I’ll get straight to the point: if you’re serious about writing, you’re going to have to treat it like a job. 

Not a very sexy intro, is it?  It doesn’t exactly scream “million dollar success!”  It doesn’t promise instant gratification.  It doesn’t offer to make you rich overnight, or show you how to write a bestseller in ten days.

If it did claim to do any of those things, would you believe them?

Thought not.

The public perception of writers is often skewed by extremes: the eccentric, alcoholic egotist with a basketful of neuroses and abandonment issues.  But this is the truth, and the sooner you embrace it, the better.  Doesn’t matter how young or old you are.  If you’re fifteen, you get more practice being professional.  If you’re fifty, you’ll pick it up more quickly. 

Like many creative careers, you will spend far less of your time dealing with the activity that inspires you – in our case, writing – than you will dealing with the associated peripheral activities that other professions call “career building.” 

If you’re a professional musician, you spend fourteen hours a day on a bus driving from point A to point B, doing press interviews and record store signings and assorted other things that may or may not be fun – all for that hour and a half when you’re on stage.  90 minutes out of 1440.  Ouch.

Another home truth: most people, most professions, that’s the ratio. 

Unfair?  I think not.  Happiness is up to you. 

As a professional writer, you’ll do some press interviews.  You’ll do some book signings.  You’ll do some other things that might not be fun – contract negotiations, promotion, social events.  Professionalism means being grateful when you’re having fun and graceful when you’re not.

Do you dream of being a bestselling author?  Don’t even answer that.  Of course you do.  We all do.  If we didn’t, why would we subject ourselves to the rejections, long hours of work with no pay, and maddening anonymity?

Here’s the trick: no matter how long it takes to get there – wherever “there” is – start being professional now.  Success will come faster if you do.
 
So how can you become professional now?

1.  Stop complaining about “the state of the publishing industry.”  Only one person controls your writing career.  That person is you.  You can’t change the industry by complaining, or feeling victimized.  How can you use the industry to your advantage, and win a six-figure advance or a million-dollar book contract? 

In his book Writing the Breakout Novel, agent Donald Maas answers succinctly: write a novel that warrants it.   

What will change the industry?

You.  You, plus a bestselling book, plus professional influence, plus a great idea.  If you have a great idea for change and you want someone to hear it, this is the best way to be heard. 

Present the idea professionally – with the purest inspiration and finest attention to craft you can muster.

2.  Accept publishing industry standards and adhere to them.  I, too, hate getting generic “dear writer” rejection letters from magazine editors who insist on being queried by name.  Fact: if your query letter’s salutation reads “dear editor,” that query letter will be discarded unread.  Also fact: the same editor might send out twenty “dear writer” rejection letters in the space of one hour.

Annoying self-congratulatory sidebar: As a webzine editor, I didn’t do that.  I always addressed rejections to the writer, and included the title of the story.  I believe that you should extend courtesy if you expect to receive it.  My view is, of course, influenced by the fact that I had submitted and published stories prior to becoming an editor.

Most editors do not share that view, sorry to say.   

If you’re an amateur, you say:  That’s not fair!  Why should I maintain a different standard than they do?  If they don’t call me by name, I’m not going to call them by name.

If you’re professional, your approach is to raise the bar rather than lower yourself to like behavior.  So, repeat after me:

I will always address my queries to an editor by name – one I know is looking for the kind of story I have written.  I don’t care if I get a “dear writer” letter in return.  I will always be professional.  If I am always professional, I will never be wrong.

It’s a simple rule, but profoundly effective.  In a roomful of unprofessional people – at a writing conference, for example – be the only professional person in the room.  You will be remembered.

3.  Cultivate personal integrity.  Only one person can raise the bar for you.  Three guesses who that is.

I define personal integrity as doing the right thing even when no one is looking.  What does this mean for you as a professional writer?  Honesty, for one.  If the editor does not accept multiple submissions, don’t send your story to Alfred Hitchcock’s when Mystery Reader already has it.  It’s dishonest, and it wastes everybody’s time.

