writing advice, unsolicited

Friends sometimes ask: "How would you suggest I go about getting what I write published?" My short answer: First ask why you write - and what you mean to say. Longer answer below.

Who can help you find people who will read what you write? This question is fundamentally different than writing something people will find worth reading, but many aspiring writers ask it first. In my view, that is the first mistake. Ask it after you first ask yourself, “am I doing my best writing, and if not, how do I get it there?”

Let’s start with the idea of getting outside help, even by asking someone like me, who enjoys writing and writes stuff just for the sake of it all the time (see above). At this point in my life, I am obviously not terribly concerned about the payoff; ergo, this Substack is 100% free of charge. But whether it be for the readers, or for the satisfaction of seeing your writing in print somewhere, or the moola, the question comes up often. Still, let’s first assume your first goal - your only goal - is to write well. That, at least, is how it should be. And some will tell you - “well then, find a good writing coach.”

Because styles and visions for such a role are always very context- and time-sensitive, such a creature is very rare. If you are an aspiring but as yet unpublished writer, who has no real assurance you will ever find your way onto a publishing track (that is, you do not have an “in” into the business, not that there really are any, and cannot afford to start your own publishing company — probably a bad idea anyway), you may look for someone who can help you cultivate your ability to express yourself in your own style. Whether it be short, long, or somewhere in the middle.

Unfortunately, most coaches are not that good at doing that, and they end up superimposing their own style onto you. I have been guilty of doing that myself, when friends have asked me for feedback or suggestions on something they wrote and would like me to read. I end up suggesting things that would probably fit my style far more than theirs. I try my best to shy away from doing that now.

The type of person who is good at helping a writer get to a finished product in their own style is an editor, not a coach. A coach may be fun to work with but they will almost invariably start taking you down some path other than your own. Editors are more valuable because they are more likely to take you down the right one, which is the one you should be on, but just have not yet had the tough love you need to help you get there. Good writers often most appreciate their toughest editors because they help them see aspects of their own style that fall short or how to break bad habits - e.g., that well-known one: "be willing to kill your darlings." But unlike coaches, editors generally do not work for writers so you do not have a way to simply hire them and say “please be my editor” (even if they hold themselves out with that job description). Instead, a real editor is someone that a publisher hires once they made a decision to publish you, to get the best possible version they can out of your work. The key here is, “your work.”

A good writer may chafe at the edits of a good editor but that is simply part of the process. There are famous stories of how the editors of the New Yorker molded great writers over the decades and no doubt still do today (although personally, I am much less a fan of that magazine than when I was 30 years younger; maybe me; maybe it; maybe a combination of both). Anyway, people who are available to hire to consult on manuscript or story development before you have sold anything are not really editors. They are coaches who claim to have professional editing experience. Good for them, but not necessarily good for you.

Getting a publisher, and thereby getting an editor, often requires an agent. But like a real editor, a real agent can be difficult to retain. Don’t expect to be able to "sign" with an agent (or at least a half-decent one who not only returns your calls, but gets their calls returned by publishers) unless they can see both your long-term potential and its commercial appeal. If you are in the sunset of your writing career even before it began, don’t get your hopes up. If you are younger, and you are in a hot genre, maybe do but still be prepared to work hard to succeed. One young writer’s advice that I remember seeing a few years ago, who published a well-received book of poetry (the name escapes me; I don’t buy books of poetry, I just read about them) said his first order of business was to get off social media and get into your own life and its relationships. Not a bad idea.

Anyway, let’s assume you are young enough and in the right genre enough that even though you are just getting started, your speculative appeal captures the fancy of a young enough, just getting started enough agent. Together you will grow and conquer the world together. Good for both of you. But keep in mind, like your good agent, you should err on the side of caution and not waste time waiting for someone else to do all the work for you and land (or hand) you a “deal.” Get your own query engine going and be prepared for a gazillion “sorry, no thanks.” It’s not you. It’s just the way it is. If you have any potential at all, you will, at least, get some good feedback along the way.

Why are publishers so reluctant to publish even when they get a good pitch from a good agent with a good writer? Because what they are really looking for is great. They have already weeded out the gazillions of people (I know, I already used that word, but it applies) who think they can write. They are like drops in the ocean because all you really need is a text editor, yes? And those can even be free (either online or an app) and pretty decent (I will skip the links; be prepared to do your own research on such things). They also know that “good” does not really sell all that good and great may sell okay, but only if some stars (not sure which exactly, ever) are aligned. They have only so many chances before they run out of money on bad bets, and are therefore extremely cautious and careful. If they are not, they will soon be out of business - and if you have been around long enough, you will meet at least a few of those too along the way.

