It’s just a little dream of mine; not that I have the talent, fortitutde, or social/professional contacts to succeed at this, but since I’m so hating my job and what passes for a career at the moment, I’m indulging my fantasy. I’ve read the usual books on writing by Garner, Highsmith, King, et cetera. I’m just looking for personal experiences in any kind of professional writing for publication–novel, nonfiction, slicks and pulps, screen, whatever. What’s your story about writing stories?
I wrote for a weekly newspaper and a couple of magazines for several years. Newspaper deadlines are not conducive to creativity; you don’t get to wait for inspiration to strike. Often, I just had to crank out the story, and some just weren’t all that interesting to me. It’s harder to write well when the topic bores you, but sometimes it has to be done.
One magazine for which I wrote was a running monthly. I had no interest whatsoever in fitness articles and marathon results, but I had to make it sound as if I knew what I was talking about and actually cared about it.
For the newspaper, I covered arts & entertainment, mostly music. I cared passionately about that, so it was easier and more fun to write.
Another magazine was a highbrow literary bi-monthly. That was fun, because I could be as pretentious as I wanted. I got to work with a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, as well as a bunch of seriously snooty intellectual types.
It always amazed me that I was able to get paid for writing (and paid enough to live on, even!) That first check is awe-inspiring. I took a picture of mine. I kept repeating to myself, “I am a professional writer. I write for a living. Professional writer. Professional. Paid. Paid to write.” I felt like someone had just told me I could get paid to sit around and eat chocolate-chip cookies all day.
I’m a professional writer. Professional technical writer, that is. Yes, I get paid to write all day. On the other hand, it’s about accounting software. So take your pick.
I suppose that the realities of most professional writers aren’t as glamorous as you’re hoping they’ll be. But then, I’m not a novelist or anything. I’d say that few of us are; not many people realize how difficult it really is to publish a book. Yeah, I’ve got an idea or two for some books, but I haven’t started them, and I’m really not certain I ever will, due to time constraints and lack of desire after staring at a computer screen all day. But maybe I’ll surprise myself some day.
Anyway, I’m a technical writer at a company that develops accounting software. I write their manuals and help out as needed with various marketing projects. I know the ins and outs of our software and I’m okay on technical subjects like databases, programming languages, and related topics (always could be better, tho’). This week I’m retaking screen shots for one of our product lines - the old ones use the old Windows look, and my bosses want the updated manuals to reflect the “new” XP look. Some days it’s really busy and my mind’s active all day and it’s fun, other days (like today) it’s mundane, tedious work that needs to be done but isn’t much fun to do. But it’s like that with every job, I suppose.
I’m not certain I could ever be a “story” writer - I’m much better at writing when I have a subject in mind. I was always better at the concrete: “write a research paper on this book or this event or this person,” for example, is something I excel at. “Write a story you come up with outta your own head” is not a project I’m sure I’d do well with. So tech writing is working well for me, so far. And it pays me well, so I’m satisfied. I suppose I’d be more satisfied if there were more of the fun days, but they’re coming, so it’s not a bad thing.
So, no experience with story writing, but I thought I’d give you a different perspective about getting paid to write from a job that isn’t on the journalistic side.
I started my writing “career” in high school, working for the school paper and the literary magazine. Now I write instructional articles for craft magazines (for which I get paid) and am a regular contributor to an online magazine, Intrepid Media (non-paying.) I also do some other freelance magazine and newspaper writing - interviews, reports, etc.
For the most part, I don’t write fiction. Although I’ve published a few poems and short stories in various magazines and anthologies, most of what I write is “straight” reporting or op-ed pieces.
If you’re interested in starting out, there are a number of good websites for writers. The online publication I linked to above has a gallery section where anyone can publish (basic registration is free, and there is a premium subscription service with more features) and get critique and discussion from other writers.
99 percent of the time you cannot earn a living writing what you like. It’s the boring crap you might be able to pay the rent with: tech writing, copy editing, PR stuff. All the writers I know who are published—regularly, by big houses—have day jobs. Scott Eyman works for a newspaper. Kevin Brownlow has a production company. I’m a copy editor.
