To Be A Writer

 

“One morning we set sail, with brains on fire,
And hearts swelled up with rancorous emotion,
Balancing, to the rhythm of its lyre,
Our infinite upon the finite ocean.”
Charles BaudelaireWhy do we write?

We write because of the Human Condition. Life as we know and experience it must find some outlet in those of us who live it, love it, or endure it. We must express these things somehow.

We write because we are made in the Image of God. He is ultimately creative, therefore we all must create, being his children.

Art, poetry, music, writing, our imagination, along with the pain and beauty we feel — is of the very same essence, which is of our souls. And each of our souls long for a way of expressing the all of the joy and terror that weaves its way through our lives.

 

“We spend our days, each one of us,
in looking for the secret of life.
Well, the secret of life is in Art.”
Oscar WildeAs for writers, we are compelled to make our art by using the most intimate media for humans, which is our birth language. We first learn to speak from our parents, especially from our mother. It is our first medium of expression, which is probably why there are many more writers in the world than there are in all the other arts, in all their various media. What we first learned to speak we are much later learning to write, endeavoring to capture afresh our close feelings of love, joy and acceptance, as well as pain and loss.

So, we have established that all of us are creative, even gifted, and that many of us are writers.

But as with any other art, there must be years of discipline, struggle and effort for that which we express to begin to have real meaning and power to move and bless others. Only few of us will do this.

The essence of writing

Two kinds of people write. One kind writes because that is what they do. The other is a writer because that is what they are. There is a world of difference between the two. The same can be said about someone who is a draftsman or illustrator making their living with their skills, compared to someone who lives and breathes art, and who passionately creates just by living. You see what I mean? Therefore, you must discover, if you haven’t already, which kind of writer you are.

Practically speaking, it is going to be much easier to talk about the tangible and the mundane things about writing, than it would be to talk about those creative urges within you and I that move us to write in the first place. Greater people have already talked about those intangible things that move us to write. For example:

 

“Things are because we see them,
and what we see, and how we see it,
depends on the arts that have influenced us.
To look at a thing
is very different from seeing a thing.
One does not see anything
until one sees its beauty.”
Oscar Wilde”A poet is, before anything else,
a person who is passionately
in love with language.”
W. H. Auden

“No matter where your interest lies,
you will not be able to accomplish anything
unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.”
Basho

“By all means marry.
If you get a good wife,
you’ll be happy.
If you get a bad one,
you’ll become a philosopher…
and that is a good thing for any man.”
Socrates

You and I could add several more chapters or even volumes of prose and verbage here. I include these quotes because they spoke to me about the creative urges and passions within us that is almost impossible to put into words. (And no, I will NOT comment on that last one!)

There is a practical side to writing excellent things. The best writing disappears. You read something and you are suddenly hearing and seeing the characters and the places where they are. You don’t notice the words. They transport you. This is what the best writing does.

You need to master your language, in its meter and even its rhyme, not to be poetic, but to say things in the best possible way with the fewest words. You also need to write continuously and rewrite your work until it gets to that point. You will know it when it does, and so will your readers.

One more thing. Learn critical thinking. Debate. Practice thinking games and puzzles. Take classes in critical thought if you can find them. Few people in the world are critical thinkers, and even fewer people in the world are awake. This practice alone will improve your writing no end.

As for the practical things you can do to become a published writer, you must first ignore the myths and the boojums that surround what writers do. Then you can begin that long patient trek to becoming a published author. Read on.

Myths about writers
(They will all kill me for this!)

Writers are compulsive

 

“Life is no brief candle to me.
It is a sort of splendid torch which
I have got a hold of for the moment,
and I want to make it burn
as brightly as possible before
handing it onto future generations.”
George Bernard ShawYou who are writers are driven, even compelled to write because of those passionate things within you. But your talent and your ideas are under control. This compulsive business is different.

People like what they do, mostly, else they get therapy. People who are in pain or torment as they create are not being creative at all. They need to get help. Writing, or any art, should not cause you great pain, nor is this necessary for your words or your art to stand on their own in the world.