Bottom line, against the universe of published drivel (“of the making of books, there is no end,” it says in the Bible), literary quality writing is like so many tiny drops in a small bucket. So unless you have an urgent need to make a living off your writing as opposed to doing it for you own enjoyment, or as opposed to simply enjoying the thrill of saying “I’m a published author,” maybe it’s best — at least for a while — not to worry about coaches, agents or publishers, at least until you are a little further down the literary skill road. That is, maybe a story or two published somewhere by someone who is not a personal friend. Even if it is online.

Regarding that, let’s consider self-publishing, or "vanity” publishing (they are a bit different but not enough to not lump together here and again, if curious, do your own web search on that). It is always an option and may well be both more affordable and sensible given all other options, especially since the completion of the ascendancy of the Internet. So, unlike when I had (largely unfulfilled) aspirations as a young writer, now you can self-publish without incurring printing expenses. Even better, there are various online “hubs” for self-publishing. This is far better than the pre-Internet days when you, as the Writer (you need to think of yourself in an inital cap sort of way to do this) absorbed the cost of printing a book, placing an order for however many copies you wanted, and tried to get them into stores, all without an established book distributor. A very far-fetched (but not entirely unheard of) result.

Another angle on self-publishing, and apart from Amazon’s program for Kindle, is to start visiting writing websites that aggregate people who write stuff that you like to write. Chances are you will find a suitable site for your particular content and style if you keep looking, although such projects tend to come and go fairly often. Some recurring themes are "fan fiction" sites, where a writer takes someone else's idea or characters or "world" (a story’s imagined environment) and populates it with their own favorite characters or plot lines, etc. Abraham Lincoln gets in a lot of such stories for some reason, no idea why (I think he does just fine in his own story as 16th POTUS). Victorian novels are another popular area, particularly Jane Austen. Again, don’t ask me why so many readers find this so interesting but clearly enough do that it may be worth your while if you do too. There are also various "flash fiction" sites such as this one. Basically, they are directories of thousands of short pieces you can browse through and by looking at a title and a brief squib on what the piece is about, click on and spend a few minutes reading. No money changes hands except maybe the site operator has ads - including many for how you can get better at writing.   

This leads to another approach - start a blog, like this one. This might be the most likely thing to try to do but it does take some reminders to yourself to feed your audience every now and then with your best morsels of wit, wisdom and insight. There was always wordpress.com in the early days but it is a monster now and better used by people with a budget (assuming that you do not, dear reader) and a patience for installing endless plugins and security patches. There are others too, such as blogger.com, but here we are together on a Substack site, so that may be the one I should be plugging if you are reading this and not too annoyed in doing so (at least for the moment).

If indeed this is the route you choose, be forewarned: you need not only the discipline to write often. You also need to get somewhat familiar and comfortable with the process of actually putting your writing in a certain space, and that can take more time figuring out than you may expect. There are numerous itsy bitsy issues on that score … it can get confusing ... no point here in going into the details … just be willing to take your time and make mistakes.

Another subject worth noting. Like everything else perhaps, when it comes to people with a deeply held desire to succeed in some way but without yet having any clear way to achieve it, there are lots of scam artists out there who will prey on you as an Aspiring Writer. Their targets are mostly younger people who are more naive (I think that is a safe assumption although not always!) and who see writing as a way to realize their dreams and have no idea how difficult it is to get from idea to finished product to audience-ready format. And they have no idea how to write effectively at all. If you are a reader here, I am going to assume you do not fit this profile but you should still be careful. Do yourself a favor and never pay anyone to publish or find a publisher who is not clearly already in the publishing business for real, in a clearly demonstrable way. Going to a book trade show may be away to validate this (that is, assuming you meet someone who is willing to listen to your pitch there) but if a publishing company has a booth at a trade show, they are going to be looking for professional writers, not first timers. So there too, you may end up lurking on the sidelines or in the shadows. Again, my advice would be to avoid that.  

Wholly apart from the scammers, there are also tens of thousands of websites, conferences, groups, etc., that offer tens of thousands (OK, not gazillions) of different slants or services on how to succeed at writing in general. You can spend your whole life wading through them. Again, don't. Because if you do, you will only wind up getting sick of it and deciding you really need to do something else with your time. And that may indeed be true. I admit that I went through a few stages in my life where I felt where I fell into such spin cycles. Even not so long ago, in the middle of the last decade, I got interested in trying to write screenplays. I found it fun for a while and thought I did some pretty good work. It also helped me understand that writing an “exteriorized” story, without an interior voice, is challenging. It requires a never-ending cinematographic sense of movement and surprise and episodic character building. All good stuff. But if you think out of the gate, you will be able to sell a script, think again. Even if you "win the screenwriting contest" (or place honorable mention, as I recall once doing) - and there are tons of those - it is a very, very long shot.

