> Don’t force it. I’ve gone weeks without writing anything. It happens.
I'm a reasonably prolific author (six books, two of them have fourth editions coming out in the coming year, all published by O'Reilly). Aspiring writers ask me for advice pretty regularly. (I'm happy to share, if anyone's interested and has questions.) One thing I always tell people is to read Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft" -- people dismiss his work because he's a horror writer, but in my opinion he's one of the best writers of the past century. This book is full of excellent advice to writers, especially aspiring book writers. I found it valuable to my own work, even as an author of technical books.
Most of Batnick's advice in his post is excellent, but I strongly agree with the advice not to force it. This excerpt from "On Writing" sums it up better than I can:
> Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best—always, always, always—when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer. I can write in cold blood if I have to, but I like it best when it’s fresh and almost too hot to handle.
(King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (p. 153). Scribner. Kindle Edition.)
I recognize that feeling from my own work -- again, as a writer of non-fiction, technical books. I think it's an excellent model for anyone looking to write.
I generally have tried to follow the feedback of writing consistently, even if you don't feel like it. Stephen King mentions how he would allow him to just sit at his desk without writing if he wanted, but that he always would set aside the time and not do anything else.
I am currently reading Bird by Bird and it is mind blowing. I have also read On writing by Stephen King but I found that Bird by Bird has more content than on writing or perhaps that has something to do with the fact that On writing is his biography + stuff about writing.
- Try to think about what your reader is thinking. It's not enough just to technically have stated something. Make sure you say it in a way that's easy to digest.
- Video games need playtesting. In the same vein, books need reader testing, especially when you're first starting out. Get other people to read your work.
- Work with what you have, but work hard at it. Writing is a skill. I'm a pretty good musician, a pretty good writer, and a pretty good programmer. I happen to have talent for all of those things. But I also did a LOT of playing music, a LOT of writing, and a LOT of coding -- starting when I was very young (well before my teenage years) -- to turn those talents into skills. Every good writer has done the same.
- If you want to be published, get a feel for how the actual publishing industry works; editors are people, they have jobs, make their jobs easier.
- Write, write, write. Then write some more.
And I think Jeremy Gibson Bond had some very useful advice about writing video games for either fortune or fame in his excellent book, "Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development":
> Designer-Centric Goals
>
> As a game designer and developer, there are some goals for your life that you hope the games you make might help you achieve.
>
> Fortune
> My friend John “Chow” Chowanec has been in the game industry for years. The first time I met him, he gave me some advice about making money in the game industry. He said “You can literally make hundreds of...dollars in the game industry.”
...
> Fame
> I’ll be honest: Very, very few people become famous for game design. Becoming a game designer because you want to be famous is a little like becoming a special effects artist in film because you want to be famous. Usually with games, even if millions of people see your work, very few will know who you are.
(Gibson Bond, Jeremy. Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game with Unity and C# (p. 107). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.)
If you want to get rich and/or famous, don't go into writing. Make sure you know your own personal goals. If you want to shoot for the stars, that's great -- just make sure you know what you want.
"If you write it they will come" (paraphrased.) This used to work and it CAN work but it is incredibly rare. An amazing article that isn't shared can languish no matter how good it is.
At least a bit of marketing - eg. at least post it to a few social networks, can go a long way.
I always look at it as: the better the quality of the article the less hard you have to work at marketing.
A colleague of mine recently wrote about exactly this.
Here's a few excerpts:
If your goal is to be heard, you need to fucking scream! We spend so much time crafting our thoughts into these prefect morsels of information, yet so little time finding an audience to read and acknowledge our work. The average blogger spends roughly 3.5 hours creating a blog post, yet only about 15 – 20 minutes promoting it.
It’s published! My work is over, it’s time to celebrate. Ugh, nope. It’s what you do after you hit that publish button that will set you apart from the rest.
Don’t believe the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy. It’s the single biggest reason most bloggers fail to secure an audience for their content and ignore the 80/20 principle. Having said that, finding an audience is no easy feat. In fact, most successful bloggers will argue it takes considerably more effort than the blog post itself. It’s a slow and steady process as each little plug here, a share there, a mention or a comment compounds the next until you start seeing serious results.
seek out relevant forums, communities, social media groups, and join them, be active, and share! Anywhere your blog posts will be on-topic and appreciated is where you want to be. There are hundreds, even thousands of communities and resources built around the very things you’re likely blogging about, so seek them out and get your hands dirty.