Writers do NOT need to write down what is moving them at any particular moment. Sometimes they are struck by a thought, an insight, or something funny, so they get up from what they are doing and go write it down, sometimes for hours or even days at a time.

Many writers would like for us all to think they are compulsive, but that is just a cover so that they can have their freedom to do what they want, selfish artists that they (we) are. Hey, it beats wearing a beret.

Fact is, Life happens. They might be some place where they can’t stop and write at the moment, but that’s OK, because when they do get the time, they will sit down and write it all out without missing anything. This means they are not compulsive, but they have their thoughts and skills under control. They just like to do what they do when they write, more than they like to spend time with you, or someone else, or in doing something else.

Writers must follow their Muse

 

“Words are locked coffins in which the
corpses still lie breathing.”
Don PatersonAnother myth. Someone somewhere said that the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets themselves. This means that your Muse will wait for you, and you do not have to jump when it says jump. Your typical writer will tell you otherwise. He MUST write, he says. He has no choice, else he will lose his Muse.

Bull! He just wants to do what he wants to do, that’s all. The truth is his muse, his inspiration, comes from the same place all good inspiration comes from, which is a person’s own subconscious mind, their dreams, and imagination. The myth of the Muse is just another cover, and a way to claim divine inspiration for what they write about to get a little respect for their craft.

The Muse we claim to own works in funny ways. I would swear that when I am writing a story, I do not have clue how it will turn out. Sometimes I keep writing just to see what will happen next. Sometimes I wake up with a story already completely written, down to the last detail. I just need to get to a keyboard to put in on paper. Amazing, how it works, isn’t it?

So, writers claim to have a fictional Muse as their inspiration, rather than taking full credit for their work and admitting it really came from their own minds, their inner thoughts, and life experience. Why is that, I wonder?

Writers cannot do anything else

 

“You came to me to learn the pleasure
of life and the pleasure of art.
Perhaps I am chosen to teach you
something much more wonderful–
the meaning of sorrow and its beauty”
Oscar WildeMany writers have a mental image of a successful writer. Real writers (they say) do not hold jobs. Rather they sit around all day in their pajamas, absorbing their favorite nutrients or other substances, only to complain about having writer’s block. Like I said, this is in the same vein as artists who wear berets, and musicians who act like Beatniks (look it up). None of this posturing is necessary.

Most successful writers already have other jobs in some other field, which, BTW, also gives them more experience and writing material than the fictitious guy hiding in his dreary apartment. There is another reason that most writers have another job. You have heard the expression, “Don’t give up your day job?” Having that profitable job in no way diminishes their talents as a writer.

Fact is, I got my best writing done while I was working a job with permanent overtime. When I was not working at all, my writing was not all that great. No matter what else I was doing, I found the time to be inspired and to put it all down in print, because I loved what I was doing, which was to write. Still do, AAMOF.

Writers suffer writer’s block

 

“Another cause of your sickness,
and the most important:
you have forgotten what you are.”
BoethiusThis WB is not necessarily true. The only cure for not being able to write is to sit down and write about something other than what is being blocked. Before long, you will be writing about what needs to be written about and the blockage will go away. This takes some discipline, and the best writers are the ones who are the most militant both about their writing and their routine.

Writer’s block is usually an excuse for something else.

If they still cannot write, then the writer may be at a point in their work where they cannot see beyond the place where they stopped. One story I had written demanded a sequel. It took me a year to get to the place where I could understand how a plot point was possible, for there to even be a sequel. Once I could do that, the story flew out of my fingers. This did not keep me from writing other things though.

Writer’s block can be very real to a writer, but still be imaginary. People cannot do any number of things because they have never given themselves permission. Therefore, “It cannot be done!” The truth about the matter is that when a few writers cannot write, they haven’t given themselves permission to write. There may even be a fear of failure lurking about, which needs to be faced.

Some people have sort of a script that they follow for their lives, which always ends in failure. If they could change the script, their lives would be different. The writers with this kind of problem have more than writer’s block, and they should have it looked at, because the world is deprived of their very unique talents and life experiences in the meantime.

