It's Time to Start Over

Happy New Year! It’s once again time to start again. Funny how this one day can make such a difference. Personally, I try to use this day to get myself reorganized for the coming year. And you should, too.  As the year rolls on, things may seem to unravel. Does your recordkeeping fall short? Do your about writing seem to get more vague? Does your mind begin to wander as emergencies and small crises pop up?

As another year dawns, it’s time to reflect on your writing career. If you just started out in 2016, then you’ve got your whole career ahead of you. If you’ve been writing a while, then maybe it’s time to take stock of what you’ve accomplished and make some plans for the future. Make 2017 the year you go somewhere with your work.

Let’s say you’ve just begun to work as a freelance writer. Did you find it hard to place your work in the marketplace? Did the process seem frustrating? Do you think you’ve exhausted every avenue?

If you answered “yes” to the above questions, then you have most likely haven’t followed the path of least resistance. Most beginners start out by sending their work to top publications. That’s your first mistake. Remember, you’re a beginner. You haven’t been in the marketplace long enough to establish credentials. So maybe you ought to plan ahead for 2017 so that you can get at least one piece—and hopefully many more—published.

Here are a few tips to getting on track in the coming year:

Write about what you know. The first mistake many beginning writers make is writing about subjects they know nothing about. Stick close to home. Write about subjects having to do with work or with a special interest of yours. Doing so will help build your confidence and give what’s called a “voice of authority” to your work. (More on voice of authority will appear in a later blog).

Keep your pieces relatively short. Another mistake beginners make is writing everything there is to know on a subject. It’s not really their fault, however, since the only type of writing they learned to do in school that had anything to do with research was term papers and reports.

Write to communicate. You’re not writing for a grade as you did in school. You’re writing to communicate information to your readers. Unlike your teachers, your readers want to learn about your subject and be somewhat entertained at the same time.

Start with small publications. Search for publications that work with beginning writers. The editors of top publications are too busy to fuss with the musings of beginners. They need writing that’s concise, accurate, and professional, leaving little for them to do but lay it out and print it.

Set reasonable goals. Create reasonable goals for yourself for the coming year and see to it that you achieve them. Check on them occasionally to make sure you’re on track. And if you get off track, get back on as soon as possible. Lots of things can knock you off your game—illness, even a cold, family emergencies, a death in the family, etc. Remind yourself to review your goals in six months to see if they’re still possible or if you have to adjust them to your present situation.

Good luck and make this weekly blog part of your regular reading for 2017.

Do Beginning Writers Need an Agent?

People generally look for the easy way out on most things. And writers, especially beginners, are no different. So it’s no surprise that many beginning writers believe that in order to succeed in publishing, they have to have a literary agent.

The publishing world is a mess at the moment. It’s no wonder beginners feel that they need help to navigate the confusing maze of publishers and editors. But does having an agent guarantee they’ll get published? Not necessarily.

In the first place, many literary agents won’t even consider taking on beginning writers. And those that do usually are a bit shady in their dealings and take advantage of a beginners ignorance in business matters.

At this point, it might be a good idea to find out just what an agent does for a writer. Essentially, when a writer teams up with an agent, he or she is basically outsourcing the marketing and promotion of their work. A highly successful writer, usually those writing and publishing books, needs someone like this to help with promotional chores. This leaves more time for them to write. But a beginning writer has not such demands on their time. Many beginners usually have just written their first book and are desperate to get it published. They see an agent as an express method of accomplishing this.

A big problem with many agents is that they have a stable of editors and publishers with whom they have close relationships. They rely on these people to place their clients’ work because of past successes. They do this at the exclusion of any other publisher that could possibly want to consider a book, for example.

One writer’s agent sent a book proposal around to 28 different publishers. Each politely declined to publish the book. When he had exhausted his list of publishers with whom he had relationships, the agent stopped sending out the proposal. In the end, the writer never did get his book published.

Another writer worked successfully on a couple of travel books through an agent and a particular publisher. The agent took a hefty 15 percent of his advance as her fee. After completing these two books, the writer decided to try his hand at negotiating himself. He got substantially more money than the agent was able to get him and didn’t have to pay her the 15 percent fee. The writer went on to publish two more books with the same publisher and had the firm consider two more book ideas.

So it comes down to this. Beginning writers are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to publishing their first book. They have no credentials and think that having an agent will miraculously give them some. Also, agent generally don’t promote articles or short stories. The low fees paid for them can’t compare with the advances paid for books. And, let’s face it, 15 percent of not much money isn’t a whole lot.

Next Week: Some tips on writer/agent negotiations.

Who Cares?

Lots of people think they have a story that everyone will want to read. But unless you’re a  celebrity or have done something extraordinary, no one cares. You could be the best writer in the world, but if your story doesn’t grab readers, it won’t matter. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your story will be interesting to anyone beyond your family and close friends. And even they may not be interested.

