On Holidays, Flossing, and Writing

I stumbled into a metaphor not too long ago that resonated with me and has been packed into the top tier of my writing platitudes toolbox ever since. I share it now because my article about what Dungeons and Dragons taught me about writing will have to wait until at least tomorrow. And that's because frankly I needed a damned day off. (Uh.....other than this, I guess.)

I was having my teeth cleaned after a particularly busy period of my life. (Funny how often I seem to have those.) The dentist was remarking how good my flossing was and how good my gums were looking. This is notable because it was literally my first "Looks good. See you in six months," check up since I was a child. Usually I have to sit there and listen to how my every oral hygiene routine is actually completely wrong.

"I haven't flossed in like two weeks," I admitted anyway, wanting to absolve my guilt. I couldn't live with all those sweet golden compliments built on a turpitudinous throne of lies.  "Like maybe once or twice."

Thinking back on it, that exchange kind of reveals a lot about who I am as a person.

"It doesn't matter if you do it every single day. It doesn't even matter if you skip a few days. What matters is that you usually have the habit of doing it daily."

"Oh like writing," I said.

OH!  LIKE WRITING!!!!! I thought.

Here at Writing About Writing we're pretty staunch advocates of writing every day if you're trying to make it to The Show™. (Contented hobbyists are a whole other story.) Every writer whose name we recognize probably wrote every day or close. And while legit excuses are out there, there are few so beleaguered that they can't set aside fifteen minutes or so from Facebook or Zelda: Breath of the Wild to write for fifteen to thirty minutes.

However, as the holidays loom here in the States, it's also important for writers–particularly the kind that haven't carved out a paycheck from writing and have day jobs on top of everything else the Holiday season packs on–to remember that it's the habit they're cultivating that matters rather than whether or not they missed a couple of days here and there (or had to write a couple of paragraphs and call it good) in the days around a major event.

If you find yourself saying "I don't have to do it every day," to the mirror five days a week for six months, you might need to do a brutally honest inventory about who's fooling whom. But if you've got six hours of shopping and cooking and that's before the first guest arrives, and a boss who wants you to clear out a five day week of work in three days if you want Friday off, and the verge still needs trimming....be kind to yourselves.

Remember your writing doesn't have to be grueling hours on your work in progress. Tear someone a new asshole on a political post, redirect all that rage you have about your childhood to someone who thinks Trump isn't risking an irony fissure to the time space continuum to mock Al Franken, (or, you know, maybe send an email to Nana thanking her for the cookies if that's more your speed), and call it a day. The writing will all still be there on Monday.

It's not one day that's going to hurt your chances as a writer. It's forming that habit.

Like flossing.

Never Ever Ever Ever Ever Ever Ever Give Up

I'd like to show you something, and I'd be lying if a little bit of it wasn't just jumping up and down with The Power of Squee™ over an epic milestone. But I also want to make a point about perseverance and hard work and dedication.

Because if the mouth harp twang of background music is any indication, I'm about to go all folksy homespun wisdom on your ass.

You see this month, while I was trying not to fall apart, I accidentally broke every goal I plausibly had as a blogger....all at once. There are still some goals regarding the book I'm writing, and as they start to look like "finishing the final draft on time," they have less and less plausibility, and I suppose there are a few pipe dream goals that involve being given a shout out by Stephen King ("Hey what a great review of On Writing! This kid's all right!"), finding some ridiculously wealthy patron who can pay all my bills just by diverting their gourmet toothpaste budget even if I have to live over their garage and they want lots of help working on their comeback script, but as far as realistic goals and blogging goals go, I thought it would be years (several of them) before I came anywhere close to July 2013. Two months ago, if you'd told me I could get 50,000 page views in a month, I would have thought you were talking to Blog too much, and it was filling your head with pipe dreams for Blogust.

In July 2013, with most good posts making a couple hundred page views and the average being around 100, I wrote Changing the Creepy Guy Narrative. This post, in the span of about five days, got a quarter of a million hits. No other post has come anywhere close to this one's popularity.