Honesty also pertains to your work.  Let’s say you’re given editorial suggestions.  Making the changes will mean a professional sale, but you feel the requested revisions weaken the book.

If you ignore your intuition and go after the paycheck, I guarantee you a negative learning experience – one of those “gee, I really wish I hadn’t done that” moments.

Keep those moments to a minimum with a professional attitude.  Keep all your dealings professional and you will build a career.  It might take longer than you wished, but it will happen.  Professionals enjoy dealing with other professionals.

You will earn respect.  That’s the best calling card you could hope for.

Throw this in your character creation file.  It’s another adapted game called “Smoke.”  In the game, you pick a famous person.  You say, “if I were smoke in this character’s pipe, what kind of smoke would I be?”  It’s fun, and breaks you out of your normal mindset.

Try these:

1) If your character was a credit card in a wallet, what kind of credit card would he be?

2) If your character was a kid’s bicycle, what kind of bicycle would she be?

3) If he was a house, what kind?

4) If she was a summer cabin, where would she be?

5) If your characters were songs, what songs would they be?

Using this method, create three characters as quickly as you can.  Do sketches.  Leave stuff blank.  It’s okay.  If you ask yourself why and you’re one of those people who needs an answer right away, then answer your question right away – with the first thing that pops into your head.  Don’t give yourself time to question.  Just write it down.

When your three characters are done, close your notebook and put it away.  Wait three days before looking at your character sketches again.  Then go back and see what they say to you.

Have fun.  Play.  Summer’s coming, so you’re allowed to play a few games.  Playing is still writing, and if playing turns into good writing, so much the better.

When I was a kid, I believed in everything.   It was like the scene in Ghostbusters where Janine Melnitz interviews Winston Zeddmore for a job helping out the seriously overworked trio of Dr. Venkman, Dr. Stanz, and Egon.

She asks him, “Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full transmediums, the Loch Ness Monster and the theory of Atlantis?”

Winston replies, “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.”

There was no paycheck in it for me, but I would have gleefully added Bigfoot; the Yeti; Nostradamus; the Rosicrucians and Illuminati and any of another half dozen secret societies; the mystery of the Easter Island statues; and all that stuff about extraterrestrials helping the Incas build their pyramids.

I accepted it all with equal enthusiasm.  I ate that stuff up.  I read Frank Edwards and Erich von Daniken and Robert Blum.  Nobody was wrong.  All of it was true. 

If pressed, I would have also told you that Jim Morrison was alive and well and running guns in North Africa, living the kind of life that Joseph Conrad would have been pleased to write about.  And bumping into Elvis from time to time.

I would have also shared with you a little known secret concerning the Kennedy assassination: it was a conspiracy, all right.  An intergalactic conspiracy.  You see, medical professionals extracted some of Lee Harvey Oswald’s blood following his arrest, and they found certain … anomalies.  Inexplicable anomalies.  The kind that later propelled entire story arcs of The X-Files.  

As a Philosophy minor in college (longer ago than I care to reveal, thank you very much), I continued to live experimentally.  I explored with the kind of enthusiasm and fervor only undergraduate students can summon.  I took every subject I studied and I lived it.

For one semester.

From September through December, I was an existentialist.  From January through May, I was a classical realist.  When the summer session rolled around, I spent ten weeks leaping and frolicking in the fields of the shaman.

From one year to the next, I cycled through two or three belief systems, completely embracing each one until the term was over, then moving on.  My emphasis was comparative religion, which made an excellent excuse for diving into the waters of Zen, Tao, Islam, Cherokee, Druidic practice, and Teilhardian Catholic mysticism  (if you don’t know who Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is and want a fun, readable primer, check out William Peter Blatty’s novel Legion, the sequel to his classic The Exorcist.  The novel has absolutely nothing to do with the execrable film sequel, Exorcist II:  The Heretic).

