Writing Tips (page 2)
By Wendy Markham (who also writes as Wendy Corsi Staub)
©2005 Wendy Corsi Staub. All Rights Reserved.
Do you write purely out of a passion for the process of painting pictures with words? Are you content to keep your day job? Do you balk at the thought of writing under pressure, or incorporating somebody else’s ideas into your material whether or not you agree with them? If you answer “yes” to these questions, you should go on creating art. Rest assured that while you may or may not eventually become published, you’ve probably spared yourself a very difficult, often excruciating journey.
Do you write not purely out of a passion for the process of painting pictures with words, but also with the vision of one day seeing your books in print? Do you dream of quitting your day job, landing on the bestseller lists, traveling on publicity tours, and making a small—or perhaps large—fortune? If you answer “yes” to those questions, you need to think “product” in addition to “art”; you must strive to achieve a level of emotional detachment from your novel-in-progress.
Remember, I’m speaking not as a fellow passionate writer, here—but as a former book editor. My job was to discover new writers in the slush pile and build them into bestsellers. In the process, I saw countless talented writers curtail potential careers through failure to approach the submissions process from a marketing standpoint. Perhaps they were inadvertently submitting the wrong genre to the wrong house. Or they were sending a one-hundred-page single spaced manuscript in a fancy pink font, all caps. Some writers defiantly broke all the “rules” because they were convinced their book was so special it would be snapped up on the spot. Others were unwilling to accept and incorporate editorial feedback in order to revise a manuscript to publishable standards.
I should point out that many would-be authors were rejected because they simply were not talented. They weren’t “born” writers. But too many others were talented—and blatantly lacked the crucial work ethic and required level of professionalism. To use a couple of apt clichés, they hadn’t bothered to do their homework or pay their dues.
You wouldn’t wake up tomorrow morning and expect to be able to open a successful clothing boutique by sundown, would you? Launching a business takes at least months, more likely years, of preparation. In order to make an eventual living, you would need to research your market, target your customer, refine your product, network, etc. You would invest not just time, but money and hard labor, in getting your business off the ground.
By the same token, you must painstakingly lay the groundwork for a publishing career.
<< Previous page | Next page >>