So you want to become a professional author/writer. How do you do it?
The vast majority of people who want to become writers think they’re going to sit down, write the great American (or whatever) novel, and the rest will take care of itself.
I hate to burst your bubble, but that is not going to happen.
We’ve all heard of authors who had never written anything before, wrote their first novel, hit the big time, and made millions of dollars. JK Rowling comes to mind.
There are a few other examples, but those authors are one in a million. If you like those odds, best of luck to you.
There are actions you can take to vastly increase your odds of success.
If you look at the statistics on the number of marriages that end in divorce, you might be inclined to believe that the odds are stacked against you. You might think it would be better not to get married at all since the odds are so weighted against a good outcome.
That isn’t the whole story, though. If you break down the statistics, you’ll realize that certain populations and communities have very different divorce rates. Hollywood, for instance, has a divorce rate in the 90% range.
Deeply traditional religious communities have a divorce rate of less than 5%. That’s a pretty sharp difference.
From this we learn that actions and procedures greatly affect whether a marriage will end in divorce.
By the same token, certain actions, procedures, and approaches will vastly affect whether you succeed in your dream to become a full-time, professional author.
Qualify For It
If you set out to become a professional engineer, you would have to qualify for that position before any sane person would give you any money to do the job. You would have to demonstrate not only that you’d received the required education and training, but that you had some experience at the professional level that qualified you to do the job you were getting paid to do.
If you’ve just written your first novel—or your first ten novels—you’re really at the entry level. You’re below the entry level. You aren’t experienced enough or proficient enough to get paid to do the job.
You wouldn’t expect someone who had just graduated from college with a psychology degree to start earning a full salary as a therapist. That comes with market experience, expertise, and practice.
If you are sitting down at your desk to write your first novel, you aren’t performing at a professional level. You don’t have the work ethic, the discipline, the know-how, or the years of seasoning to inspire confidence in anyone even to read your book, much less pay you for something you basically don’t know how to do.
Reverse Goal Setting
We all know what goal setting is. You set a goal and then you lay out your to-do list of steps you need to take to get there. These probably include writing you novel, editing it, and submitting it to agents and publishers in the hopes of getting it published.
Reverse goal setting is a different concept. With this method, you set your goal. You envision exactly what your goal looks like, how much money you’re going to make, what your life will look like once you get there, etc.
Then you draw up a similar profile on the kind of person for whom that goal would become inevitable. What skills, habits, knowledge, disciplines, and practices would that person possess and implement in order to do the job? What does their daily work schedule look like? What kind of experience do they have that makes success inevitable?
This is the position I was in when I got published. I had been working as a contract ghostwriter for twelve years. I had written hundreds of books for paid contracts and I had several books already completed that were publication-ready just waiting to drop on the publisher that picked me up.
I spent every day working for up to twelve hours on my career. I wrote tens of thousands of words per day. I outline everything down to the smallest detail. I had to because, during my ghostwriting career, I had to show my outlines to my clients before I could get a job approved, so outlining everything became second nature.
I understand the publishing industry better than most of my clients. I understand the genre and subniche reader expectations, tropes, and formulas so that my clients always get the book they want.
It’s exceptionally important to me that the client always gets what they paid for. I make sure my clients always walk away happy, even if it means I have to rewrite the book from scratch. Fortunately, I understand the business well enough that this doesn’t happen.
I have an iron-clad code of honor when it comes to meeting deadlines. Deadlines are non-negotiable to me. I do not miss deadlines—ever. If I tell a client or a publisher that I’m going to finish a project by a certain date, I finish it—no excuses—ever.
I’m ruthless with my editing. I know the English language and its grammar rules like the back of my hand. I’m detail-oriented in the extreme when it comes to any written content that passes through my hands.
I have a professional standard by which I only allow myself to produce the highest quality written work—no matter what—no excuses—ever. This is the standard to which I hold myself as an artist and a professional. This has nothing to do with what my clients expect. This is a bond I hold with myself because I couldn’t respect myself as an artist and a professional if I didn’t.
Are you getting the picture now? Are you starting to see why my publishing success was inevitable?
Compare yourself to the professionals. Are you a professional who is working at a level where you’re qualified to get paid for your work? Or are you an amateur?
Practice, Practice, Practice
If your goal was to become a full-time, professional piano player, you would expect to spend hours every day for several decades practicing and perfecting your craft. You would continue to practice for many years even after you became successful.
You would never dream of learning a few pieces on the piano and expecting people to start paying you a professional salary. That would be ridiculous.
Yet people think that, because they’ve been taught to read and write in school, they can crank out a novel that will be worth people paying for it. This is simply not the case.
Fiction is an art form that takes years of practice. It takes years of studying writing craft, writing a lot of really terrible books, throwing them out, and starting over.
Stephen King has famously stated, “If you want to become a writer, you have to do a lot of reading and a lot of writing…..”
I agree with the part about doing a lot of writing. I think writers should do a lot of reading, but there comes a point where you have to stop reading and start practicing your craft.
Go back to the music analogy. There comes a point where a person has to stop listening to other people’s music and just get out your instrument and start practicing. Practicing your craft teaches you something you can’t learn by consuming someone else’s.
There comes a point at which listening to more music won’t help you at all. In fact, it might hold you back from doing the practice you really need to do.
Which leads me to my last piece of advice:
Get off the internet.
The internet is a cesspit. It’s the bottom of the intellectual barrel.
I use the internet for my work, but you need to be ruthless about weeding out anything that you aren’t specifically looking up—anything that isn’t helping you further your craft.
Creative energy is a one-way flow. It’s either flowing into you from other people or it’s flowing out of you into other people. You want to eliminate as far as possible the instances in your life where other people’s creative flow is coming into you. You need to stop consuming other people’s content and start producing your own.
Creative output is a muscle. It’s a habit that gets easier with practice.
The flow state is a product of mastery. Flow doesn’t happen until you reach a state of mastery. Think of our musician. A musician wouldn’t be able to get into a flow state and start improvising in any meaningful way that sounded good until after they mastered their instrument. The same is true of fiction. Before you reach a state of mastery, it’s hard work. It’s excruciatingly difficult, but it gets easier the longer you practice.
A lot of people say that time is our most valuable resource. They say we have a limited number of hours in the day and that wasted time can never be regained.
But there is a resource that is even more valuable and much rarer. That resource is creative focus. We always have more time. We all have spare time we could be dedicating to perfecting our craft. As long as we’re still alive, we have more time.
Creative focus is much harder to come by, much more valuable, and much harder to get back once it’s been lost.
This is why you need to be ruthless about eliminating anything that breaks your creative focus. You need to preserve your creative focus at all costs and make sure you’re directing it where you want it to go.
I hope this helps. Good luck out there and keep writing. You will continue to get better the longer you work at it.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.