So, you think you want to write, do you?
         
          Freelance writing is the hardest work I know:  No security, no steady income, no health care, you spend fortunes in research, time, eyestrain and health to pour your life and soul onto paper then put the results in front of some Radcliff grad who is marking time stuffing rejection slips into return envelopes until she can figure out how to write herself. Research, more research, writing, rewriting, more rewriting—Once, after listening to me describe my writing day to a sixth-grade class in Wilton, Maine, one of the students looked at me in horror and said, "Gee, mister, it sounds like you're spending your whole life doing homework!"

Sane persons who have seen others try to make a living at writing can't imagine why anyone would want to be a writer. Big bucks? Fame? Awards? Bright lights? Sure, it happens. You have a better chance of being struck by lightning in a rubber bed, but it happens. It's like music, though: for every rock star glorying in fame and fortune there are a thousand pickers in seedy roadhouses and high school gyms playing for pocket change and another hundred thousand in garages playing for an audience of one and pocket lint.

What about escape? traveling worlds of imagination to get away from current boredom or nightmare life? Sorry. Writing is different from reading and there is no better way than a freelance writing career to have your nose periodically rubbed in the true grit of reality. A friend of mine, writer and biologist Thomas A. Easton, calls writing "a mug's game."  Other writers I know use earthier terms.

Okay then, why am I a writer?

I love writing; That's the short answer. I didn't always love it. In thirty years of tapping those keys I have suffered every frustration and heartbreak possible in this profession, yet now I love it. Stranger even than that, if everyone in the world could look through my eyes for a day, everyone would want to join me in writing. What's the long answer to why I love writing? You can only learn that by becoming a writer yourself and by writing the best stories of which you are capable. That long answer I've provided in The Write Stuff Online Writing Seminar.

There is more difference between any two humans than there is between the members of any two different species on earth—humans are that complicated and unique. There are certain special stories that need to be told by each person. Some tell their stories through art, some through teaching, some through acting, and some through business. Most never tell their own stories at all. Of those who do, some of us tell our stories through writing. Those writers who write the stories they need to write—their own stories through their own special sight—write stories necessarily unique. If you do the same, combining your stories with the polished skills of a career writer, then you will be writing the best stories of which you are capable—the goal of The Write Stuff.

The Write Stuff

This course is a lot of hard work. In the end, however, you will be doing your best writing. Whether you love writing, as well, depends on your approach to the profession—your reasons for taking this somewhat perilous turn in your life. The course begins with exactly that: Your approach. 

At no charge Chapter One of Part I, "The Wrong Stuff," follows.  Read it, do the exercise at the end, and see if  you might want to do what it takes to write the best stories of which you are capable.

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1. THE WRONG STUFF

2.  GREAT EXPECTATIONS*

3. FINDING YOUR WRITE STUFF*

4. WHY IS THE WRITE STUFF THE RIGHT STUFF?*

5. THE MACHINE*

*If you decide to try The Write Stuff: Online Writing Seminar, the remainder of Part I, as well as Parts II through VII, will be Emailed to you once your payment is received.
 
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Chapter 1. The Wrong Stuff

 The first thing to know about the write stuff is to avoid the wrong stuff, which is not as simple as it might sound. Aspiring writers and seasoned pros alike are drawn to the wrong stuff like flying insects to a lit fuse. Desperate for publication, notice, and grocery money, we are wrong stuff magnets eagerly chasing down unproductive paths, loading ourselves up with time-and-energy burners, filling ourselves with karma-corroding choices as though a diet packed with enough catastrophic selections might build up an immunity to failure. And the really frightening thing is that each of the crippling choices we make in the fruitless pursuit of a writing career all look like the right thing to do 

We’re going to look at wrong stuff first for the same reason that instructional courses in fungus appreciation begin by identifying the varieties of mushrooms that will kill you. If you’re dead, there’s not much point in taking the rest of the course. If you are nibbling some of those career killers right now, this will be your opportunity to stop. Similarly, if your original choices in approaching a writing career take all of the creativity, fulfillment, meaning, potential, communication, importance, and fun out of it, you’d be better off taking a well paying job that you really hate. The bars, back alleys, and graveyards are filled with men and women—published writers—who achieved the goal of publication, made money at it, cranked out yards of middling to good writing, and hated every minute of it. And that constituency is minuscule compared to the endless multitudes who wanted to write but were ground into nothingness by misdirection, frustration, paralysis, and self-sabotage.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? So, let’s get started identifying the fungus that will kill your writing.

 

I want to write like So-and-so

This is the trap that catches the greatest majority of those suddenly inspired to write. Perhaps you’ve just finished reading J. R. R. Tolkien, Alex Haley, Guy Sajer, James Baldwin, Harry Harrison, Jr., or Agatha Christie and a tiny little spark ignites in the back of your brain. You don’t poke at it or examine it—it might extinguish. But it seems to be drawing you toward blank screens and keyboards, and many of you interpret this feeling as a “need to write.” Time after time we have uncovered such in workshops and writing seminars, and when they are forced to examine their motivations for writing, much of it boils down to “I really want to write like So-and-so.”

