Tips & Tricks #7: Juggling for Writers

Reading the profiles on the Nanowrimo site has been eye-opening for me. The biggest surprise has been finding out people's reasons for writing. Some people got into it just to "see if [they] could do it." Some people always wanted to write a book but didn't know how to get started.

A surprising number have attempted it and failed, and are coming back to try again. I admire those people the most, although they confuse me just the same.

Me, I do it for the money. I would like to get my writing published and out to a wider audience. Maybe it's mercenary of me, but the reason I devote so much of my time to this is that I expect my efforts to eventually mean something.

If you want to be a writer who gets paid, though, there's a lot to do that does not involve writing.

Editing
The only people whose first drafts are perfect have sold their souls to Satan and will be paying for it in the hereafter. For the rest of us - there's editing. It's generally a good idea to put a piece aside for a few weeks. Forget about it. Lose the associations you have with it so that when you go back to it, your mind isn't automatically filling in the blanks the way it was when you wrote it. Then pick it up and read it again. Fix all those places where you had said to yourself "I'll take care of that later." All the inconsistencies, the incongruities.

Then give it to a friend. Let someone else who doesn't already know the story look at it. It's best if it's someone who can be honest with you, because chances are that they're going to say that your story is *gasp* not perfect.

The last one is one I found out sort of accidentally: read your story out loud. Even if you're alone, read it aloud. Your mouth is much smarter than you think it is and it'll make word substitutions and point out problems that your brain glossed over. It's better if you have two copies of your manuscript - one for you and one for a friend who can make note of your changes while you read.

Marketing
You've spent months building your trumpet. How silly are you if you never blow it? Get a copy of the Writers Guides to the Novel and Short Story Market and look at it. Refer to it. Mark it up and put zillions of little tape flags on it. Send off for copies of the publications that interest you, or head to the library or bookstore. Then start sending off those submissions. The very worst they can do to you is say "No," and after a while, even that doesn't hurt anymore.

Creating
If you have a piece that you think is great and you've worked hard on, by all means take a rest and enjoy the fruits of your labors. But don't let that rest be any more than five minutes. Get back to work. Keep writing. Keep generating ideas. The brain is like a muscle in that the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Every time you have a story idea, jot it down, wherever you are. When you're ready to start work on a new project, whip out your notebook and you'll have a wealth of material to choose from. Not every story is right for every market, so the more you write, the better your chances of catching on somewhere.

Ideally, you should be doing all of these things all the time. Isaac Asimov, a man with over 500 books to his credit, always had five or six projects going at once. When he ran creatively dry on one thing, he picked up another, which would often give him ideas for yet another.

You're a writer. Act like a writer!