Once it is written, it cannot be changed

 

“In the case of an artist, weakness is
nothing less than a crime, when it is a
weakness that paralyses the imagination.”
Oscar WildeAmateurs believe this one. “I cannot change a word. It is perfect like it is!”

More bull! To be a successful writer, you must EDIT, EDIT, EDIT! You will almost never get to a point where you think there cannot be one more slight change, a different word, etc., in your story. Do not be afraid to look at your work with a detached viewpoint. Try to tear it apart. Argue the other side. Look for flaws and plot failures. Then sit down and rework it. You will be a better writer for it, and your writing will improve enormously.

Some writers are on a deadline, and that can’t be helped. Yet even they, who are some of the best writers out there in the real world, hammering out their thousands of words a day on their word processors and typewriters, would all agree to this.

Nothing is worse for a writer than to look the next day at their work in print and wish with all their might that just a few words could be changed. You are in a better position than they are. You can sit down and edit your work ahead of time, because if you look closely, it probably needs it, right?

I will never find a publisher

 

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed
by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.
So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream.”
Mark TwainYou will be published. It just takes time. Lots of time. Hey, you aren’t going anywhere off planet, are you? You still have a life to live right here and now, right? Therefore, don’t worry how long it will take. If you keep broadening your experiences, stay at your keyboard, keep perfecting your writing skills, and continue to send your stuff in everywhere you can find to submit it — hey, it will happen.

The average writer gets his book, novel, or major work rejected about 20 or 30 times before someone picks it up. You have to be more persistent than those cretins the publishers hire to automatically reject the best writing the world has ever seen! Therefore, learn how this whole publishing thing works.

If nothing else, you can write about how it all works so others who want to write can be informed about this barrier to being published. (Yeah, I know.)

How to get published
(What? We got too many writers now!)

You can freelance

Trials and travails await those who work on spec, writing some article for a publication, spending hours researching, and polishing their piece, only to be turned down at the end. Never write on spec. Take a down payment (1/4 or 1/2) in advance, with a written contract, if you must. Although most pubs now only take material on spec, even from their seasoned stable of writers. It’s tough out there.

You know your time is limited. Therefore, you should not waste it writing about things some publisher might or might not want. Why spend hours writing something you possibly won’t get paid for, and which you cannot sell anywhere else? You will do better writing about what you love or hate, and submitting that those magazine publishers you think might pick up your work. Or you can try to send in just article ideas or clips to see if they are interested. Also, keep your day job.

Newspapers rarely take something, but they might do a story on what you do if you are good at it. If you are interested in writing for them, get your Journalism degree.

You can publish your writing on the Internet

 

“an intelligent writing which …
can defend itself and knows when to speak
and when to answer and when to be silent”
SocratesSure, you can build a home page, and transform your writing into something sort of readable, or downloadable on the World Wide Web. Many writers do this because they just have to see their work published. Yet you must be aware of several things here concerning what you write and publish on the Web.

One. Almost no one will see your work, except the friends and family members you drag over to your computer, or into whose unwilling hands you press a Xeroxed copy of your pride and joy! Publishing your work this way is a minor ego trip, and never profitable. However, your family and friends might think your work is pretty good after all, so perhaps this is worth doing anyway.

If you want to see what kind of excellent writing there is out there, so you know what it looks like, you need to look at some websites. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and places like Applelinks, MacCreator, MacObserver, MyMac, and Zoozone, have the very best creative writing there is. They don’t all take submissions, though, sorry.

To submit your writing, you would do better to find one of the precious few serious sites that do publish writer’s submissions. If you write science fiction, sffworld.com is a good place to start. If your work is good, they will publish it. If you write other things, such as articles and informative stuff, find the webzine sites that publish on that subject, and submit to them. You are reading this article on one such webzine, BTW.

Two. No money is involved here. No webzine pays for articles and stories. Even if you want to submit to paper magazines, their pay is pennies per word, and they almost never accept submissions from anyone outside of their writers stable. If you want to make your living as a writer, be a journalist, and get your Masters Degree in that field, or else get a couple of dozen novels or scripts published or produced.