Many writers truly believe that their story has the makings of the next New York Times bestseller, whether it be a messy divorce, their battle with cancer, or the adventure of a lifetime. But most of the time, their story lacks what it takes to make it big.

Those that have endured a traumatic experience often feel that the experience, itself, is enough to a make a story engaging. It isn’t. What’s needed is a hook, something to draw the reader in and keep them there. How much you’re involved in the story is irrelevant. What matters is how it affects the reader.

Once there was a woman whose husband had died after a failed operation. She blamed the surgeon and wanted to lash out at him by writing a book about the incident. What she didn’t realize was that she wanted revenge, not to educate her readers on how to avoid a similar situation or what to do if the same thing happened to someone they loved. This beginning writer wrote her story and then paid $8,000 to a vanity publisher to have it printed. What she ended up with was a room full of books and no way to sell them.

But in today’s digital world, you could write a book and put it on Amazon for next to nothing. So it’s important that you write your story with your readers in mind—what’s in it for them, not what’s in it for you.

Another problem with the scenario above is the word “beginning.” As a beginning writer, and most likely one who hadn’t written anything before, the woman would have lacked the writing skills and research expertise to enable her to do a professional job on her book.

A lot of seniors fall into this category. They feel that because they’ve lived a long life,  everything they have to say is interesting. They read memoirs of famous people and say to themselves that they could write a book just as good. But most of the time they can’t. The situation leads to a lot of frustration and disappointment.

So what does it take to hook your reader? First, your story doesn’t have to be earth shattering, but it does have to relate to readers on their level. It has to offer them something—information, advice, hard facts—that will allow them to apply whatever happens in the story to their own lives. This applies to both non-fiction and fiction.

Many beginning writers chose to fictionalize their stories to avoid having to be associated with them, thus avoiding the possibility of getting sued. Even if you turn your true-life story into a novel, you still have to relate it to the reader. And if your characters are anything like the real people in your experience, you could still get sued. But frankly, a non-fiction version will offer a lot more credibility since it actually happened to you.

Professional writers target their readers. They usually don’t write to a general audience, but to a specific group of readers—men, women, young, old—who would most likely benefit from what they have to say. True, bestselling books often get read by a large audience, but they weren’t written that way. They were first written for a specific one and then got picked up by other groups when the book became a viral hit.

So before you pour your heart out in a book that may not go anywhere, think about what you have to offer your readers.

So You Want to be a Writer

Over the years, many people, especially my students in my Creative Writing classes, ask me the age-old question, “How do I become a writer?” Writers aren’t born, they’re made—by the writers, themselves.

Since writers work with words, they have to love them. And the key to loving words is reading. It’s surprising just how many writers, when asked, don’t read very much. What they don’t realize is that by reading as much as possible, especially the kind of writing they wish to do, they absorb words and phrases that later on may appear in their own writing. Writers learn by example.

Unfortunately, students aren’t taught that in school. Instead, they’re led to believe that all they have to do is sit down at a computer and the words will just flow out into their fingers as they type. The human brain needs to be fed information just like a computer. That information may come as facts, experiences, or observations. All give the budding writer the resources to create.

The second thing to consider as a writer is what to write—fiction or non-fiction. Some people only consider fiction writers true writers because they’re the only kind of writers they hear about. They read Web pages, magazines, and perhaps a newspaper–if they can find one—every day but don’t consider where the articles come from.  Each type of writing has its merits. Some writers work in both areas.

What about education? Believe it or not, a writer doesn’t need to study “writing” to write. In fact, that may be a deterrent. Outside of school, writers write in a conversational style which is as far from academic or school writing–reports, term papers, and theses—as they can get. What a writer needs is information and that comes from a variety of courses. The more a writer knows, the better prepared he or she will be to write.

A lot of people say to be a good writer you have to have talent. Talent is such an elusive thing. A talented writer is one who can get organized and write faster—a person who is brimming with ideas. But with perseverance anyone can become a writer. The key is not so much talent as having something to say and the ability to say it well.

Every writer dreams of the big successes of famous authors. But only a very few make it to this level. And it’s not because they aren’t good writers. In this business, it’s often who you know, not what you know or write. Believe it or not, luck often plays a big part in a writer’s success. Being at the right place at the right time may land a writer a juicy article or book. And knowing more about a subject than the next writer definitely helps, even in writing novels.

Taking all of the above into consideration, the most important thing a writer needs is discipline. Good writers don’t just write when the spirit strikes them. As long as they have a good topic and something to say, they can write any time. They communicate with their readers. They make those readers feel as if they’re writing only to them.

There are no secrets to becoming a writer. It just takes lots and lots of hard work to make the grade.