So let us put aside the commercial aspects of writing and sing the praises of simply doing it as a worthwhile activity. If it is something you truly enjoy doing, that’s great - me too! If you can just leave it at that, why not? I often do. Which suggests to me, before you can achieve the reading audience, you need to appreciate and find yourself truly dwelling in your own personal dimension of the act of writing. And, if you are there already, and you do it in a purposeful way, what you next do to eventually find your readers, purely on the level of what you have managed to accomplish as someone who is good at your own writing, is a valid next step.

There are, in my view, three primary components. First - what is your subject matter? A lot of people flit through various ideas. But you have to find a niche you love and want to write in. Often it's because you love reading it yourself. Crime thrillers. Sci-fi. Stranger than fiction. Whatever. Have that firmly in mind. Second, be willing to sweat through the process of composing sentences and constructing paragraphs and building narratives far more carefully and often than you may have ever thought humanly possible. Be willing to be your own worst critic (although do decide, at some point, that it’s “pencils down” time and move on to something else). Whatever you wrote, which you enjoyed writing, and which you suspect others may enjoy reading (maybe test that on a few patient friends or family members), ask yourself: what is this experience you are putting out there? Is it something your readers could never have known or thought of themselves, or could never have experienced, but for your giving it to them (for not very much money, one might add) that is wonderful, and true, and a good use of their precious time? If you are sure of all that, do not be shy. Many good writers actually are and the world loses if their shyness prevents them from finally sharing what they did (Kafka, for example, is said to have told a family member to burn all that he wrote after he died).

It's hard to recognize what that is a lot of times, especially when you are first starting out - but it has to have some color or insight that the reader yearns for, which can be any of a number of things. Fascinating characters, amazing plot twists, incredible realizations. Etc. Whatever they are, they must come from the heart as well as the head and cannot be made of cardboard. A simple "here's the problem, here's how the protagonist (you, if in the first person) solves it, or resolves it, and - wow, isn't that great!?" is not creative writing. It's more like self-assigned homework that you expect an automatic A for. 

Good writing, in other words, needs to find a hidden connection with readers that readers did not even know they were looking for. I would say that it has to fold back into itself to accomplish that, by which I mean, it must close some emotional loop. It has to reach the point where the purpose of reading is accomplished. Different writers will have different ways to get there and different styles on how to do that, but that’s what makes good writing interesting and as endless as the rain (even if, like the rain, it rarely sells).  I don't even know if that makes sense but at least that's how I see it.

In terms of advice, sometimes you may stumble on a book or an article that explores this well, other times you'll be asked to ponder the usual nonsense about three-act structure, heroic quest, killing cats, or whatever. Far more often the latter (and I've bought or read more than I care to tell). But to get to this, I think you must also seek out writing you enjoy, read a lot, and introspect on what appeals to you about it. That gets into what I am probably most weak on, which is reading a lot. I know some people who find certain authors and read everything they ever wrote. That’s not a bad idea if you have one you adore but while you are at it, also spend some time reading what other writers in the same genre or era wrote, just to make sure you know why you liked your favorite(s) so much. The list of possible authors who would be worthy candidates for that go on and on so no point in listing any or a few. Regardless, aim to be able to explain — if only to yourself — what you liked or did not like about what you read and why you read it anyway. Be a critic of other writers as much as a writer yourself. 

And lastly, I would offer this: what I see as the hardest part of writing - have your own voice. This is a sense that gives the reader that there is someone behind the words who is capable of making writing that is unique to the writer. Someone the reader can “get to know” by reading on. Again, no point in coming up with a list, but we all know a good "writer" (at least to us) when we find one. And even if you never reasonably expect to reach the level of your favorites or the literary legends, never even try to imitate them or anyone else. The internal process that you undertake, ultimately on our own, of striving to get there is what leads an audience to you as a writer.

Lastly, here is a short, humorous piece that I read recently that I would say reflects what I mean by "voice." It's a natural tone that fits the content while revealing the mind of the writer. It looks easy but in my view, it’s probably the hardest thing in the world to do as a writer and a skill rightly prized by publishers, editors and (last but hardly least) readers.   

So that was the prompt, as they say when you do a writing exercise — write something about how you approach writing. Oh well, you did ask .... right? :)