Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

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