Vintage Links 005: Literary Fame, Publishing Crashes, Breathing, & Research

It’s Friday, September 30, and so I launch into the fifth instalment of my Vintage Links series. It’s been an interesting week clearing the To-Read folder, as i’ve had my first run of posts/articles that were either a) no longer online, or b) now taken over by godawful spam sites that have camped on the former name.

The Bizarre, Complicated Formula for Literary Fame (Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker, 2015)

Read it at the New Yorker’s Website

When you work in a writers centre, you tend to accumulate articles about how various writers get famous or made a giant splash. They’re almost always talking about outliers, because the kinds of folks who get the big coverage are exceptions to the rule, but they’re also the source of information for how publishing works for many new writers. They assume every successful writer’s career trajectory mirrors Stephen Kings, or Dan Browns, or JK Rowlings, or…well, you get the idea.

This…isn’t one of those articles. Rather, it’s a look at what makes Romantic poets like William Wordsworth more famous and remembered than their contemporaries, via an academic study by HJ Jackson at the University of Toronto. The answers are surprising, involving writing different types of works, creating work that is easily illustratable, and work that is highly adaptable.

I’m intrigued by how well this seems to marry up with the insights on creativity from David Epstein’s book, Range, which argues for the power of being a generalist rather than a specialist and the power of writing in different styles and genres.

The Easiest Way To Get Started Running: Mind Your Breath, Not Time (Lifehacker, 2015)

Read the post at Lifehacker

It’s notable that 2015 was the year that I learned I had chronic sleep apnea, and one of the contributing factors was my weight. I started accumulating posts about diet, budgeting (’cause treating sleep apnea costs, yo), and exercise as they rolled through my feed.

This one caught my attention because it was all about committing time to the act of running, but tailored the process to your current condition. It was such a useful approach that I flagged it as a metaphor for learning to write in classes.

Business Musings: The Hard Part (Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Blog, 2015)

Read the post at KrisWrites.com

Rusch has been posting about the state of indie publishing for years, and always comes at the strategies with the mindset of a career-long writer and editor who has seen the status quo of publishing shift more than one. This post talks about the shift away from the tactics that worked in the early days of Kindle, and the problem with binding your approach to a single tactic and retailer that you don’t control.

It’s also a post on the steps you take when your tactics crash into a trough, which is one of those things that’s going to happen more than once in any writer’s career. Some really useful insight:

Every single successful freelance writer I’ve ever met bounced on and off day jobs early on in her career. Every single one—except those who have a spouse, significant other, or family member who was willing to bankroll the ups and downs of a writing career.

Using the day job to relieve financial stress is a time-honored freelancer tradition.

Indie writers have never faced this before. Most of them believed that the gold rush would last forever. Some burned bridges horribly with their day jobs, so there’s no returning.

But there are other day jobs. Most freelancers get lower-level service jobs to tide them over—not career jobs. Things like retail or waiting tables or temp work. Those will often pay the bills until it’s time to freelance again.

Never look at one trough—no matter how deep—as the end of your career. It’s only the end of your career if you end your career.

How To Research Like A Journalist When The Internet Doesn’t Deliver (LifeHacker, 2015)

Read the post at LifeHacker

Exactly what it says on the tin. A remarkably good primer on how to research if you’re a writer, digging into things well beyond what you can find with a Google search. I may have sent this out to more than a few people who called into the Writers Centre looking for advice about researching their projects, but it’s lingered in my to-read file despite this.