Good parts and bad parts

Becoming a professional fiction writer is a lot of work. A lot.

Most people who want to be writers sort of realize this – at least, if they’ve gotten even most of the way through a novel, they’ve experienced just how much work the writing part of it really is. (There’s a reason why nearly every writer knows – and repeats – some version of the famous quote about how to write: “stare at a blank page until drops of blood form on your forehead.”) What many of these folks miss is the rest of the work.

When you finish a manuscript, whether it’s your first or your fiftieth, whether you’re trying to break in or you’re a long established professional, you’re only about halfway through the work. Maybe only a quarter of the way. And for most of us, the fun part – the making-up-cool-stuff part – is done. (Those for whom the fun part is revising have just gotten to it.)

What’s left is a) fixing it up, and b) all the business work (review, copyedit, publicity/promotion, taxes, etc.). If you want to sell your work professionally, you’ll want to get good at as much of this part as you possibly can in addition to pushing your writing limits. Ideally, one would enjoy doing every bit of it, but I’m not sure that’s humanly possible. I don’t believe that there is any job that is 100% fun, 24/7. There are always boring bits and unpleasant bits; the trick is to arrange things as best one can so that there are as few of them as possible.

One difficulty is that the boring and unpleasant bits differ from writer to writer. Some writers struggle horribly with producing a first draft, but enjoy straightening out the mess once they have a complete mess to work with. Others like producing the first draft, but hate having to revisit it. The extreme case of this is the writer whose work sets up like concrete shortly after they get it down on paper – from then on, any changes just feel wrong.

The boring and unpleasant bits can also move around, depending on where one is in one’s career and what sort of thing one is working on. For instance, many writers dislike marketing their work, whether they’re marketing to editors at a publishing company or selling directly to individual readers. Marketing to editors moves around quite a bit. If you are as yet unpublished, you pretty much have to have a complete story/novel all written and polished up before you can actually sell it effectively to an editor, but if you have already sold one or more reasonably successful books, you can often get a book under contract based on an outline and a couple of chapters, long before the whole thing is finished. And this doesn’t stay stable. The market changes constantly. The editor who loved your work may leave publishing entirely for one reason or another, and suddenly you’re back to having to finish the book before you can sell it.

If you’re self-publishing on your web page or on Amazon, the selling bit moves to the end of the line – you can’t really put a half-finished novel on Amazon, and even if you decide to try, you have to have a cover and various blurb stuff and paperwork finished before they’ll let you do it.

One difficulty is that until you settle down to actually doing them, the boring and unpleasant parts of the job often don’t sound that bad. (Except for taxes. I don’t know anyone who thinks doing taxes is going to be OK, let alone fun, not even people who chose to do it for a living.) Also, one doesn’t always know whether that thing one’s writer friend really enjoys doing is going to be something you enjoy doing. Or are good at.

I have several writer friends who are periodic extroverts, that is, for a couple of months after one of their books comes out, they absolutely adore doing autographings, book tours, convention appearances, speeches, and anything else that gets them out and in contact with readers, fans, bookstore owners, librarians, and anyone else who buys (or who might buy) their books, now or at some nebulous future date. To all appearances,

But after a couple of months, they get twitchy, and pretty soon they disappear and nobody but their best friends sees them for months. And eventually, they reappear with a new manuscript, and start doing a bit more socializing, and then the book comes out and the cycle repeats.

And that’s the key to coping, if you can’t learn to like the whole process: Remembering that everything in a writing career is cyclical. Hate revising? You only have to do it for a while; then you’ll be on to the copyedit. Hate being “on” out in public? You only have to put up with it for a few months; then you can go back to your cave to start the next first draft. Hate drafting? As soon as you’re done, you’ll be at the fun (for you) part, revising. (If you hate every single bit of it, perhaps you should look for a different career/hobby.)

This applies in the other direction, too. Meaning, it is important to remember that you cannot spend the whole of your professional career writing first drafts and never deal with any of the rest of it. Not even if you hire someone to do your taxes and marketing and be your book doctor. The price of doing the parts that you love is tolerating the parts of the job you dislike. Also, your career will benefit if you can do a reasonably competent job of the things you find boring or unpleasant. Not necessarily your writing; your writing career. There’s a difference.

And you don’t have to do every single part of the job brilliantly. “Reasonably competent” will do, for the parts you hate (and becoming reasonably competent will also let you get through them faster). You do want to get to a higher level on some part(s) of the process if you want a lifetime career, but you need a minimum competency level in most of them to get started. (This is why professional writers insist that beginners learn things like standard submission format and spell-checking their manuscripts before sending them in. Minimum standards.) After that, work on making the fun stuff brilliant, and level up the other parts as needed.

It all comes down to what you like, what you hate, and what you want.

On March 13, 2019   /   Writing  

Tags: career, process, professionalism