So there not will be money changing hands for the typical writer, unless of course you pay them to publish your work on their website. Stay away from that sort of thing, for they have no more eyes on their substandard site with their third rate content, than you will draw to your own great looking and professional site that features real writing and interesting work. Erm, you did set up the preamble of your site for search engine hits, right?

Three. If you publish your work on the Internet, you will almost never find a book or magazine publisher for that particular piece of writing. Publishers never touch previously published work. You have to think hard about this one. The bulk of your work is of a quality that you would not mind it only being published on the Web, but there is some part of your writing that is far above this. Your best work must be published in the traditional way, so keep it off the Web.

Of course, there are the big Web Publishers like Mightywords, and a few others. They charge a bit of a monthly fee for you to post your book for sale on their site, and promise to spread the news about your excellent work all over the Net. I did this with a book a few years ago. I charged $2.50 a book for anyone who would buy an electronic copy. Not expensive. Never sold a one. I had a great topic too, but no one ever visited that site, which is not surprising, considering they had over 10,000 books for sale there! You might have better luck with this, but I suspect your own website with appropriately chosen keywords might be a better bet for people to find your work.

All editors are alike?

I want to take a detour here to talk about editors. This is one of the biggie myths for writers. Real editors are very rare. Almost anyone who puts out a webzine also consider themselves to be an excellent editor. Most of them cannot even spell, which becomes apparent when they do rewrites to your work and then publish it that way. They believe that you giving them your work gives them license to rework your writing, and to leave out what they consider offensive for the content of their publication. Most of them are wimps who are afraid of offending or driving off readers, so your best and most controversial work will become insipid and even pointless in their hairy hands.

This is what an editor/publisher does, right? Never! Any real editor will always ask you first before they change anything you write. If they don’t, run, do not walk, to the nearest exit! Your work should never be seen on their website if they are not real editors. Your work is more than just copyrighted, it is inviolate, and you should consider it to be so. Never allow any editor to change anything in your writing, unless they can first give you a powerful reason for changing it.

So you found a great place to publish your articles, and now your most excellent owner/editor has asked you to change something. You must decide here. Is your work going to stand as it is? Or can you change something to make it more palatable for your reader, so as not to offend them to the point that they dismiss your POV outright. Sometimes this great editor is right, given the vast experience he has, and his innate understanding of his readers. He is watching your backside for you. You still may defer changing anything in your work. You know you have a great editor when he will go ahead and publish your work anyway, regardless of what kind of heat he and his publication will get for doing so.

Such people as these deserve your best work. Don’t shop around on them just to get a few more readers somewhere else. Their publication is likely to be the better place for your work simply because of their brave and honorable stance in publishing things the way their writers intended for it to be said.

You are reading this article at such a publication, BTW. MyMac is the best webzine on the Internet, period. Why? Yeah, mymac.com has great writers, (all those other guys and gals here) but their Editor/Publisher is by far the best one of any publication anywhere. That makes the crucial difference in this business, for what readers get here is the real deal.

You can put your writing in books

Over the years of your writing, everything you ever wrote, and all those “freebies” you put out on the Web, have served to hone your talent and your improve your skills for writing your Magnum Opus. Do not deny the world the opportunity to read your singular and world-class work in a well made and professionally published hardback book!

This is the way things work. Once you have “Arrived,” and your work is published in the mainstream, then you can look to other media, such as electronic copies for PDAs, eBooks, scripts for television, and movies, theme parks, etc. — or not.

You control your story, regardless of what your publisher tells you. You can take it as far as you want, or keep it in whatever medium you want, provided you have not signed the rights to your work away in your passionate desire to see your work in print. You read the small print before you sign anything. If you cannot understand it, get your own attorney to tell you what it says before you sign it. A publisher who sincerely wants to publish your work will agree to this, you Amateur, you! (G)

You can self publish, if you are wealthy, or willing to go into debt. To do this, do NOT use the publisher you found in the phone book. Do your research and find one who actually does books for people who want to self publish. Be sitting down when they give you the estimated cost per book. Make room in your garage for all the boxes you will soon own. If you are lucky, you might also find bookstores and dealers who will stock and sell your books. Plan on selling them for a long, long time. You may even break even in a few years.