After graduation, life started becoming more and more about a steady paycheck.  Over a period of two or three years – my first years in the Air Force – I became Winston Zeddmore. 

It wasn’t the environment, as you might think.  I ran into plenty of military people inclined to believe in the paranormal, extraterrestrials, or psychic abilities.  I heard at least a dozen ghost stories for each new assignment.  I lived in England for 12 years.  The country is crisscrossed by ley lines, dotted with standing stone sites and Norman churches built on old pagan holy grounds.  How did the Normans “acquire” those sites, you ask?  By slaughtering the pagans, of course, and stealing the land.

With that kind of long, bloody history, England really was spook central.  But by this time, I was a skeptic.  I lived in High Wycombe, only a few miles from the West Wycombe caves, a purported haunt of the legendary Hellfire Club, one of the aforementioned secret societies proud to call Ben Franklin a member.

I took a photograph in those caves I still can’t explain.  A white, oblong shape, resembling fog, appeared where I had definitely not seen any such thing while taking the picture.  Ghost?  Not if you asked me.  At that time, if you questioned me about paranormal phenomena, I would say, “I believe in the possibility.”

Which was pretty much the same as saying no.

Not only was I saying no, I was proud of it.  I had finally grown up, grown out of that silly fantasy about flying saucers and ghosties and goblins and things that go bump in the night. 

Except that every short story I sold over the next ten years had one of those creepy crawlies as its subject.  My first professional sale, a story called Five Past Four, was one of only a handful that did not contain a supernatural element.  The rest?  Haunted boys; demons popping out of mirrors; ex-girlfriends returning from the grave; homicidal, dimension-hopping creatures; a man chased by the apocalypse, ever in his rear view mirror.

And on.  And on.

My subconscious, calling me a liar.  Oh, there was a good excuse for that one, too.  “For a guy who doesn’t believe in that stuff, Dave, you sure write a lot about it.”

I explained that fantasy fiction gives writers a rich and diverse metaphoric environment to work in.  Those monsters are really symbols, see.  Our daily fears, lack of control, cultural paranoia and various other repressed issues, all dressed up in vampire regalia.  It’s still not really about the creepy-crawlies.

Except that it was, and I was a liar, and I here confess.  There are some things in fiction it’s okay to lie about.  You can change a name here or there, a hair color, an eye color.  You can make your male college roomie a girl in your story and no one will say boo about it (except maybe the roomie).

But in many ways, you must tell a much more naked truth in fiction than you would if you were writing a biography.  All those symbols catch you out.  They tell a deeper tale than the one you think you’re telling when you begin.  They speak of things you may not even have realized you believed yourself, because they speak from the subconscious.

As you become aware of these truths in your conscious, work with them.  Use them.  Liberate them.  Free them to run in your conscious mind.  They are tools for your use.

Fortunately, my subconscious refused to be repressed.  My stories told truths I never told aloud.  And so they sold.  Many years, later, I read them again and realized what I had been trying to tell myself.  Better late than never, I suppose.

Discover what you really believe.  Then be true to it.

If you don’t, you really are a liar.  People read fiction, but nobody reads liars.

I often hear writers talking about what I call the “flow state.”  Words pour from their pens and computer keyboards.  Pages fill on their own.  Story problems solve themselves; characters invent themselves; scenes write themselves.  I’ve heard many ways of describing this, all of which seem to take the writer out of the driver’s seat.

“This story wrote itself.”

“I felt like I was taking dictation.”

“I didn’t even think I was capable of that kind of writing.  It just happened.”

Interesting, yes?  As if the energy we use to pursue this crazy endeavor comes from outside ourselves.  As if even the story ideas come from outside ourselves.

I believe that’s how it works.  I call it writing from the Big Mind.

I’m not here to talk about religion.  There are as many ways to experience spirituality as there are people.  No matter what your faith, this idea makes perfect sense.  We have been given a gift.  This passion.  This skill.  This love.