A lot of online spaces have rules against self promotion. I have not found much success by trying to promote my own writing myself.
I have to wonder what pieces of information are missing from such advice. I often feel like the monkey in some story I heard that learned the wrong word for some animal and this was reinforced by weird coincidence.
The other issue I run into is that I get the wrong kind of attention for the wrong things. This seems very resistant to being translated into anything desirable.
Of course a lot of communities have strict rules against blatant self-promotion. Otherwise they would be overrun by spam and ruined.
But if you are there, as a professional/expert in a specific subject, and provide "value" and stay on topic, it's usually OK to drop a link once in a while (sometimes for needed context).
I simply try and follow the Reddit famous "10% self-promo" rule everywhere, not just on Reddit.
You definitely need marketing to close the loop and get your writing to the readers, and it's a totally different skill set.
I'd there's another stage between writing and distribution, which is the editing/rewriting loop. The only kind of writing is rewriting, as a great (re)writer once said.[0] That means writing will probably take much longer than you expect, if you want it to strike the right tone and be true.
Another probably important point for aspiring writers is that in order to have something worth saying, you have to live something big, or learn something valuable, and generally observe things keenly if you want to have something new. (And if you don't plan to write something new, why are you writing at all?) So there's work to do before writing happens. You need to read and learn and ask questions of people who know more than you, so that you can distill everything you've read and bring it to the reader.
More specific: your luck is any talent X times your marketing skills. Corollary: with marketing skills going toward zero, no amount of talent for X will help. Yes, talking from experience. :/
In other words, you need to write more than just words. This has certainly been my experience over the last decade or more of chasing the thing. At this point I've written some fairly solid web code and a decent narrative, but as for the marketing... well, let me just post a link[0].
I prefer Neil Gaiman's view of "Most of us only find our own voices after we sounded a lot like other people".
Also, at what point you stop being an aspiring writer and become one? First article published? Your book tops the nyt list? Sometimes I think aspiration is better left for fields where you need somebody else's permit to work. You write, you are a writer, even with zero appreciation.
That's something I've been noticing since I was young. The artists who imitate and even "rip-off" other artists were always the ones who seemed the most successful. They always end up finding their own voice eventually.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. I'm slowly learning what makes me me, but in the meantime I'm being influenced by things I like that guide what I want to create.
I think this is great advice for me because I'm not looking to make a living from writing. I just have this strong urge like if I don't put in writing all the fucked up shit I encountered or read about, if I take all of those things to grave without telling it I feel like I'm going to lose it.
but the main problem is getting down to it. Anything I write I throw it away because it seems shit, like why the fuck would anybody spend their life reading bullshit.
I even considered buying a typewriter. Not to be hip but because typing on the computer is sooo distracting. HN and reddit is to blame and Youtube. God I watch so much youtube....
so I resorted to writing short quips here and there online for shits and giggles from the replies...that seems to give me that rush...but I've still failed to become the stereotypical edgy, self absorbed, miserable writer.
I for one appreciate the link. I think his advice is right on target for someone who aspires to be a creative writer, which is not necessarily the same thing (unfortunately) as someone who aspires to earn a living from writing.
This isn't very good advice for "any aspiring writer."
It might be good advice for someone who wants to write Hollywood TV shows or movies. It might be good advice for someone who wants to write the next Harry Potter.
It is terrible advice for someone who wants to make a living as a writer. The best advice that person can receive is to understand that you must develop some kind of additional skill or knowledge to complement your ability to write.
It's that combination that lets you add value (and find a well-paying job) in a HUGE number of businesses and industries.
Also for whatever his strengths are as a writer, any advice from Dan Harmon (or anyone for that matter) should be taken with a grain of salt.
This seems to be targeted towards people who want to make living out of it. My personal conviction is to write for myself first, and develop my own thoughts and not rely on it for commercial reason, but to clarify my thoughts, and develop communication. Aiming to make money of it results in a different type of writing, imo.
I can definitely attest to showering and walking being the best idea facilitators. In fact, I believe the same can be true for coding. I've solved a lot of coding problems in my head while hiking.
I bet there's a connection there to the relationship between physical activity and mental capability throughout the aging process.
One of my favorite quotes on idea generation is from Madmen (tv series): "Just think about it deeply. Then forget it, and an idea will jump up in your face."
