Designing Your Writing Career© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
Granted, it isn't impossible to simply fall into a best-selling
career. You might sell your first book first time out to the first
publisher you send it to for a million dollars, get a movie sale
on the sequel, hit the Times list, show up on Oprah, and have every
succeeding book you write do better than the last. If this happens
for you, cool. You won't need what you learn in this article, and
I'll be modeling you for guidance in about three years.
Assume, however, that you're like the rest of us and you're going
to have to work for your success. The odds favor this -- I don't
know of any writers, ever, who have had the career described above.
I won't take all the fun out of your fantasies and say they can't
happen, but I will say "Have a back-up plan while you're waiting
for George Lucas to call."
First of all, remember this. Your career consists of your lifetime
body of work. In that lifetime, you're going to have some ups and
some downs -- no matter how brilliant and how lucky you are, some
of your books will sell better than others, some will cause you
problems, some will bring you a lot of joy. The first key to having
a career as a writer is to keep working. When you have a
winner, write another book. When you have a flop, write another
book. When you get rejected . . . write another book. Keep striving
to improve your craft. Keep digging for the heart and soul of your
work. Don't give up when things get tough, because careers are cyclical,
and your luck will improve. And don't get cocky when things are
great, because careers are cyclical . . .
The second key to career success is to have a plan. If you know
what you want from your career, you're a lot likelier to get it
than if you just stumble blindly around, hoping to fall into fame
and fortune.
Here's how you design your plan.
Find a writer who has a career like the one you want to have. Choose
a writer who:
- Is writing in the genre in which you want to write.
- Writes books that you respect.
- Has achieved a level of success that you would be happy achieving.
- Is currently active in your field. For this exercise, dead writers,
no matter how beloved or brilliant, cannot help you.
If you want to write fantasy, don't waste your time modeling Danielle
Steele just because she has the numbers you'd like to achieve. Different
genres work differently, and what works for her isn't likely to
work for you. And if you want to have your career in fantasy but
can't stand Robert Jordan's work, don't model Robert Jordan simply
because he sells like ice cream in a heat wave. Your model has to
be someone you can simultaneously respect and emulate.
Model a living writer who is still actively publishing. The publishing
business is dynamic, and success in writing now requires different
steps than it did when Faulkner, Hemingway, and Twain were at their
peaks. You model the steps that great dead guys used to reach success,
you end up with a dead career.
When you have chosen your model, dissect his career. You may or
may not be able to find out anything personal about your chosen
writer -- if you can, good. Your model's personal life and writing
habits can provide valuable clues about achieving success and living
with it (both what to do and what not to do). But if you
can't find a single personal fact about your chosen writer and how
he writes, you still have enough information about him to model.
You simply study -- and I mean really study -- his work.
Buy every book your writer has on the shelves. The good ones, the
bad ones, the ones that flopped for mysterious reasons, the ones
that soared. Put them in order of publication, and read them in
that order, and chart out, preferably on paper, the following things:
- Which book marked the beginning of your writer's rise to success.
- What makes it different from the books that preceded it.
- Which books mark high points in your writer's career.
- What is special about them.
- Which books marked lulls, detours, or places where your chosen
writer seemed to lose his or her way.
- What went wrong with these books -- what made them flops, either
critical or commercial.
- Your writer's growth -- did he or she start slow and gather
steam? Did he burst out of nowhere, rise with meteoric speed,
and then maintain a high level of quality? Has he been coasting
lately, or are his books still getting better? Were his best books
early in his career?
Go into as much detail on the successes and failures of your writer
as you can. Put time into this -- the value of the plan you are
going to build for yourself is no better than the data on which
you build it. If you make false assumptions based on shoddy research,
you can spend a lot of words and a lot of years before you figure
out what you're doing wrong. The point of this exercise is to learn
from someone else's experience, and in so doing, to cut years off
of the time it generally takes to go from slush-pile warrior to
best-selling author.
And as a side note, there is no sin in modeling more than one successful
writer. The more you know, the more you can use. Yes, this process
is a lot of work. But it will reward you richly -- you will get
out of your writing career exactly what you put into it.
When your data is in place, it's time to go to step two.
What these goals are will depend heavily on where you are in your
career. If you've already started selling your work, you don't need
to have "Complete a story" as goal number one. If you haven't dared
put anything in the mail to an agent or publisher yet, your first
goal needs to be a bit more modest than "Sell book for one million
dollars." Your objective is to give yourself achievable steps to
follow on your path to greatness. Here are some rules for the goals
you write for yourself:
- Devise your goals based on your model writer's successes.