So, yes, we’re all incredibly lucky in that we get to write about what we love and actually get it published—but it’s more of a “hobby,” supported by our mind-numbing day jobs.
I read somewhere that the process of writing is actually pretty simple. You just stare at a blank page until drops of blood begin to form on your forehead.
How do you know you don’t have talent? Fortitude? I’ll take your word on who you know. Get started. Even if you suck now you’ll improve. Dean Koontz’s early books that were published after he had a couple of hits are no prize winners. But ke got started and kept going.
Steven King did it by writing every night in a closet, after teaching school all day. If you want to write you have to get to writing.
I waited until retiring to give it a go and now have one long novel (160,000 words) done (and desperatly seeking a good home) and a much shorter one about a third done. When its done I’ll start another.
My comments echo Snickers’s, nearly to the letter: I, too, am a full-time technical writer, working for a software company.
I have fancied myself a writer for as long as I can remember, but I’ve always been much better at nonfiction than fiction (I even had a nonfiction article published in Catholic Digest once for 20 minutes, in 1960). I’m currently in grad school, working on an M.A. in English with a concentration in Professional Writing & Editing (“professional” in this case meaning for business, not as opposed to amateur), and the editing and nonfiction writing classes I’ve taken so far have been inspiring. While of course I’d love to be able to make a living by writing my own stuff, I think that my soul will be content as long as I’m working in this field: editing for a living appeals to me almost as much as writing for a living.
I write science fiction, and have had some success, but it’s not enough for me to quit my day job. I write in the evenings and just keep plugging away at it.
Basically, I try to set aside a consistent time to write. I started back in 1981, just writing short stories and sending them off. After about a year and a half, I had my first sale. That’s when I started my first novel, which was eventually publishing in 1986. Since then, it’s been short stories – about 30 of them.
I write and send things off – then start a new story or novel. Getting published is merely a matter of hard work and persistence.
And, there are several important rules to follow to avoid being ripped off:
[Yog’s Law]Money flows toward the writer.
[Yog’s Corrolary] The only place a writer signs a check is on the back.
[Rothman’s Rule] Never, under any circumstances whatsoever, pay money to an agent.
Stay very far away from PublishAmerica.
Never, under any circumstance
I 'm arguably a writer. I’ve got a book out and several articles. I write a regular column in a professional magazine.
If you took all the money I’ve made from my writing, you wouldn’t be able to make one month’s mortgage payment. Don’t quit your day job. I have yet to make back the advance I got on my book (which I foolishly blew on getting permissions and photographs for the book)
I edit for that magazine in my copius spare time (for which I don’t get paid, either). I’m still trying to get my fiction published.
Well, I like to think that my day job is my hobby, and I pretend my paychecks are made out by a publishing house. It helps me retain a little sanity.
I hate those books that tell you how to “be a writer.” (On Writing was an exception, I liked that one, but most of them suck.) The important thing about writing is to write–you can have all the talent in the world, but that doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have product. OTOH, you can have NO talent and be a successful writer, granted you probably won’t be remembered in a hundred years and might feel a little dirty in the morning, but it can be done. However, I’m going to take your interest in writing as a sign that you do have talent, just a little, and that’s all you need.
So just sit down and do it. Don’t worry about who your target audience is going to be or what genre you’re writing in or whether you’re drinking the artistically correct brand of coffee–the important thing is to turn out a finished product. When you’re writing for quantity (which is what you should do on every first draft), you can easily turn out a 300-page manuscript in a month. After that comes revision, but considering that you don’t have a first draft completed, no sense in going into that now. Go out, write a draft, come back in a month.