I have a waterproof notebook for situations just like these, though it got mostly used to sketch out public talks - during showers I would often think about the points I wanted to make, and suddenly, new insights would dawn on me.
Not nearly as cool, but sometimes a tricky client problem that's been bothering me seems to solve itself in my head, and I try to frantically diagram it or write it in the condensation on the inside of the shower door to make sure it checks out and to help me remember it. It's happened several times.
I don't think it has anything to do with screens per se - it's about being alone and free to think, while not being able to do anything else. Other people are as much, if not more, distracting than screens - hence the time spent in shower or on the toilet is so frequently mentioned as the source of valuable insights.
as a writer i would mostly suggest the opposite of what this article suggests, though the author makes good points too, especially the one about reading being essential for writing.
my (opposite) suggestions:
1. worry about what the world needs obsessively, and give it what it wants, not what you want to make. become a machine that takes in needs as raw materials and spits out explicit and actionable solutions that are written down. this tip is by far the most important.
2. if you want success, it means holding back on the full story if your audience doesn't need/want/can't handle the full story. painful, i know. fluff pieces are what works.
3. write at a 7th grade level only if you think the 7th grade students have enough money to make it worth your while. NB: this is about the simplicity of your writing style AND the simplicity of your content. here is a big tip: simple content is the route to success (as the OP author notes indirectly), which should keep most of your mechanics simple.
4. "good writing" is overrated. "good enough" writing is underrated. "bad writing" can very easily be profitable. hasn't someone said this before?
5. often what you write is not something that would be worth your time to read. don't mistake that idea for your writing being worthless. if you yourself wouldn't read it, you already have all of the knowledge and ideas that went into writing it!
6. finding your own voice is not as important as blending in-- this is assuming that you are really chasing "success" and not self-actualization via writing. if you have a radically different perspective, expose it to your reader only in part lest they become confused or reactionary.
7. force yourself to write for 5 minutes per day and live by the maxim that if you write less than 1000 words on the same topic per day you aren't serious about writing. more importantly: force yourself to edit 1000 words per day.
8. your friends and family are not good at telling you where you need to improve. professional editors are, however.
9. you know that little voice in the back of your head that says "well, this sentence that i just wrote is shit, how can i make it better?" find and kill that voice until it's time for editing.
10. writing and editing are two different things. as a writer you need to write first, stop, wait, then return to what you wrote and edit it. potentially a lot.
this seems to be the way to write if only to make a dollar. what about people that want to actually write quality? you mention chasing success, but success is obviously subjective. for me-- if i wrote some mumbo jumbo for 13 year olds about high school gossip and made $10,000 off of it, i wouldn't call it success. kind of like how i wouldn't take a $100+/hr job to do wordpress templates
As to your #8: Murakami and Nabokov do/did well with their wives as "most important reader/editor" And before Michael Pietsch came on the scene (and after!) David Foster Wallace gave his drafts to his sister and Mom, which seemed to work well for him.
What you want to make wasn't always a fact of your nature. Most likely it was determined by some tiny reinforcement you received long ago. Is it better to stay true to that random event in your past, or make something the market wants and get more reinforcement in the future?
Imagine a typical "heavy metal parking lot" kind of musician. They imprint on whatever music was cool when they were young, and then spend a lifetime "doing what they love", getting no money and no recognition. What's the damn point of doing something you love if it doesn't love you back?
> Don’t force it. I’ve gone weeks without writing anything. It happens.
I'm a reasonably prolific author (six books, two of them have fourth editions coming out in the coming year, all published by O'Reilly). Aspiring writers ask me for advice pretty regularly. (I'm happy to share, if anyone's interested and has questions.) One thing I always tell people is to read Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft" -- people dismiss his work because he's a horror writer, but in my opinion he's one of the best writers of the past century. This book is full of excellent advice to writers, especially aspiring book writers. I found it valuable to my own work, even as an author of technical books.
Most of Batnick's advice in his post is excellent, but I strongly agree with the advice not to force it. This excerpt from "On Writing" sums it up better than I can:
> Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best—always, always, always—when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer. I can write in cold blood if I have to, but I like it best when it’s fresh and almost too hot to handle.
(King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (p. 153). Scribner. Kindle Edition.)
I recognize that feeling from my own work -- again, as a writer of non-fiction, technical books. I think it's an excellent model for anyone looking to write.