If we’ve got the gift, doesn’t it make sense that we use it to tap into the same energy that gave it to us in the first place?

For me, writing is as much a spiritual pursuit as it is my chosen career.  In fact, I think the spiritual aspect came first: The call to do this, and to do this in a way that will earn a living.

It’s not desperation.  It’s inspiration. 

I’ve heard lots of professional artists say that they achieved success in their chosen fields of endeavor because they didn’t know how to do anything else.  That’s not the case for me.  After twenty years in the Air Force, I can design resumes for a half dozen career fields from management to industrial security. 

But I do this better than I do anything else.  I burn to do this.  I have a vision.  I’d be willing to bet you do, too.

An interviewer once asked film director Steven Spielberg what he thought God might say to him if they were given an opportunity for a face-to-face.  Note that the question concerns what God would say to him, not what he would say to God.

Spielberg’s reply:  God would say “thanks for listening.”

Yes, this is a spiritual thing.  It’s about internal growth through stories.  There is no better job, no more fulfilling profession.  We are continually challenged.  We are always beginners, reborn in every new project.

I believe rebirth is a key facet in the experience of Big Mind.  Buddhists certainly agree.  The concept of rebirth is, of course, very important in Christianity as well.    

Yet, for every writer who says “this story wrote itself,” I hear another who says, “I’m writing this because Editor X likes it.  I’m writing this because the paycheck is good.  I’m not passionate about this subject, but there’s a market for it.”

That is writing from the Little Mind.  It’s just you – you and your own head.  You and your own earthbound, limited, single perspective.

I try not to get too heavy-handed and judgemental in my approach to writing and teaching.  My two favorite words are “whatever works.”  Writing from the Little Mind doesn’t work. Your ego doesn’t have enough energy to keep it going for very long.  It’s like trying to run a Ferrari F430 on a 9-volt flashlight battery.  You won’t even get out of the driveway.

Stories reach for something huge, something grand – something far larger than ourselves.  We write because we need to write.  People still read because they need stories.  It’s essential humanity.

Little Mind will tell you to write what’s popular, so you can sell your work.  It’ll tell you to write things you don’t really care about so you can get a byline.  It’ll tell you how to make a living.

Big Mind will tell you how to expand your concept of the world, our connections with each other, human consciousness.

Which of the above is likely to produce more story ideas?

I have to be honest: I did not feel like doing anything today.

I just came off a fantastic weekend, filled with bright sunshine, good music, things I love to do … and fell first-thing into a gloomy Monday.  Yuck.

It happens, right?  Sure it does.  Even if you’re fortunate enough to be able to do exactly what you want to do.  Even if you work at home, so you can slop around in your gym shorts all day.

Even if you love your work, sometimes you just don’t feel like doing it.  Especially on a cloudy Monday. 

On days like this, when the entire world seems shrouded and dim, it’s tough to break away from the influences of things like weather and low-ebb energy.  It’s almost traditional; on Monday, nothing gets done.

But you have to get things done.  There is simply no way around it: stories do not write themselves.  You have to write them.

As a writer, a case of the Mondays is not an earth-shattering crisis.  In fact, there are a few Friday-beforehand strategies that can help you avoid it altogether.  Here are three ways you can avoid the dreaded Monday blahs:

1.  End your writing day in the middle of a scene.  This leaves you a little “cliffhanger” to look forward to when you sit down to begin work on Monday.  This is particularly useful when writing longer works, like novels.  But it also works well when writing short stories.  Depending on your output and the length of the story, it can take three or four sessions to complete a rough draft.  This gives you plenty of opportunities for intentionally finishing in the middle of something exciting.

