Job list…

One of the things it’s easy to lose sight of is that “writing is a solitary business” has a lot of implications besides “it means you spend a lot of time sitting alone at your computer writing stuff.” Among other things, it means that everything comes down to you–either you do the job yourself, or you hire and supervise someone else who does the job.

You are the director whose vision for the whole shapes the story.

You are the entire research department, who fact-check everything.

You are the choreographer, who decides where the characters stand and how they move.

You are the location director, who picks the places where the story will take place.

You are the set designer, who designs the specific look for each location.

You are the set decorator, who picks the lamps, the chairs, the colors of the carpet, etc. to fit the designer’s look.

You are the set dresser, who puts the lamps and chairs and carpets in place for every scene (and remembers where the choreographer had the characters move them to in the last scene).

You are the costume designer, who decides what styles and colors people wear.

You are the dresser, who dresses each character in the appropriate clothes for the particular scene they’re in.

You are the casting director, who decides what each character looks like.

You are the speech coach, who teaches the characters how they should phrase things in dialog and what kind of accent they have.

You are the scriptwriter, who writes everybody’s dialog.

You are the director’s assistant, who comes up with the schedule for getting each scene down.

You are the special effects coordinator, who decides how to describe unusual effects (from crashing through a window to explosions to describing spaceships taking off, aliens, and magic spells)

You are the props manager, who makes sure the right gun has been hung on the mantelpiece before it’s needed (and that it has been removed from the mantelpiece in the scenes that follow the protagonist grabbing it and running out to fight off the zombies).

You are the cosmetician who does the makeup and hair styles for each and every character.

You are the first editor who revises the draft.

You are the first copy-editor responsible for correcting the spelling, grammar, and so on.

On top of all of those things, which are directly involved in getting the book written, you’re also the entire back office, from secretary getting things sent out on time to venture capitalist financing the time you’re spending. These days, that also includes publicity, web page maintainer, bookkeeper, financial officer, and office manager. (And definitely janitor, which is a much-neglected job, based on what my office usually looks like.)

All of these things take time, even if an awful lot of them normally get lumped under “writing the book.” You can get help with some of them if you’re willing to trust other people and if you have time or money to trade, but ultimately “writing is a solitary business” means that all the decisions (and 99% of the work) end up as your responsibility.

All of those jobs—and a few more—have to get done. They don’t all have to be done perfectly (and they won’t be—everybody is good at some and bad at others), but the overall result should probably be above average if you want a professional sale. In some cases, that means focusing hard on the things the writer does best, so the really good parts compensate for the ones that are a bit below average. In other cases, the writer has to really work hard at getting better at the not-so-good jobs, or at actually doing the jobs that they really hate and would like to leave out. Because if you ignore the jobs you don’t like, they don’t get done…and they all need doing.

If you want a complicated project to work like a well-oiled machine, somebody has to oil it. And if you’re a writer, that somebody is you.

On October 9, 2024   /   Writing  

Tags: basic writing, the biz, writing life