Luck Denial

One of my goals when putting Writing Without Rules together was to get past the idea that you needed to be an expert, a guru in order to write and publish a book. The whole premise is that if you spend any amount of time talking to me, you start to get the creeping feeling that this guy doesn’t know anything about anything, he’s just making shit up and then you realize that if I can publish all these books, for money, so can you!

So, success at writing doesn’t require expertise in a dozen different skill sets, it only requires one—the actual writing part. It also requires hard work, of course; saying that I’m an absent-minded guy who doesn’t understand business or social media isn’t meant to imply that I’m lazy. And there’s a third aspect to writing and publishing success (and success in general) that people don’t like to discuss: Luck.

90% of Success is Just Showing Up

Luck and its twisted cousin, privilege, make people uncomfortable. People think that if you point out their luck, their privilege, you’re taking away from their accomplishments. The fact is, luck is always a factor. Whether it’s the privilege you were born into or happening to be in the right place at the right time, selling novels and getting a writing career off the ground requires luck. It’s just that simple.

But luck just gets you in the room. It doesn’t actually write the novels or the articles. Being lucky—and acknowledging that luck—doesn’t mean your work isn’t great. They are separate considerations.

I’ve been lucky in my career. Plenty lucky. I’ve also worked my ass off. The former does not erase the latter, but neither does it work the other way around—no matter how hard I work, the fact is that luck has played a role in my career, as it has in most careers. I’m okay with that, and I’m also okay with efforts to spread the luck around more evenly. Success isn’t finite. The fact that some groups that have been underrepresented in publishing for decades—centuries—are finally getting more attention, more deals, more support doesn’t mean that my own career suffers. As long as I’m writing good stuff, I’ll get it published. With a little luck.

The bottom line is: Anyone who pretends that luck has never helped them to success is lying to you, or to themselves.

Submissions: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

When describing what it’s like to make money from creativity, I often like to refer to the TV show Mad Men because of the way it depicted resident creative genius Don Draper. In a nutshell, Draper was often shown napping in his office, sneaking out to a movie (or a date) in the afternoons, drinking excessively, and otherwise goofing off.

In short, there’s a lot of blank space in a creative life. When 90% of the work is mental, it can be hard for other folks to understand what you’re doing if you’re not madly typing constantly.

If that blank space is mystifying to other people, it can be downright terrifying to a writer; it usually follows months or years of intense effort, and then you send off your project—to a magazine, web site, publisher, agent, or beta reader—and enter into the Blank Space portion of your writing life. In short, one of the most difficult aspects of a writing career (as opposed to actually just doing the writing) is the waiting game that ensues after you submit something. You can drive yourself crazy interpreting silence. The best thing to do, in my experience, is to not think about submissions at all.

Set It and Forget It

I send off a lot of submissions every year, both on my own (short stories and novellas to contests, anthologies, and magazines) and to or via my agent. And it’s always the same: There’s a ton of work that goes into thew writing, revising, and preparation of the story or book, and then there’s a ton of work that goes into preparing the submission itself—cover letters, synopses, proposals, etc.

And then: Nothing. The Blank Space.

The only thing to do is put it out of your mind. Forget all about it. Jump to the next project or take some time off, whatever you prefer, but don’t waste time thinking about what you just sent off. You can’t affect the odds now, what’s done is done. And the universe is not taking note of the amount of mental energy you’re pouring into the submission, so there’s nothing to be gained by going over it in your head, or worrying over what the delay or speed of a response means. Put it out of your mind and move on to the next thing so that the rejection or acceptance that comes down the pike will be a surprise, pleasant or otherwise.

Of course, there’s a downside to this: I often completely forget about submissions altogether, and thirteen months later I suddenly notice an open sub in my records and then realize I’ve accidentally simultaneously-submitted that story a dozen times. Or forgotten to follow up at all. Because when you’ve got a sieve-like memory, sometimes Blank Space is all you have.

Snatching Failure from the Jaws of Victory

Last year I submitted a short story to an anthology, and a few weeks ago I got an email informing me that my story had been selected. This is always great news, and it was made even better by the fact that the antho was kind of prestigious and I could expect a bit of attention, so this was more than just a tidy sum of money and an extra credit on my resume.

The email noted that the although the editors had chosen my story, the publisher had the final say, but I figured, what could go wrong?

You see where this is going.

Thanks but No Thanks

Yup, the publisher pulled my story. They had their reasons, and the editor who contacted me to break the news was very awkwardly embarrassed about it, but hey, shit happens. I sold a story and then it got un-sold, and that sucks, but you move on.

Luckily, stuff like this is rare, and usually it’s me doing the un-selling. I once sold a short story to a magazine, but their contract turned out to be very shitty, so I pulled the story. I’ve been ambushed by vanity publishers and had to pull stories. Usually, once you get the acceptance, though, the rest is just details.

