Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

I’m off to nurse my throat infection today, spending some quality time drinking tea and staying warm. With that in mind, I figured I’d throw out a grab-bag of recommended reading for writers from elsewhere on the internet. Two of the links below are on the list of things I wish every writer read before they started their career, while the other two are interesting ideas that really change the way you approach either the craft or the community of writing. A Definition of Author Platform (Jane Friedman) The internet irreversibly changed the nature of writing and, as a result, the nature of writing advice.It became truly noticeable about five years ago, where suddenly new writers would ask as many questions about blogging and promoting their work as they would getting their work published, with Author Platform replacing the publishing deal as the thing every writer was chasing. Jane Friedman breaks down the idea of Author Platform into its component parts and

Writers aren’t fond of the word no. It comes from a career that is built around rejection – we spend so much time getting told “no” by editors and agents that it just because natural to start saying yes to things for the sake of hearing the word. And while there are some phrases where this habitual yes can have all sorts of benefits, there are at least three times when aspiring writers really need to learn how to utilize the word No for their own benefit. NO…I’M NOT AVAILABLE FOR THAT PROJECT When you’re starting out, the thought of saying no to a project seems untenable. You’re spending so much time wanting to be published, sending your work out to slush piles and getting back form responses, that the thought of someone contacting you and offering you a writing gig is vaguely dreamlike. And when you do start publishing and the invitations to write for this anthology or that

I first heard about Donald Maass and his five-books threshold for establishing an audience when I met Australian Fantasy and SF novelists Karen Miller, who’d spent the early years of her career powering through a pretty impressive number of novels back-to-back in order to establish an audience as quickly as possible. The results were impressive: two fantasy series under her own name, an urban fantasy under the pen name K. E. Mills, plus tie in work for both Star Wars and Stargate universes. Eighteen books total in the first five or six years of her career, if the release dates on wikipedia can be trusted. They’re good books, too; you can see my response to her debut, The Innocent Mage, in the blog archives. I’d only just turned my attention to writing SF at the time I first met Karen and I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how revelatory that conversation was for me. It was the first time

Last Friday I went out to do a presentation at a local school, talking to kids aged ten to seventeen about becoming a science-fiction and fantasy writer. I’m not usually the guy who gets asked to talk to school-age writers, as evidenced by the notes at the top of my presentation – don’t swear, and don’t mention Horn – and I was actually pretty impressed  when I succeeded in obeying one of those edicts. Talking to kids about writing is kinda weird. See,on the surface, almost all writing advice boils down to three basic tenets: read a lot, write a lot, submit your work. The rest is really a matter of nuance and how to apply that knowledge, neither of which was a strength of mine way back when I was eleven or twelve. Mostly what I ended up thinking about, in terms of the presentation, was the difference between the advice I heard that was actually useful, and the

You don’t want to be published. And, yes, I know you disagree. You’re an aspiring writer. You’ve worked hard at your craft. You’ve been getting rejection letter after rejection letter since you started sending your work out. All you want, more than anything in the world, is to get published. It’s the focus of everything you’re doing. But the truth is, you’re wrong. You don’t want to be published; you’re just using those words as a short-hand for a goal that you aren’t willing or able to articulate yet. I work in a writer’s centre four days out of every five. My job is literally answering the questions new writers ask about how to get published. I’ve done it on the phone, in seminars, in person, and via magazine articles. Now I’m doing it here, and I’m sharing the one truth I’ve learned after three years at the centre and nearly a decade of teaching creative writing classes before that. You