Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

ONE: MASLOW THE FUCK OUT OF IT My friend Laura Goodin has a saying: Maslow the fuck out of it. Actually, that could be a lie. She has something similar to this, but I can’t remember if I’m inserting the profanity or the profanity was there when she deployed it in our most recent conversations.  If I’m wrong, the intent was definitely something close, and I will owe Laura a beer and an apology. Life would be much easier if I actually copied down the interesting things my friends said, exactly, on the basis that I will one day want to write a blog post around their adages. But for our purposes, lets go with this. Laura Goodin has this saying: Maslow the fuck out of it. Near as I can gather, the saying come from her years working with emergency services, where she would train new recruits in the best way to respond to a crisis. When in doubt, work your

Let’s not dance around this fact: there are works I have out there, in publishing land, that I am less proud of than others. No, I will not tell you which ones. No, I will not confirm your guesses. No, it’s probably not the work you’re thinking about. In public, you try not to denigrate your work. For one, it’s stupid to tell people, well this, it’s not my best, is it? For two, it’s stupid to tell someone who likes that work, well, you’re kind of a sucker for liking it, ain’t you? People like what they like. When they like your work, you shut your bloody mouth and say thank you, like a grateful person should when they’re getting paid to make bloody art. But still, those works exist. Occasionally, in the company of other writers and artists, you will venture so far as to mention your fear that what you’re doing right now is shit, or that what you’ve done in the

This post is inspired by two separate things. The first is an article about kicking your year off right that a friend of mine linked to on Facebook, which advocated a handful of things to do in the early days of 2016 that would level-up your coming year. It was a solid article – I could see why my friend linked to it – but then I hit this section where they talked about email practices and broke out a very specific example: If you open a bill, the writer advocated, then pay the bill then and there. Only touch your email once. The second thing is a year-long subscription to Money magazine, which was a gift from my sister not long after I acquired a mortgage. I’ve now been reading the magazine for twelve straight months, and its been a very interesting experience. Writing advice and money advice have a lot in common, in that you need to make all kinds of

I’m not making resolutions this year. I’m not making big, large-scale writing goals outside of the general idea that I’d like to write more and I’m going to start paying attention to what that actually looks like. What I am doing is establishing four basic tenets that govern my year. In essence, this ties back to my decision to abandon goals, ’cause none of these have an end-point in mind. Instead, they’re basic principles and philosophies behind how I do what I do, rather than where I want to end up. Effectively, a handful of new rules to live by, which will hopefully shuffle me towards the kind of life I’d like to have if I apply them regularly enough. TENET ONE: FINISHED BEATS FAST I have, over the last few years, put an extraordinary amount of effort into the act of trying to write more. What I didn’t do, all that often, was finish things. Nothing takes the thrill out

There are two ways to look at my weekend. First, there is the I wrote nothing approach, where I look at the zero in both my word count and time at keyboard columns and curse myself for my lack of forward momentum. Second, there is the I wrote nothing on my current project approach, which takes into account the fact that I wrote about 2,500 words on things that are, essentially, for fun and never going to see the light of day (or have any real financial benefit to doing them). Acknowledging that writing happened, it just wasn’t directed at the place where it was useful ’cause the thing that is useful is hard. Guess which of these options I go with as a default? Fortunately, yesterday’s Sunday Circle got me to actually sit down and think about triggers as they relate to writing and the holidays, which may go a long way towards figuring out why I went down the

The great thing about being a writer: everything is the basis for a story, one way or another. It’s also the worst thing about being a writer. In fact, it kinda sucks. The tendency to extrapolate a narrative out of isolated incidents means that your head will be filled with chaos, especially once you move away from the page and try to live your life. Things happen and your subconscious starts playing what if, and because all writers are sadists at heart, those what if‘s are not pleasant. I’ve got a month away from the day-job coming up. It starts Friday. I hate taking time off, especially at this end of the year, because it does stupid shit to my brain. What starts with yay, holidays! becomes but what if something goes wrong while I’m away, which becomes but what if it was something I could prevent, and it wasn’t there, which becomes what if the job isn’t there when I get back, which becomes what happens if I’m unemployed and stuck

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

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,

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

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

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