Not much you can do about it. Losing opportunities like this is just part of the game, because there are two sides to every sale: The editorial, and the business. And whenever you get a story past the editorial part, there is always the possibility that the contract will be bad, or the terms not what you expected—or that someone on the bean-counting side will object for bean-countery reasons.

The lesson is simple: Don’t brag on your sales until it’s a done deal. When I was sixteen, I sold a novel to a tiny publisher. I immediately began bragging to everyone about, and was very likely insufferable for a very, very long time. Two years later, as I started college, the tiny publisher had gone out of business and had mailed back my manuscript, half-edited. And I had to start admitting to everyone that I wasn’t getting published after all.

It’s part of the game. The fact that the game’s rules were apparently written by a drunk and vengeful god is beside the point.

Build a Privacy Screen

I’ve often discussed the fact that I’m pretty much the worst judge of my own material, as well as the most clueless person in the room when it comes to my own career. The books I thought would sell usually haven’t, and many of the ideas I thought were nuts when I first heard them have turned out to be the most lucrative decisions I ever made.

In other words, I’m a moron. The only reason for you to take my writing and career advice seriously that I can come up with is the fact that I’ve made every mistake, so you can definitely learn from my general drunken incompetence.

This also means that there’s always a disconnect between the work I’m doing and my feelings towards it and the work that has sold or hasn’t sold. For example, sometimes when working on a new novel I start thinking about whether it can sell—whether a publisher will like it and pay me money for it, and whether it actually appeals to readers assuming that happens. It’s tempting to start comparing it to older books that succeeded or failed, and before long you’re in your own head and the work suffers.

You have to build a Privacy Screen.

Or a Wall

What I mean by that is that you have to disconnect your creative work from your business. While there may be writers in the world who can combine their sense of the market with their creative endeavors (outlining and writing novels based on their sense of what will sell), it’s usually a losing proposition, at least for me. If it works for you, that’s great. It never works for me, and thinking about sales and publishers and contracts while I’m writing usually leads to a lot of dubious decisions in terms of plot, character, and literally everything else that goes into a book.

Instead, when I’m writing a new story, I don’t think about anything except the story part. Years later, after that story has sat for a while and browned up, been revised and had the dark edges trimmed off, that’s when I will tentatively wonder if it has any legs in an economic sense. The best part is, I grow disconnected from my own work over time. A few years after finishing something, it’s like someone else, a stranger, wrote it, so I can usually judge pretty fairly whether something has a chance or not.

Personally, I think this separation is necessary. If I start thinking about a story’s saleability while I’m still writing it, it’s just so easy to talk myself out of what I’m doing out of insecurity and panic.

The cure is obvious, though: Every time I start to think about selling a story while I’m still writing it, I drink until I black out. Usually when I wake up, the story is miraculously finished!

Publish or Perish

Different writers take different approaches to their careers. There’s no wrong way to pursue your literary goals—some folks want bestsellers and big advances, some folks want more control over their own writing, some folks want to self-publish and some folks want to publish small, smart books. Some folks want to stick with short stories, some people want to spend decades working on a single, epic novel.

You do you. Personally, the only thing I don’t understand about other writers are people who don’t try to basically publish everything they’ve written that’s any good at all.

Paper the World

Me, I basically plan to publish everything I’ve ever completed, even the stuff that is pretty terrible, even the obvious juvenelia. I’ll put out a self-pub book that’s 5,000 pages long called SOMERS SUCK and it will just be all the awful stories I wrote plus several awful novels, plus all that poetry I wrote when I was in my tortured 20s. The world may never recover.

I’m only slightly kidding. I firmly believe that writing—or any creative endeavor—should ultimately lead to getting your work read or viewed or listened to by as large an audience as possible. I believe that if you wait for your work to be polished and perfect enough you will wait forever, for the simple reason that everything I wrote five years ago seems awful to me today, but that is a moving target. The stuff I’m writing today will seem awful five years from now. So judging your own work is a loser’s game—just get it out there and let the world judge you.

So, I submit most of the short stories I write. I have inflicted some mediocre novels on my agent. All in the hopes that maybe I’m wrong about how mediocre they are—after all, we’re the worst judges of our own work, as you may have noticed.

Oh, sure, there are some things that even I know are too terrible to submit. Slowly, short stories I once liked drop off the submission list as I rack up rejections and slowly realize they weren’t very good to begin with. And novels get retired too—although sometimes resurrected if I happen to see an opportunity. But I more or less intend to publish everything, and I put a lot of constant effort into that goal. I’ll likely never achieve it, but I think it’s useful as a career motivator.

Also, I’d love it if people in the future started wearing T-shirts that read SOMERS SUCK. Actually, that would be cool right now.

