‘Yes,’
or so the narrative goes. ‘Yes, yes, oh, yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES,
YESSSSSSS!’
I'm
not the first, obviously, to quote the actress Meg Ryan, and I’ve a hunch that
neither will I be the last. And it may
well be that, in doing so, I'm sliding slightly towards cliché, but I'm
prepared to risk it, as I can think of no better way to put what I'm trying to
say, which is ‘just say yes’.
Ah.
Perhaps those three words would do just as well. After all, as writers, the big
thing that’s always drummed into us is to avoid using lots of words when fewer
will do.
And
here’s more; ‘it’s a long game’, a ‘precarious business’, and that old chestnut
– that ‘2% of writers, in total, earn more than the other 98% combined’.
I
made those figures up, actually, but they are certainly in the ballpark.
Writing is an incredibly tricky way for a person to make a living because for
every J K Rowling or Terry Pratchett or Dan Brown there are thousands – tens of
thousands, perhaps – scratching one, because there just aren’t that many
livings to be made.
Which
begs the question – why does anyone make it a career choice? With odds like
that, you’d have to be some kind of lunatic, wouldn’t you? Well, yes. That’s
exactly what you are.
What
we all are. As I always point out
whenever I find myself in a room of
budding novelists (hungry for instruction, words of wisdom and hopefully the
names of a couple of agents) writers write because they are afflicted by what
many liken to a disease. The majority of us write because we can’t NOT write.
Which is what makes it so astounding, when you stop and really think about it,
that, on any given day, there are writers - writers desperate to make writing
their day job - spending hours and hours failing to do just that.
Sound
familiar? I imagine it might do because one of the chief gripes I deal with
when teaching my novel writing classes is the writerly affliction that dare not
speak its name, but which attracts acres and acres of analysis and discussion, and generally goes something like this…
Nasty.
Nothing more dispiriting than an empty page, is there? Damn that wicked muse and it’s capriciousness. But let’s
give the resultant lack of progress an acronym instead, shall we? Let’s simply refer to it as WB, and having
done that, let’s afford it the respect it deserves i.e. none whatsoever. Nada.
Because
the truth is that, in most instances (a few diehards will disagree with me, and
that’s their right) WB is a luxury you really can’t afford if you are serious
about trying to write for a living.
Those
italics are key. If you don’t aspire to becoming a career writer, then it’s
fine. You can stare into the middle distance, gently bleating, all you like.
Your output or lack of is entirely your affair. But if you want to earn proper
folding money (or its post-modern digital equivalent) you need to get
publishable words down on paper, and get them published - and do it day in and
day out.
It’s
a bit like the relationship that exists between calories and weight, which is a
simple one. You take them in, you use them up, you do the maths and, hey
presto, that relationship is proven, time and again. But that doesn’t stop the
juggernaut that is new-diet-craze, does it? There must be some other way,
people think, scouring the media. Some easier way. Some better way, some nicer way
than that.
It’s
the same with writing. There is no route out of being unpublished than the
(some might say) boring one (I don’t, for sure) of sitting down and writing.
And writing some more.
But
I can’t! I hear you cry. Some days, it’s just not happening! I’ve been
afflicted by a virulent case of WB! And
I feel your pain, I do, because that happens to me too. But that’s where the ‘yes’
bit comes in.
It
might sound trite, but the reason I earn a fine living writing is that when I’ve been short on inspiration, I have
written other things. I’ve never turned down a writing gig, ever.
I
started small. Yes, I had a lofty plan to Be A Published Novelist. That’s a
given. But since I had no more idea about how to write a novel than I did about,
say, spacecraft ergonomics, I thought I would chance my arm writing short
stories while I practiced. I wrote several, I got a few published, I amassed
wealth (where wealth is defined as a lot of free copies of the small press
magazines I had subscribed to in the first place in order to see what sort of
short stories I might sell.) Then I focused. I did sums. I realized (somewhat
fretfully) that in order to survive, I needed more in the way of food than
sustainably sourced paper, however culturally enriching the words printed on it
might be.
I
diversified. I wrote a piece about being a student teacher for the TES. I wrote
an article about pregnancy hormones for You
and Your Baby. I wrote a readers letter and sold it to BEST magazine (for a
whopping £50) about getting confused in a toilet in Debenhams. I embraced the
WOMAG market (that’s the woman’s
magazine market for the uninitiated), realizing that if I researched well,
studied the craft (and, boy, is there a lot of craft to it) I could write fiction
‘in the style of’, varying to suit each magazine, and, if I toiled, could get
published in all of them.
And
so it continued, and still goes on a whole two decades later, with perhaps the
biggest leap of faith (having by now nailed that ‘novel writing’ thing) was to
say yes, when approached by a stranger and asked if I’d help them write their
life story, while my agent yelled ‘noooo!’.
In
fact, thinking about it, saying yes has been key to every positive development
in my writing career. Yes to those writing gigs (you never know where they
might lead), to those invitations to speak in backofbeyondsville (you never
know who you might meet) to those to teach (you never know what might come of
it - in my case, a book) to the idea
that, actually, it’s a myth, the whole ‘career’ thing. For almost everyone,
being a writer isn’t a career. Not in the sense that it’s something plannable
or controllable. You are flotsam and jetson, willo-the-wisp, at the mercy of
the breeze, a slave to fortune. Almost everything that happens to you, outside
of the actual writing, is down to destiny and circumstance – and those pesky
right-time-right-place dynamics. Understand that, embrace it, be joyful, and be
industrious.
You
are already special. Course you are - you’re a writer. So just say yes, and
give fate a helping hand.
facebook
page Lynne Barrett-Lee Author and
Ghostwriter
twitter
@LynneBarrettLee
NOVEL; Plan it. Write it. Sell
it.
By Lynne Barrett-Lee:
Published by: Thistle Publishing
Price: £3.99
Date: Out now
No comments:
Post a Comment