If your model writer wallowed in mediocrity for ten years, writing
little books that went nowhere, then shot straight to the top
with a big, brilliant book that was the first in a series, skip
the ten years of mediocre wallowing! Dissect the hell out
of his first big success, figure out why it went to the top when
his earlier novels didn't, and then copy his success. Plan to
design your own series, emulate your model writer's scope and
scale, emulate the size of his masterwork.
Don't waste your time copying his book -- he sold it and you
won't be able to resell it, and you shouldn't try. Don't try
to rub off the serial numbers -- if all you're doing is copying
someone else's work, you guarantee that you will never be better
than second-rate, because all copies are second-rate
compared to originals. But if your model leapt to fame and fortune
by developing a charming, roguish PI with delightful friends
and setting them in a city that people love and flock to, use
that. Don't reinvent the wheel. Refine it. Give it ball
bearings and your own cool wheel covers, and then slap it on
the vehicle that will take you to success.
- Make your goals specific.
Instead of "Write daily," make your goal "Complete five pages
daily," or "Write fifteen hundred words five days a week." Instead
of "Outline book," make your goal, "Outline 100,000 word fantasy
novel."
- Keep your goals within your control.
The areas that you can control in your writing are your output,
your quality, your regularity, and your professionalism. You can't
control your marketing, your sales, the awards you receive, or
your level of fame, and if you base your goals on these indicators,
you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Repeated disappointments
can start to feel like failure, and this perception of failure
where none exists can destroy you emotionally and wreck the parts
of your career that you can control.
So don't make one of your goals "Write New York Times Bestseller."
Make it "Write NYT Bestseller-caliber novel."
- Plan for both the short term and the long term, starting
with where you are right now.
If you haven't actually finished a story or book, then completing
work has to be your first goal. Sending it out has to be your
second goal. Getting a sale is probably going to be your third.
But you need to have the long view in there, too. "Develop series
character and series world," "Outline ten-book series," and "Acquire
top-notch agent," may all figure into your future plans, and if
they do, you should have those goals written down.
Put your goals into a logical order, starting from where you are
now and working up. When you have them all written down in order,
figure out where you want to be next week. Next month. Next year.
In five years. In ten years.
Do allow reality to enter into your equations. If you've never
sold anything and never even completed anything, don't plan to be
making your full-time living from writing by next year. There's
a learning curve to writing just as there is to being a doctor,
and both are about equally steep. The fact that you know how to
write and punctuate sentences and how to break your writing into
paragraphs does not mean anyone is going to be ready to pay you
to do this just yet.
What has worked for me has been to put my goals on index cards,
then pin them on a board in order of desired accomplishment. When
I first got started, I wrote down the date for each of the goals
I set, then left a blank just beneath that for date achieved. Every
time I succeeded in one of my goals, I wrote in the date. This gave
me a steady sense of accomplishment, and a clear view of where I
was and what I needed to do to move to the next goal.
Be prepared to revise your goals as you go along. You discover
things about writing as you're doing it for a number of years --
you may find out that you want to switch genres, that the goals
that seemed big when you were getting started suddenly seem small
and confining, or that you don't need to write the number-one best-selling
novel in the world in order to be happy with yourself. When you
discover any of these things, set new goals, remove the ones that
no longer apply to you and your desires, and get back to work.
-
Finally, realize that, as life happens while you're making
other plans, so do careers.
No matter how carefully your model your career, how carefully you
set your goals, and how carefully you follow your plan, you're going
to make mistakes. You can misinterpret the factors that caused your
model writer to achieve success. The field can change. The field
can just plain vanish (witness Gothic romances and the entire horror
field as examples of this latter grim phenomenon.) Life is going
to put some bumps in your path, and some of them are probably going
to hurt.
I know this from experience. I've had to revise my plan a number
of times -- I'm in the process of revising it even now. My mistakes
have hurt, but I'm still writing. I'll still be writing in five
years, and in ten years -- that's the biggest part of my plan, and
whatever changes I have to make to make that true, I'll make.
Consider a certain amount of flexibility as much of a virtue as
thick skin and persistence -- you're going to need all three. What
I told you at the beginning of this article, I'll repeat again.
No matter what happens, keep working. Because one book, no matter
how successful or how wonderful, does not make a career. Your career
is built a page at a time, a day at a time, a book at a time, and
with determination and careful planning, it will last you the rest
of your life.
What do you want to do with your writing, and how are you going
to do it?
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