Three Simple Rules

As you all know, I’m not a complicated man. Give me a cat in my lap, a glass of scotch, and a keyboard and I’m more or less complete. Also, I have a tendency to reduce all of life’s questions to an extremely brief list of bullet points; I am comforted by limited choices, and so I boil everything down to insane levels of generality.

For example, my writing career philosophy (not to be confused with an artistic philosophy), which is essentially three nested rules:

1. It’s better to finish stories than not.
2. It’s better to be published than not.
3. It’s better to be paid than not.

That’s it. Those are the guiding principles of my writing career.

Simple Rules for a Simpleton

Better to finish stories. I make this point a lot, but it bears repeating: You sell exactly zero of the stories and novels you don’t finish. Even if I’m not feeling 100% confident in a story’s success, I try to finish it. I can always revise a mediocre story later. I can’t do anything with a story that isn’t even a story yet.

Better to be published than not. I firmly believe that the only reason for writing, for creating, is to share your ideas and works and let people read them. Possibly to force people to read them, too, but that’s a whole other blog post involving the small private army I’m organizing. The point is, I intend to publish everything I write, someday. And so should you.

Better to be paid. You can’t always control market forces, and you can’t always get paid. But you should aspire to always be paid, because being paid for your work recognizes the value of it, being paid means your publishing partner values your work, and being paid means you might be able to write more.

Those are simple rules, but they make all the difference. Notice there’s a lot of wiggle room with each, though; I don’t see much value in being rigid. Sometimes you might not finish something for a good reason, sometimes you might be okay with not being paid. Guidelines instead of rules, maybe—but useful nonetheless.

On the other hand, my rules for alcohol are even simpler:

1. Whiskey.

Take Your Opportunities

There’s an old saying that goes something like ninety percent of success is showing up. The precise figure quote and the attribution changes depending on where you stumble on this gem, but the basic premise is the same: Success is more about doing the work than anything else. Yes, there are other factors—luck, privilege, talent—but ultimately if you don’t show up you’ll never get anywhere, but if you do show up you’ve just increased your chances at success tremendously.

This of course applies to writing, as well. Of course, often there’s nothing to show up for in a writing career; you’re working alone in your room, toiling away, and that’s the showing up part. But there’s another aspect to it that seems so obvious it doesn’t get discussed much: Part of showing up is taking the opportunities you come across.

Yes Man

This seems obvious, right? Not so much. A while ago I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest about my “year of saying yes,” in which I discussed launching my freelance writing career by basically taking any job I could get, no matter how bad the pay was or how boring or distasteful the subject matter was. And I took some low-paying, mind-killing jobs that first year—but I also established myself and paved the way for better-paying, more interesting work because I took every opportunity I could find or manufacture.

Fiction has a similar sort of dynamic. You have to not only read and write consistently, you have to seek and crate opportunities and then take them when they’re offered to you. Don’t just write stories, submit them to markets and contests. Don’t just work on your novel, submit it to agents and publishers (or publish it yourself). If someone offers to pay you to write a story for an anthology, you say yes.

This might seem obvious, but the twist in a writing career is how much you have to create your own opportunities. You can’t sell a story you don’t submit. You can win a contest you don’t enter. You can’t sell a story you don’t write, either. Selling your work requires a lot of research and constant diligence, and sometimes the main lesson regarding making a living as a writer is that you’re going to have to be willing to write stuff you might not necessarily want to write.

The Incompetence Variable

I’m kind of an incompetent—ask anybody who knows me, especially my wife, The Duchess. I forget things and I have a poor eye for detail, which is why any time I’ve decided to proofread and copy edit my own work I have a fool for a client.

The Duchess, by comparison, is painfully detail-oriented. Composing an email for her is always an odyssey of wordsmithing as she revises and revises until she is 100% certain she not only has the precise wording she wants, but that her words are completely error-free. Me? I like to close my eyes and hit the throttle, wake up a few days later and see what I’ve written.

One result of this approach is that the work I submit is often riddled with typos.

Failing Upward

Recently, I sold a short story. The editor attached a light edit to the congratulatory email (not uncommon to have a quick gloss before the real editing) and I was kind of horrified to note a large number of dumb mistakes in there, including one misspelled word that should have been caught by spellcheck, if nothing else.

And yet, I sold the story. The editor recognized that these were just dumb typos that had no bearing on the quality of the story itself. And that’s today’s lesson: If you think that a bit of sloppiness will destroy your career, if you think that your work has to be absolutely perfect or you have no chance, you’re wrong, and I am living proof. Living proof that the Incompetent can have successful writing careers.