It’s actually a compliment to the author. “I really liked that book. That author really spoke to me.”  Why is this a problem? Aside from the troubling fact that So-and-so is already writing So-and-so’s stories, even if you did rip off some characters and ape a certain style, setting, and structure, about the best you could do is to turn out mediocre similarities. So-and-so’s writing is appealing to you, probably, because that author was writing his or her own stories—not someone else’s. Even if you do avoid the legal and critical entanglements, writing to emulate another author completely misses the point of writing. You’ll be trying to write stories you’d like reading. You won’t be writing the stories you need to write: Your stories. At the end, even if you do manage to drive yourself into publication and financial success writing someone else’s stories, which almost never happens, you’ll be a failure as a writer, and you’ll know it.

Whatever You Want

I suppose the one thing sillier than modeling your writing after a writer you like is modeling your writing after writers you don’t like. Who would do a moronic thing like that? Hundreds of thousands of aspiring writers, that’s who 

“Guideline Wisdom.” You’ve seen it in writing books, heard it in creative writing courses, and pondered it when it appeared in magazine and publishing house submission guidelines: “Read several issues of our magazine (or check out our publishing line at the bookstore), see what we’re buying, go forth and do likewise.”

 Of course, they always throw in the hook: “It’s your best chance of appearing in our publication.” In other words, go model your writing after writers someone else has picked. Well, it’s one thing when the writer is choosing not to write his or her own stories, but when an editor recommends it—I mean, who are we to fly in the face of editorial guidelines?

 Okay, editorial guidelines are valuable resources from which to learn the names of the editors, necessary telephone numbers and addresses, word length, subject matter, areas of interest, submission qualifications (such as “no multiple submissions,” or “agented writers only”), things the editor really hates, and base payment rates. The editors don’t know yet if they want stories of yours written through your unique view because they haven’t seen them yet.
 

Deadly Input

From aping writers we like to aping writers we don’t like much, the next step down to gut-wrenching obscurity is to mold our efforts after the opinions of persons who don’t write, edit, publish, or even read much, and putting all of our personal relationships at risk at the same time.

 Is there a child, parent, sibling, spouse, or friend of a writer who doesn’t dread that approaching handful of manuscript paper followed by that oxygen depleting inquiry: “Whaddya think?”

 “I really want to know. Tell me the truth. Be brutal.”

 Talk about impossible positions to put loved ones in. If you tell the author the story is great (“I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me!”) the author of the piece won’t trust the praise. “Oh, you’re just saying that to spare my feelings.” If you tell the author that the title is too long, the characters a bit one dimensional, the dialog unconvincing—the author won’t listen to that either: “Oh, you’re just saying that to hurt my feelings. You just don’t want me to succeed!”

 Or, supposing that you are one of the eleven aspiring writers on Earth who can take frank criticism from a close family member, what are the close family member’s qualifications to critique your story? Uncle Ed? The one who sells insurance and clips his toenails in the kitchen? Your sister? The one who dyed half of her hair fuchsia and has a D in freshman English? Your mother? Oh, Jesus! Your mother! What in the hell were you thinking?

 At the End of the Road

Creativity. Everyone has it to one degree or another. If parents, peer pressure, and teachers haven’t crushed it by the time we get through the compulsory education system, we continue the process ourselves by following the poisonous recommendations mentioned above. You don’t need creativity to get published. There are those who actually do make it into print writing other persons’ stuff, doing just what writing teachers, friends, editors, and editorial guidelines tell them to do. A very few even make a pretty good living at it, if all you look at is money. The ending, however, is bitter. As one writer late in his career once put it, “I did exactly what they told me, and I never got to write my own stories. Now I don’t think I can.”

 Is this where you want to end? Busting your hump for years only to have whatever success you do have feel like a rebuke? Writing is hard work. If you’re not enjoying doing it, writing can kill you. You don’t want to be telling some unhygienic stranger in a bar twenty years from now, “I  mean, I could have been this miserable selling securities and at least have something to show for it.”

 So, it would be worth your time, not to mention your chances of producing the best writing of which you are capable, to take a moment to examine what you are bringing to the process in the way of expectations. What are your goals? What do you want, and why do you think writing will get it for you?

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Assignment: Why Write?

 Here is the part of this chapter that requires work. Take that keyboard, that typewriter, or that pen and pad and write down what it is you hope writing will do for you. Get it down on screen or paper. If every fantasy about your writing were to come true, what would they be? If you have only one goal that you hope to satisfy by writing, all you need to put down is one. If it’s a dozen, put down a dozen. Let yourself run free with complete permission to be absolutely honest with yourself, and in as much detail as possible. You don’t have to mail it in or show it to anyone. This is truth-dose information for you 

This truth may not set you free, but it might save you from wasting what time and talent you have. If you find yourself putting down, “I need to write,” throw out your list and start over. Why do you “need to write”? What exactly will the writing get you? What change will it make in you? Write your list, rewrite your list, throw it away and do it over again and again until you know you have been honest with yourself. In the next chapter, we’ll see if you managed to come up with an answer that won’t destroy you.