2.  Write every day.  One of the great things about writing is choice.  You choose the time and place.  Lots of writers who make their money doing something else write only on weekends.  While I don’t recommend that approach – it’s difficult to maintain continuity and build momentum with so many days between writing sessions – I highly recommend writing on weekends to connect your Friday session to your Monday session.  If you’re on a roll and writing well, you may already be doing this.  If you’re struggling, you may be making excuses not to write.  I definitely understand those days (I’m having one today, remember?), but I also know from experience how difficult it is to pick up where you left off after several days have gone by.

3.  Settle for half your usual word count.  Some days, it just isn’t going to happen.  Give yourself a guilt-free break; what you write might do something good for humanity, but we’re not curing cancer here.  It’s much easier to coax the horse from canter to gallop than it is to climb back on after falling.

To these three tidbits, I add one piece of advice that encompasses all of your work, creative or otherwise: trust yourself.  There may be days where it’s better not to write at all.  Sometimes you need to fill the empty cup.  Writing every day requires discipline and a solid craft approach – but when it comes right down to it, we’re supposed to be doing this because it’s fun.  If it isn’t fun, take a day off and feel good about it.  If you take several days off and don’t miss working, it’s time to take personal inventory and be sure you love doing this.  Passion brings joy – even on gloomy Mondays.

Sherman, set the wayback machine for October, 2006. Destination: a website called Voidgunner for Writers. Six months later, it became www.write-your-short-story.com. Now it’s a blog called “Rex the Wonder Scribe.” Why? Two reasons. First, I didn’t want to limit myself to writing about short fiction.  That’s what I’ve published. But I’ve also written four novels, four screenplays, and several hundred songs.  I make a living as a technical writer.

Second, I follow my instincts, and take things on faith. I leap, believing the net will appear. If it doesn’t work, I shrug and say, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

If it works like gangbusters, I shrug and say, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”   

Recently, I wrote an article about allowing yourself to begin. The first article I published at Voidgunner for Writers was about allowing yourself to be a writer in the first place. Now that we’re into the first sprint of 2010, it seems appropriate to share that here, in our new home.

So, without further ado …

You Have My Permission

You have my permission to be a writer.

Does that sound strange? Maybe it does. If you’re one of the lucky few enjoying the unconditional acceptance and support of every friend, every single member of your family, every stranger you talk to at a bus stop, feel free to ignore this.

Me? I grew up hearing people tell me I was crazy. Impractical. Too imaginative. Childish.

Or the sure-fire muse-killer: Get a real job.

Make a living as a writer? Yeah. Right. The odds against making a living wage as a freelance journalist are astronomical, and that gamble looks positively glowing compared to your chances of survival on a fiction writer’s wage. Journalists, at least, earn respect. They’re reporting truth. They’re chasing down the facts, and the facts always seem to run a little faster than they do.

Journalists are writers, but they have a real job. Sometimes they’re even role models.

Fiction writers? You just make up stories, like kids kicking around tall tales at recess. It’s all make-believe. Anybody can make up a story. How hard could it be, right?

So when are you going to grow up, anyway?

Any of that sound familiar? It sure does to me. For every one person who said, “you’re really good at this,” there were a dozen telling me to forget it, hang it up, quit dreaming. Learn a trade.

A real job? There is no job more real than writing. There is no task more demanding, more exacting, more exhausting, than the constant sifting through the detritus of daily life, searching for a grain of story that makes us jump up and shout, “hey, I’ve really got something here!”

That’s when we get the strange looks, of course – the ones Robert E. Howard used to get, shadow-boxing as he walked down the streets of Cross Plains, a new Fighting Dennis Dorgan story writing itself in his head.

We’re going to get that look.  It’s part of the job. I’ve learned to grin, get out my notebook, and get to work. I don’t care how strange it seems. I’ve even learned to feel a bit sorry for the folks who give me that look. They don’t say strike sparks.  They’re not inspired.  Their lives are closed to that.

If you have ever doubted this - this insane thing that lives in our heads and speaks out of turn at dinner parties - I am here to tell you it is normal. If you have ever wondered if you’re going crazy because imaginary people wake you up at 3 a.m. and demand to have their actions recorded – now, right now before they get away from you – I am here to reassure you. 

