Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give it, Volume 21 - Define "Writer."

I never miss an opportunity to link to something Russell Smith is doing.  He's like my own personal hero, right next to Booker T. Washington and that guy in Norway who beat up a shark with his bear hands.  I don't think that Russell Smith had to overcome the adversity of oppression and social injustice, nor do I think he is a hulking Nordic fisherman with a mean left hook, but he is a snappy dresser, and quite literally wrote the book on men's style.  Well, a book on men's style, and a very good one.  It's just short, is all, but in Smith's case brevity is the source of wit, and it's very concise. 

All of the above rolled into one - new hero found!

But mentioning Mr. Smith's book kind of brings us around to my own point in a roundabout way.  First, take a moment to read his article from the Toronto Globe and Mail: 


If you can't be bothered to soak up the whole thing, here's the most important paragraph:

The market for fiction shrinks every year, the attention paid to novels by the media diminishes monthly, booksellers demand ever-lower prices, everybody in the industry says it’s the worst it’s ever been. And yet more academic or private creative-writing programs are created every year, and the demand for advice on becoming a novelist remains furiously high.


As someone who dedicates about 1/3 of his blog to giving advice to new writers, you might think I would take some offense.  I do not - I think the writing advice industry is mostly silly and I direct the same criticism towards it as Mr. Smith: that so much of that advice comes out as bits of ritual rather than technique.  While I certainly indulge in bits of such fluffery in this blog, I think for the most part I've done a good job explaining particulars of tone, narration, character, and so on, and kept the ritualistic stuff to a minimum, basically encouraging writers to establish a ritual while not vaingloriously espousing my own as the way to write a book, which is what I am hearing a lot of these days.

Pipe, pen, tweeds, mad look in eye - at least he's not writing on his laptop at Starbucks like a douche.

Nevertheless (and my own shortcomings aside) I want to pay particular attention to one recurring word in the above excerpt, namely:  Novel.

It's the thing that every writer is expected to produce.  Nobody is picking up short stories except for journals and magazines which do not get read, and electronic journals which are about one rung above self-publishing on the prestige ladder.  Collections of short stories might sell, but only after you've got a few novels under your belt, which is a shame because I think the short story is where the culture is at right now - 5 pages, archetypal characters, stock plots, lots of action - it's like TV made of paper.

Just fucking die already.

I digress - the important thing to remember here is that your odds of getting a novel published are pretty small.  A novel is a big investment in time and energy on behalf of a publisher, and with literary tastes being so much a matter of, well, taste, it's a big gamble as to whether or not it will pay off.  Even vested and established authors have bad days, and publishers know this.  Making a novel is an expensive preposition, which is why your first advance will hardly make the process worthwhile (though as I've said often enough before, you've got to write because you want to write, not because you think there's a paycheck coming).

A royalty check well spent.

But there are ways to get paid, and I hope that some of the advice I've put forth in this column has been helpful in that pursuit. Here are a few of them.

1) Blog

Just because I'm too hot for adsense doesn't mean you have to be.  There are several ad networks out there who will pay you some small amount of cash in exchange for hosting advertisements, either links on a sidebar or highlighted words that open pop-ups when clicked.  It's probably not going to pay your bills, but it may cover your hosting cost and give you some beer money all while giving you a potential source of readership and a way to indulge your vanity.

2) Edit and Ghostwrite

If you've really got the chops, you can hire yourself out as an editor (said the freelance editor) - set up a web page offering your service, and link back to it via a craigslist ad.  People constantly need essays and resumes checked for style, grammar, and spelling, and just as everyone thinks they have a great idea for a book, so too do many of them realize that they can't actually write worth a damn.

I once bought a month's worth of groceries with the money I made implementing specific changes that someone else had already penned in - seriously, the guy went through and made red-pen edits to his own written work, and I just had to go and change the accompanying Word doc.

Also, this was literally the worst book ever written about anything.  Simply dreadful.  I specifically asked that my name not be associated with it lest it should see the light of day and I somehow be blamed for it.  Regardless, I got paid, and that's the important lesson here. 

Ghost WRITE, I said, Ghost WRITE!

3) Write Something that's Not a Novel

I was at Barnes & Noble with my dad two days ago picking up a present for my nephew when I noticed an entire end cap of instructive books and how-to manuals.  The interesting eureka moment for me came when my dad saw a book on handguns and actually picked it up (my dad is not a reader).  While selling people books on topics about which they are already enthusiastic and probably knowledgeable may not set the world on fire, it might help you to pay your heating bill.

By all means, write that novel, but if you're going to be a writer, don't let that be the only thing you do.  Remember that as a writer you are a wordsmith, and like any smith you've got to take the work that comes your way in addition to the dream projects for which you would like to be known.

Insipid, but profitable

And speaking of smiths, it's worth noting for the sake of this post that I came to know Russell Smith's work through his truly excellent book Men's Style:  the Thinking Man's Guide to Dress.  Smith had already had some success as a novelist prior to publication of this work, but would I have known that without this practical little book?

Let that be a lesson to you - a writer writes, and writes to many purposes.  Don't let your vanity get in the way of your output.