They don’t like my format!

Face it. Book and magazine publishers are Neanderthals! They want their “Manuscript” which is your very best writing contorted into an obscure format, which no one knows the origins of. You take your finely developed story which has been not only well written, but already formatted to perfection in your word processing software, and you must strip it of any character whatsoever, just to be able to submit it to one of these book publishers.

Here it almost goes without saying. You need to spell correctly, at the very least. Unless your name is E. E. Cummings, you should also know how to write in a format that is grammatically correct. If you wish to be a journalist, this is a requirement. If you are an author, it is no less true. If you are a writer of anything, this is always a must. Your language is your craft, and how well you use it is very obvious to your readers. Learn your language. Learn how it works, and begin to understand the beauty of its forms. For no matter how passionately you share your ideas, if your writing has visual flaws it will not be read, and your POV will be dismissed outright by your readers and whoever you try to submit it to.

Manuscript format requires that you call ahead before you send it to a particular publisher to make sure of how it’s formatting must be, to be accepted by them. Most of them will tell you they do not accept manuscripts. So ask them that if they ever did possibly accept manuscripts some day, what format might it need to be in, just for your reference. Be polite. Play dumb. Maybe they will acquiesce and tell you. If not, you need to contact some writer they have published and ask.

Good luck finding many of these publishers anyway, for they do not advertise their whereabouts, and even search engines do not turn them up on the Internet. You must rather go to a bookstore and get a couple of magazines called “Writers” and “Writers Digest” in order to find out where these publishers are and how to contact them. These rags aren’t bad for writing tips either.

Do NOT pay someone who offers a service for getting publishers to read your work, for they have no more chance than you do of getting any publisher to look at your writing.

Your manuscript

So now you created a mailing list of publishers to submit your work to. What now?

The format for your hard copy manuscript generally requires it to be double spaced, in serif font, sans formatting, and printed on single sides of 8 ? by 11 inch plain white paper. Your pages are to be numbered at the bottom, and they are to be placed unbound into a standard cardboard box with a lid, to be mailed to the publisher. Strange, huh?

Do not send disks, electronic copies, or email your work to them. There are legal reasons they will not accept these, but for the most part most of them do not even own a computer, which is why we writers call them Neanderthals.

There are only a few hundred book and magazine publishers in the business. Many of these are marginal, and their readership is also marginal. But, hey, any publisher is better than no publisher, right? Consider sending your manuscript to all of them, starting at bottom end of your list. This will take both time and money, so send out one or two manuscripts every month to spread the cost out a bit. You will have time, because it can take a more than a couple of years to find a publisher for your book anyway. In the meantime, polish the words of your novel or subject.

If your work is of a particular genre, you might consider looking for publishers who deal in only that particular subject. This will make your efforts that much easier, but it will narrow your list.

You could also consider publishing off shore in other countries, depending on what you are writing. Beware if you do, for other countries and off shore publishers have a very different understanding of copyrights, publishing and editing rights, etc. If you publish in another language, make sure you know the person who does the translations. They should be your best friend, or spouse, BTW. But, the world is large, and those markets are not saturated, so consider it.

Who will read your manuscript?

Will your expensively printed manuscript be read when you submit it to a publisher? Probably not. Even if a publisher will accept your work, odds of it actually being read are slim. Publishers are in a business with ultra tight profit margins. Books require tons of cash to be printed and bound. Bookstore shelves are crowed with unread books already. Only certain topics or genres are considered worthy of publication in any given season.

If your work, by its TITLE does not fit the subject matter they are seeking, it likely goes right into a large warehouse of unread, unopened manuscripts, which periodically gets cleaned out and shipped for profit to some paper recycler. Therefore, do not expect a publisher to mail your manuscript back to you, even if you request it, and even if you try to pay for its return, for they usually do not do this.

