The more you know how the publishing industry works, the more youâll realize how and why particular books sell and others donât, and also what you need to do to sell your work to the right people.
This is not to say that at this point you should let this information guide you in what you write â at this point you should write what interests you, not what you think is going to make you money one day, if for no other reason that the publishing industry, like any industry, has its fads and trends. Whatâs going on now isnât going to be whatâs going on when youâre ready to publish. But thereâs nothing wrong about knowing a little bit about the business fundamentals of the industry, if you can stomach them.
If you think youâre going to write in a specific genre (science fiction or mystery or whatever) why not learn a little about that field, too? A good place to start is by checking out author blogs, because authors are always blathering on about crap like that. Trust me. Also (quite obviously), authors are prone to offer unsolicited advice to new writers on their sites, because it makes us feel all mature and established to bloviate on the subject. And sometimes our advice is even useful.
Thereâs no reason to be obsessive about acquiring knowledge of the industry at this early age, but it doesnât hurt to know; itâll be one less thing you have to ramp up on when youâre ready to start putting stuff out there. Which reminds me:
8. Be Ready For Rejection.
Itâs very likely the the first few years that you submit material to publishers and editors, or query them for articles, your work and queries are going to come back to you unbought. Why? Because thatâs just how it is. Iâll give you an example: Recently I edited a science fiction magazine. For the issue of the magazine I edited, I had between 400 and 500 submissions. From those, there were about 40 I thought were good enough to buy. And of those, I bought 18. Thatâs a 95.5% rejection rate, and an over 50% rejection rate of stuff Iwanted to buy, but couldnât because I didnât have the space (or the money, because I had a budget, too). Now, as it happens, for this magazine I also managed to give first sales to four writers because I wanted to make a point of finding new writers â but I imagine if you asked them how long theyâd been submitting work before that sale, youâd find most of them had been doing it for a while.
There are things to know about rejection, the first of which is that itâs not about you, itâs about the work. The second is that there are any number of reasons why something gets rejected, not all of them having to do with the piece being bad â remember that I rejected a bunch of pieces I wanted to buy but couldnât. The third is that just because a piece was rejected one place doesnât mean it wonât get accepted somewhere else. I know that at least a couple of pieces that I rejected have since been bought at other places.
Rejection sucks, and thereâs no way to get around that fact. But if youâre smart, when you start submitting youâll consider pieces that are rejected simply as ready to go on to the nextplace. Keep writing and submitting.
(Which brings up the question: If you have pieces now that you want to submit, should you? Well, Iâm sure submissions editors everywhere will hate me for saying this, but, sure, why not? If nothing else itâll get you used to the rejection process, and thereâs always a chance that if it is good, someone might buy it. But, on behalf of the submissions editors, Iimplore you not to submit unless you really think the work in question is the best you can do.)
9. Start Getting Published Now â Yes, That Means the School Newspaper.
I know, I know. But, look, youâre going to have to deal with editors sooner or later. And you know how many editors in the real world were editors of their school newspapers? A whole lot of them. Lots of writers were, too (I was editor-in-chief of both my high school andcollege newspaper, so that makes me a two-time loser). Basically, as a writer youâll never be rid of these guys, so you might as well learn how they work. But also, and to be blunt, school newspapers may be piddly, but they give you clips â examples of your writing you can show to others. You can take those clips to your tiny local newspaper and maybe get a few small writing assignments there â and then youâre professionally published. And then you can take those and use them to get more serious gigs over time, and just keep trading up.
You can also also use those high school clips to help you get on your college paper, and when youâre in college, working at the college newspaper can be very useful. I used my college newspaper clips to freelance with the local indie papers in town and also with one of the major metropolitan newspapers⊠and those clips help me get my first job out of college, as a movie critic at a pretty large newspaper. And all of that started doing little articles for my high school newspaper, the Blue & Gold.
What does this teach us? First, that it can be worth it to deal with the high school newspaper editor, even if he or she is an insufferable dweeb, and second, that all the writing you do can matter, and help you to continue on your writing career.
10. Work on Your Zen.
Being a writer isnât easy; itâs a lot of mental effort for often not a lot of financial reward. It takes a lot of time to get good at it â and even when you are good at it, youâll find thereâs still more you have to learn, and things you have to deal with, in order to keep going in the field. It takes a measure of patience and serenity to keep from completely losing it much of the time, and, alas, âpatienceâ and âserenityâ are two things teenagers are not known to have in great quantities (to be fair, adults arenât much better with this). Despite that, youâll find as a writer that there is a great advantage in keeping your head, being smart and being practical, even when everyone around you is entirely losing their minds. It helps you see things others donât, which is an advantage in your writing, and also in the workaday aspect of being a writer.
So: Relax. Spend your time learning, observing, writing, and preparing. Donât worry about writing the Great American Novel by age 25; donât worry about being the Greatest Writer Ever; donât worry about winning the Pulitzer. Focus on your writing and getting better at it. As they say, luck favors the prepared. When the moment comes, if your skills are there, youâll be ready to take advantage of it and to become the writer youâve been hoping you would be. Your job now is to get yourself ready for the moment.
Youâve got the time to do it. Take it.
