ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

Writers talk about failure a lot. They gather together to talk about the long roads they had to hoe in order to get their books published. They talk about the inevitable rejection letters, which arrive and keep on arriving and do not let up if you are doing your job remotely correctly. We like the failure, as an audience. If plays to our twisted little perceptions that all artists must be punished for doing what they do. Greatness? Commercial success? All perfectly acceptable as long as it’s causing you pain, you filthy wine-swilling arty-boy. DON’T YOU DARE BE HAPPY OR PROUD OF YOUR WORK, OR WE WILL CUT YOU. Sorry. Flashback. But it happens. We feel threatened by happy artists and immediately move to villify them for the crime of being arty and well-adjusted at the same time. They get demonized the way…shit, I don’t know. Adam Sandler? Stephanie Meyer? Taylor Swift? (Do we still demonize Taytay, or has she moved onto the vaguely-respectable older artist phase of her career?) Essentially: Anyone with the temerity to fuse creative output with commerce and speak to a broad audience. Anyone where we need to pretend that the aren’t creating art to make the fact that they’re making money okay. Creative-types are good at failure. We’ve got that part of the gig down. All the advice is out there: steel yourself, chin up, keep marching on. If you let the failure get to you, you weren’t really an artist anyway. Let me take a moment

Another day, another terrifying number of people showing up to read Tuesday’s post about wasting time as a writer. I think it’s the first thing I’ve ever written on this site that got more views the day after it was posted than it did on the first day. This means I’m still brooding on the whole writing advice thing, moving from point to point like Pac-Man trying to reach a power pellet, extrapolating outwards from the acknowledgement that I don’t know fuck-all. And I’ve realised a few things I should have put in yesterday’s post about processing advice, but didn’t have the brain-space to consider when I wrote it. SOMETIMES THE BEST ADVICE ISN’T ACTUALLY ADVICE AT ALL I have a shelf full of how-to-write books that are chock-full of advice. Many of them are really good and I’d heartily recommend them to folks who are looking to develop writing skills, but they’re not the be-all and end-all of figuring this writing thing out. Advice, by its nature, tends towards the general. It’s someone trying to distil their ideas and their process into something pithy and easy to understand, which hides the fact that process and business are actually enormously complicated. The most useful books in my collection, in terms of learning about writing, aren’t actually how-to books at all. They’re collections of interviews and biographies and writers talking about their specific process, places where there’s no need to be general. Where the assumption is people are interested in their work, rather than writing in

So, having established that I don’t know shit about writing and publishing, I figure it’s worth talking about filtering the great swathes of writing advice out there. And, more importantly, how to figure out if a particular bit of advice is actually going to be useful to you. I mean, there is a whole bunch of writing advice out there on the internet, and a lot of it is…conflicting. Or authoritative. Or great advice, that is utterly useless to you, specifically, even if it works for everyone else. So how do you process good advice when it comes along? Honestly, I can’t tell you, but I can offer you the process I work through when I come across something interesting, which may be useful. I read about writing a lot, given my various day-jobs over the years, and my approach to taking things on board is pretty formalised at this point. It also includes one important rule. RULE ZERO: ANYTHING THAT STOPS YOU FROM WRITING SHOULD BE IGNORED Not getting stuff done trumps everything on this list. Period. The core of your job as a writer is getting new work done, and there is always advice that kills your forward momentum stone dead. Sometimes it’s because you got the wrong advice, or the right advice at the wrong time. You fixate on a particular idea and it keeps you from writing, or redrafting, or editing. You stare at the blank page, wanting to open with a line of dialogue, and some asshole’s

A whole bunch of people showed up to read yesterday’s post. Like, four times as many people than would ordinarily read this blog. More of you this morning. This makes me very happy, but also extraordinarily nervous. Because, here’s the thing: I know fuck all about writing and publishing. I mean, I know some stuff, but in terms of the writing and publishing world, I am an utter bantamweight. I am thoroughly not ready for prime time. I am three steps into a journey of a billion god-damn steps. The fact that I have a job where I talk about these things and people listen to me like I’m an expert? Fucking terrifying. The fact that you’re here, paying attention as I blather on? Equally terrifying. Every instinct I have says shut the fuck up, send people elsewhere, let them pick this up from people who actually know their shit. When you are trusting me as a reliable source, you are trusting a man who thought this was a good idea: The gulf between what I’ve actually picked up about the topic, over the years, and what I’d need to know in order to actually feel comfortable talking about it? Massive. Immense. Deep as the Marianas Trench. I know fuck all about writing and publishing. I acknowledge that, openly, without any real sense of shame, because knowing you know nothing is an incredible source of strength. It means that you don’t take the handful of shit you do know – ’cause we all know

Occasionally I get this request, either sent through to my email or from someone I just met: Hey, can you take a look at my story/book and tell me if I’m wasting my time as a writer? And, man, my heart aches every time I see that. I remember that stage of my career so fucking well, and it was hard. I made the decision to become a writer when I was fifteen or so. I stuck with it long past the point where it was sane, living on the kind of money that made my parents wince well into my late twenties. I took bad jobs, ’cause it meant I could work very little and write a whole lot. I wasn’t getting paid anywhere near enough from my writing to make that worthwhile, and the number of times I seriously thought about quitting… Well. It happened a lot. There were points where it was a god-damn weekly occurrence. I’d work at stories or poems or novels and I’d peer into the future and I could literally see no way that all the effort would pay off. The uncertainty was terrifying. There were all sorts of piss-poor decisions made ’cause I was literally working blind and trusting that somehow, somewhere, there would be a career for me if I just kept plugging along. And there were successes. Publications, even. But that didn’t help. The sheer amount of crushing shame I felt for devoting all my time and energy to this thing that seemed like a god-damn lottery… Wait.