Are there editors out there who will reject your work automatically if there’s a typo? Yes, there are. And yes, I’ve probably been rejected by them for that reason, and they may even have posted a photo of me on their office wall with a note to never accept work from this man. Fair enough. For me, that doesn’t bother me, because I probably wouldn’t work well with someone like that anyway. I need collaborators who are fault-tolerant, because I am more or less defined by my faults.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run spellcheck and review your work. Don’t be purposely incompetent—and there is a difference between a few minor mistakes and a trash fire disaster of a manuscript. But if anyone ever tells you that typos will kill your career, point them to my website and watch the expression of horror that they make.

New Year Writing Goals

I’m not much for superstitions, and the concept of a New Year falls under that category. I love any excuse to have a little party, of course, but let’s face it: A year is an artificial concept in itself, something we invented in order to keep track of our shit. There’s nothing mystical going on when the calendar flips over to a new number.

Still, there’s a utility to picking a moment to look back and look forward. Did you achieve your literary goals this year, artistically and professionally? What will the goals be next year? This is as good a time as any to consider both areas. I’ll start.

2017: The Writing Year in Review

I’ve been writing professionally for a while now, so my goals tend to be pretty static. I went into 2017 with a few basic goals:

1. Increase freelance income (always, that Cost of Living increase is no joke)
2. Sell a book to a publisher
3. Write 12 new short stories, minimum
4. Sell a few short stories
5. Launch an author newsletter
6. Write 3 new novels

So how’d I do? I did in fact increase my freelance income by about 30% this year, mainly by picking up a new client while maintaining all my old ones. In fact, I’m making more money as a freelance writer than I was when I had a Day Job, which kind of amazes me. I did sell a book—Writing Without Rules will be published by Writer’s Digest Books in May 2018. I wrote my monthly short stories, and actually had a hot streak where three of them are actually pretty good and will be in my submission cycle next year, after a bit of polishing. I sold one new story and saw two others published. I did in fact launch my author newsletter, which is awesome and you should sign up for it pronto.

And I did in fact write 3 new novels, though 2 were reboots of projects I’ve tried to write before (and one of those is being rebooted again), and started 2 others.

So, 2017 goals achieved. My 2018 goals are basically the same. Writing is a long game—instead of concentrating on one project, I just keep my head down. I write. I submit. I talk to my agent and listen to her sage advice. I take the opportunities that come my way and make the best of them.

So what are your writing goals for 2018? The key to achieving them, I think, is simple: Put in the work. There’s no magic spell, and there’s no One Way to publish and sell work. But at the core of the infinite ways people succeed as writers is that one simple rule: Do the work. Write, revise, submit. Repeat.

Happy New Year, folks!

Writing Means Being Challenged

I sold a piece of fiction recently. I used to think when someone bought a story I submitted that the purchase was the end of the interaction—an editor read my work, liked it and thought it would bring eyeballs to their platform, and offered to pay me for it. End of story. In fact, way back in the early, early days I published a short story (for no money) and got very bent out of shape when the editor proceeded to engage in what I considered excessive editing, coming back at me with questions and suggestions over and over again. Why in the world would you publish a story you obviously thought needed so much work?

Now I understand that selling a story is often just the beginning. Being published is a relationship, and that means you’re going to be challenged even though you’ve already cleared the hurdle and gotten your work ‛approved’ on some level. The lesson is simple: Be ready to be challenged.

Good to Great

Editors often see potential in a story even if they believe there are flaws. Sometimes those flaws are purely mechanical and it’s just a thorough copy-edit that’s needed, but sometimes even though they like a story (or even a full novel) they’ve got concerns about certain plot mechanics, certain character motivations, or other aspects of the tale. In other words, they see a good story that could be great with a reasonable amount of work.

As an author, you have to balance out a knee-jerk rejection of any further changes simply because you considered the story finished long ago with the fact that you’re the author and thus the ultimate judge of whether edits are improving the story or not. In other words, when you sell a piece of fiction you should expect to be challenged, you should expect the editor to push you—but you also have to decide when to plant your feet and decide their suggestions aren’t right.

It’s not an easy balance to strike, sometimes. But being prepared for the push back is half the battle. Knowing that selling a story or book doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done is half the battle.

I sold Writing Without Rules this year and submitted what I thought was an excellent manuscript. I got feedback from my agent and revised accordingly. I got feedback from my editor, which ranged from mechanics to conceptual suggestions, and I took or left those suggestions as I saw fit—but I still wasn’t finished, because I currently have copy-edits to review, and the copy editor is also challenging me throughout questioning assumptions I’ve made and highlighting what they see as flaws. Half the hard work, in other words, comes after you sell something. And you just have to be prepared to defend all of your decisions. In my experience, no one’s going to force you to make a change that you disagree with—but they will want your reasoning, and it had better be good.

None of this is why I drink. I drink because after you publish the book the reviews and feedback from readers comes in—and it’s too late to make any changes.