Suppose a publisher actually reads your work. First it goes through a minimum wage employee who is hopeful of being a Publisher some day. (They aren’t really cretins.) He or she will look over your work, and they might even read your manuscript if they find it interesting. Then they will perhaps pass it on to the owner of the publishing company with a recommendation that this one is at least readable and will not be a waste of their time to look at it. From that point it most likely will go to the warehouse unread by them — or not. They must consult their zodiac first.

If they do read it and actually like it, you will hear from them. You DID put a return address or phone number on it when you sent it to them, didn’t you?

Don’t be alarmed by this process. Normally you will get a REJECTION LETTER in the mail soon after you submit your work. It will be polite and it will praise your creative efforts, but the “Market is fickle and we just cannot publish your pride and joy at this time. Don’t call us, we will call you if things change.” This is the letter you will get if they didn’t read your work.

If they actually read your work, your rejection letter can be much more specific about changing your book’s title, it’s entire contents, it’s plot, all the characters, and your writing style, – and the publisher might even include an invitation to submit something to him again. These are the letters you frame and hang on the wall.

Then one fine day, out of the blue, comes an acceptance letter and possibly a large retainer from some obscure publisher you forgot you ever wrote to. Your work is going to be published!

After you celebrate with everyone, call the newspaper, and run up your credit card bill, you actually talk to this publisher and discover that they have to make some “minor” changes to your inviolate work. If you have ever read the stories about authors whose work was made into a movie, you begin to get my drift here about what most publishers can do to your writing.

Do you dig in your heels and demand your writing stand as it is, or do you allow them to do their dirty work? At least it will still have your name on it, unless of course, they want you to pick up a pen name like Rocky Strong, or something. You must decide what is to become of your hard work. Best of luck to you. I would recommend you stand by what you wrote, and the way you wrote it, except for the most minor details. It is here you will find out what kind of writer you are.

Why is it we write, again?

 

“A book is the only immortality.”
Rufus ChoateDoes it sound like every writer’s manuscripts just goes to Publisher’s Clearing House in Florida, along with all the millions of hopeful but losing tickets and lost ballots people mail in? You would not be far from the truth here.

A very small fraction of everything written ever gets into print. Of those books that do get into print, they compete with a million other tomes published each year for the reader’s attention. (Been to a bookstore lately?) Your effort to publish your work has a little bit better chance than your song making the Top Ten, or your painting being hung in the Louvre. But only a bit.

Don’t despair over this. Things are as they should be. The years of labor you spent on your original and seminal work may yet be published one day. If you keep trying. If you keep writing.

You need to write for a much more important reason. If for nothing else, write for your family, your children, and your friends, who all take great comfort in knowing that a real writer in their midst, whose opinions and imaginative works are a source of enjoyment and pleasure to them.

More important than this, in the historical perspective, your writing might become as well known publicly as those rare geniuses of past centuries. Think about it. Austen, Shelly, DeFoe, and Browning were giants in their centuries, but only because they lived in a less populated world. Even then, few people knew of their work out of all the population of their nation and their day. We in our generation know them better than anyone did in their own generation.

The world is much more peopled today, isn’t it? Therefore, your sphere of influence could already be as big or bigger than theirs, because of your immediate access to communication and media that they could only dare dream of.

Take pride therefore in what you write. Make it the best the world will ever see. You get pleasure out of it, don’t you? You like what you do, right? Your writing is sacrosanct. It is original, and it is that precious and intimate part of who you are and of the life you have lived. In the future, you will never know who will read your work, or how it will impact their lives because of what you wrote.

But only if you write it down and make multiple hard and data copies of it, and share it with as many people as you can through whatever medium you can. Or only if you never, ever give up trying to get published.

Then wait for Life to go on, for someday, no matter how long it takes, someone will read what you have written, and they and their world will be better for having read what you wrote.

 

“We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wondering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.”
Arthur O’ShaughnessyRemember, writer, in Life the prize goes not to the fastest, or the wisest, or to the richest, but it goes to the one who has the most rejection letters.

Be well, and please write.

Roger Born

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Roger Born