As for connections, yeah they’re important, though they don’t mean anything if you don’t have the work. Two good ways to meet other writers and publishers are going to conventions geared toward your genre and joining writer’s groups. Most large cities have at least one writer’s group, in the Pittsburgh/southwest PA area I can think of at least five, some genre-focused, at least one not. You can also do what I did and enroll in a writing Master’s program, but I wouldn’t suggest doing that unless you have some other reason for wanting an MA or MFA (in my case, so I can teach writing in college).
And of course, you have to get your writing out there. Many publishing houses will take unsolicited (not through an agent) manuscripts, and almost all magazines that publish short fiction will. There are a number of places to find book and magazine publishers; your local library should have a copy of the Writer’s Market, which lists the guidelines and addresses of all of the major and most of the minor publishing markets. There are also online resources, such as Ralan for SF/fantasy writing, that list markets and are more up to date than the Writer’s Market, which is only published yearly and doesn’t contain listings for one-shot anthologies.
The important thing about writing is just to do it. Don’t wait around for “the muses” to inspire you–set yourself a daily word limit or revision goal (when I’m working on a new draft, that comes out to 2000 words a day, when I’m working on revisions and researching markets, at least five hours) and stick to it. Don’t worry about the scare tactics employed by people who say you’ll never get anything published. Most of the people who get rejected either had substandard work or did not do their homework before sending out work. If a book is good, and you send it to the right market at the right time, it will get published. And even if it isn’t, you’ve done something you wanted to do, you’ve written a book and gotten over the anxiety of sending it out to publishers, and that’s something 99.9% of people will never do (especially that second part). So write another, and maybe the next will be good enough or get into the right hands. Or the following one. Or the one after that. (After that many tries you have permission to give up and never write again, but I still wouldn’t.)
I’ll leave you with this quote by my favorite writer, Philip K. Dick:
I’ll echo much of the sentiments put out here. I write for a gaming company and if I were to get paid for what I did, it would support my hobby basically. However in this industry pay checks are not very forthcoming, most of the authors I know are about a year or so behind.
It’s not a big deal to me beause I don’t write that much (about 10,000 words a month) and don’t really want to be a full-time writer. I make much more as a chemist than do my full-time writer friends. Even the novelists I know often have to work on technical writing or odds and ends to make ends meet. One friend is writing brochures for Nintendo games based solely on the title of the game.
I used to write email newsletters for a major retailer. The good part was getting lots of free product and writing about something I was already interested in.
The bad part was cranking it out by the reamful on a weekly basis. There’s not a lot of art in that, pounding it out 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, but deadlines is deadlines.
I wrote myself into tendinitis in both arms (simultaneously), burned myself out, and finally quit. Since my tendinitis becomes chronic at the drop of a hat (and is aggravated by typing) going back to that lifestyle isn’t really an option.
Every now and then I would write a 25 word blurb I could be really proud of though. And there was the time I wrote 800 words about a book that not only had I never seen, but the author hadn’t even submitted it to the publisher yet! Creative writing at its finest. Ah, yes.
One of my favorite SF authors, Ted Chiang, is a technical writer by day and only writes one story a year. Of course, that story usually ends up nominated for (and often wins) the year’s major SF awards. So that’s one way to go about things.
One of the old pulp SF writers (I forget who, of course) mentioned that being a being a professional fiction writer was harder than being a bricklayer–he’d been both, so he knew from personal experience.
Thanks for the replies (well, most of them…“listen to the song Paperback Writer”???). I noticed several of you do tech writing as the day job to support your real job (you know, until you hit the Big Time and Simon and Schulster come and dump a dumptruck of money at your front door), which makes me curious about that vocation. Being an engineer (with minors in physics and math) I think I could have the technical knowledge of it down, and am wondering what else to consider. (I have to get out of this corporate coronary bypass farm before I end up like the other styrofoam-eating zombies around there.)
So, to that end, I started a [thread=314528]thread[/thread] on the topic. Feel free to contribute if you have the time and interest to “help out a fellow American down on his luck.”[sup]*[/sup]
Stranger
That’s just a film reference. Dopers of all nationalities–even those from countries that don’t use vowels–are welcome to participate.