You are a writer. This is how it works. Listen to those people. They will steer you through treacherous and wonderful waters. You may not always like where they take you, but you will always learn something from the experience of going there.

The naysayers will tell you you’re being childish. Fine. Be a kid. Embrace it. Kids have huge eyes. They see everything. It’s all new and fresh and loud and live, in color, nonstop. Ray Bradbury’s been a kid for 86 years. He has written stories that will still be taught in high school and college literature classes two hundred years from now. Robert Bloch was a kid when, at age 42, he wrote an intimate, chilling story about a boy whose best friend was his mother. Nobody’s going to forget that one, either.

The doubters are out there now, like the haunted, familiar faces surrounding accident victims in Bradbury’s story “The Crowd.” They’re pressuring you, telling you don’t, telling you no, telling you can’t.

I’m only going to tell you one thing: write. Write like your life depends on it.

You have my permission.

I interviewed computer graphics artist Abby Goldsmith for an article I wrote in Spacesuits and Sixguns awhile back.  She mentioned that, as a student, she had a very narrow definition of success, which she later discovered was both impractical and limiting.

I used to have a similarly narrow definition of success: I would be a published novelist, or I would be a failure.

My plan was simple.  I’d serve four years in the Air Force, work my writing career in the off hours, publish my first novel by the time I hit the four-year mark, separate from the military, and begin working as a writer full-time.  Sounds great on paper, doesn’t it?  Oh, I had a timeline, and tools to help me track my progress.  And I did manage to land some short story sales in that four years.

What I didn’t have at the end of the four years was a publishable novel.  I didn’t have a plan B, either.  But I came up with one in a big hurry.  And then I kept writing.

Those of you who followed my various postings and articles at the original website (which will remain online until Christmas Eve) will already know that my four-year plan became a twenty-year career, which resulted in all sorts of eye-opening and very valuable experiences I had not anticipated.  More fuel for the muse, new stories, new songs, new novels.  Very worthwhile.

When I retired two years ago, I was excited about working freelance.  I would be my own boss, do things my way, with no one to answer to but myself. As it turned out, that also meant no one to talk to but myself.  That gets pretty old.  No one to edit my work, either, which makes creating professional work extremely challenging.  In case you didn’t know this already, here it is: Everybody needs an editor.  Period.

By the end of 2008, I realized that the freelance life was not for me.  I missed working for a team, and I was more than happy to leave the bookkeeping and accounting to somebody else.  So I left the freelance life for a contract job as a technical writer for a software company.

Yes.  That’s correct.  A (gasp) technical writer.

When I originally posted my intention to be largely absent from the writing website for the indefinite future, I received several emails about that.  “But, Dave, isn’t technical writing really boring?  I could never do that.  I’d fall asleep at work every day.  I need a job that allows me to be creative.”

For a long time, I also held that prejudice – until I started building a resume for technical writing jobs, and came to the realization that I’d already been working as a technical writer for over fourteen years.  It sort of snuck up on me, you see.  Although my Air Force career field was Security Forces, I did a lot of writing – everything from official correspondence and performance reports to base operations plans and classified security reports that made it all the way up to the Pentagon.  In the Air Force, if they know you’re good at something, they have no problem asking you to do it for them, even if it has nothing to do with your career field.

That contract job at the software company turned into a full-time position.  I get a big kick out of working there.  I write – and the assignments are varied in both style and execution – but I also design publications, work with really cool software, and share passion, editorial oversight and silly interoffice email humor with a team of six other smart, crazy people who love writing as much as I do.  That alone is worth the price of admission.

If I had defined success in my former limited terms, I never would have interviewed for this job.  Now, I have a steady paycheck doing something I enjoy, as much job security as any of us can expect in this economy, and time to pursue my other writing passions when the work day is over.  Life is good.

Keep your eyes open.  You might find success where you least expect it.