How to Be A Writer

I spent more than 20 years as a freelance writer. That was my day job. People who want to be writers always want to know how you get a job like that, and the answers that writers give to that question are largely unsatisfactory, because a lot of writers, like me, ended up there completely on purpose, and yet almost entirely by accident. It works that way because a career in writing (like a lot of things in life, frankly) has two essential components: the stuff you control, and the stuff you don’t.

It’s kinda like a Reese’s cup: you got your chocolate, and you got your peanut butter, and unless a couple of hapless clumsy people are wandering around with headphones on and one of them is eating a chocolate bar and one of them is carrying an open jar of peanut butter and they run into each other and realize “Your chocolate is in my peanut butter!” and “Your peanut butter is all over my chocolate!” and actually this is NOT a complete disaster, you know what, this could actually work, well, maybe nobody would have ever figured out that those two great tastes actually taste great together and people would wander around sadly eating peanut butter off a spoon and wondering whether they’re missing something but not really knowing quite what.

I should probably stop now because I’m sure that was completely clear and I need say no more.

But I am a writer (even though it’s not my day job anymore) and we do tend to go on a bit (some of us, like Tolkien, or Stephen King, never quite figure out when to stop), so I’m afraid that unless you are the sort of disciplined person who can just stop reading right here, you’re out of luck.

Grab a Reese’s Cup and settle in, we’re going back to the main topic of “How to become someone who writes for a living.”

I use that cumbersome phrasing because of the two components I mentioned earlier – the bit about the stuff you control and the stuff you don’t.

The stuff you control is the “writer” part.

You become a writer by, quite simply, writing. And by treating writing the way an athlete treats their sport: by working at it, every day, diligently, and studying it, and finding out what people are doing who are better at it than you are and trying to do that. Get up every morning when the football players and the swimmers and the baseball players are heading out to early practice before school, and while they’re lifting weights or swimming laps or batting in cages, write. After school while they’re watching films and preparing for their next game, study your craft. Read the books about writing fiction by Natalie Goldberg and Ursula LeGuin and Orson Scott Card (they are good at teaching writing – not all writers are). Read books about marketing, and contracts, so that you’ll know how the professional side works.

Read books about running your own business, because that’s an area where a lot of independent artists falter. Learn to manage money well, because as a writer your income will probably be irregular and you will have to pay your own taxes, which are things people in other fields either don’t have to do, or things they study as part of learning their profession (retail management, just for example). Nobody tells writers that you need to know this. It may be the most important thing you take away from this blog: be disciplined with money and pay your quarterly estimated taxes.

Read everything. Because if words are what you do, you need to fill your head with them, in every combination imaginable, and you cannot read enough. Read every day, and write every day.

Ask writers you know who are making a living at this what they’ve learned.

All of that, every word up to now, is the stuff you control.

The stuff you have a lot less control over is the second part; the “getting lucky” part, the “Your chocolate is in my peanut butter!” part. About that, I will say this: If you are doing the stuff you control, your odds of “getting lucky” are much, much higher. You can think about that until your head spins, but really it’s pretty simple. Lots of people write novels, but not a lot of novels become runaway bestsellers. And yet, if Joanna Rowling had never written the first Harry Potter novel – never done the part she controlled – then the lightning would never have struck, and we wouldn’t all be simultaneously collecting the books while cancelling the author.

For me, the “luck” part was that I had spent four or five years writing articles when an editor who had been buying my work approached me about writing a book. And I wrote two books for her that paid very little ($3000 flat fee). And then the publishing company she worked for was sold to a larger publisher, and they came to her and asked, “Who could write a book for us?” and she sent them to me. And I wrote two books for them that paid royalties rather than a flat fee (in other words, I made a little bit of money for each book they sold) and that pulled in a six-figure income for me for the next dozen years or so.

That was the bit of luck, the thing I had no control over that I could not have predicted.

But if I had not been doing the articles for the first editor at the small publishing company, if I had not written the books for her that didn’t pay much, I never would have gotten the contracts for the books that took me into six figures.

And that six-figure income? I didn’t go out and buy fancy things. I saved as much of it as I could. After all, my spouse had a job that supported us just fine. So, my income? I squirrelled it away. And then my marriage broke up, and the lucrative books were sold to a publisher that didn’t want them and just about killed them, and the industry changed from publishing in paper to publishing on the internet which does not pay nearly as well, and for a while I lived on that money that I squirrelled away during my seven years of plenty while I retooled my career, wrote every day, and worked diligently toward the next lucky break. There was a chance it would never come – but I wanted to be ready if it did. A lot of writers will tell you, if you ask them: “overnight success” is usually preceded by ten years of hard work in obscurity.

Did I say learn to manage money? Yeah. Because this business is feast-or-famine, and you gotta use the feast to be ready for the famine. And if you’re living modestly and budgeting with care, you’re far more likely to survive the famines without actually having to live in your mom’s basement and eat ramen.

The world needs writers. The world needs storytellers, and people who can fluently narrate the world around us and make some sort of sense of it and show us why good is good and bad is bad. If you want to be one of us, welcome! Practice is at 6 am before school and again from 3-5 after school, and if you don’t show up, you won’t make the team.

Here, have a Reese’s.

I look forward to seeing what you’ll do.