My life would never be the same. Death threats. Relationships. New friends. A following (no matter how modest it became after it became clear I was not going to patrol the BART fighting crime and then blog about it). Somehow the groupie threesome eluded me, but I'm sure that was just an unfortunate coincidence of timing, obvi. And of course that giant unsurmountable spire sticking up in my analytics that couldn't ever be touched. No matter how hard I tried, I was never going to get that many pageviews again. Not for years. (Technically, I figured there might be a chance I fluked again with another viral article, but at a monthly average of 35,000, I didn't ever expect it to be anything reliable.)

Then came this month. And honk my hooter what a month! There were a couple of heavy hitter articles doing some of the heavy lifting, but really no one article made this happen. Largely thanks to the growing audience of my facebook page, any article I post now has about a thousand page views, and a decent one averages around 2,500. Add that to sundry traffic and most days this month were over 10k hits.

If you told me my mother had drowned in a vat of asparagus flavored pudding, I would be less confused.

You can see on the lifetime chart right where Sonic Gal got her cancer diagnosis, and my posting dropped off except for a slogging attempt at jazz hands. You can see where I started to crawl back. And then....you can see where things began to angle upward. And of course you can see where, by a few thousand, I beat out the month that could not be beaten.

Image description–July 2013/Pageviews: 278,325

Image description–Jan 2017/Pageviews: 287,637

I'll have to come up with all new goals now. (Post to come.) And who knows if this trend will continue on the upswing or level out or go back down to something more less ridonkulous. One thing is for sure, my poor ass is wishing I would sell out and host a couple of ads right about now. Damn it Chris!

But I never could have gotten to this point if I'd stopped writing because life got hard. I never could have gotten to this point if I'd updated a sporadic twice-a-week schedule. I never could have gotten to this point if I'd given up.

I post this for two reasons.

One, because you all are awesome. That's literally 287,637 people who are NOT me being amazeballs and stopping by, and I can't ever be grateful enough for how wonderful you are.

But here's the main thing: there is no trick to this. There is no magic formula. It took me five years to build up an audience. Five years and seven days most weeks. And while that's a little faster than someone might expect through traditional publishing, it's not a shortcut by any means. You can go back and look at how I've done it. It's all right there–every single article. I'm not that great a writer. I have massive glaring grammar errors at least twice an article. I need to revise my posts more often. I'm not an SEO or a social media expert. I don't even have an advertising budget anymore. I don't have "talent." But I do the work. I got something up every day and I spent an hour or so every day maintaining that FB page. And over time, that work paid off.

You can do it too. It just takes time and an unswerving dedication to keep writing. Somewhere out there is a viral post you're not expecting or a book you didn't realize was going to resonate so hard. Somewhere out there is a slow curve of improvement punctuated by moments of unexpected success. But to get to those moments you have to keep writing. So never ever ever ever ever give up.

Suit Up and Show Up (Mailbox)

Words of encouragement.  

Luna asks:

Do you have any really great words of encouragement? I'm having a real "What if I'm not good enough," moment.

My reply: 

I'm having one of those myself, so today is probably a good day to answer this. Last week I had a zillion writing ideas beating on the back of my eyeballs like the "Open open open" woman from the Mervin's commercial, but it turned out to be an unforgiving week on the househusband front, and I experienced one of the most frustrating and depressing experiences an artist can have: impotently watching a genuine burst of creative energy go sailing right by because life got in the way.

In case you weren't living in Southern California during the 90s.

First of all, the peaks and valleys of being an artist can sometimes suck, but the best thing you can remember is that it's normal. Every time you go into one of those crippling self-doubt spirals, remember that you are a writer, an artist, a creator of worlds. Soon you will emerge from the ashes of your own destruction blazing in glory, arms akimbo, and vaporize everyone who doubts you with your laser beam side eye of doom.

There is no middle of the road. You are either a shitty artist impostor with zero talent who may have tricked a few people somehow and is fooling themselves, or you are better than Betty White and Chuck Norris's love child.

When you're riding the highs, you know why people are artists. You know from the Sulawesi caves to the tortured garage band kid why people give their lives to art. You know why artists think the creative process is better than sex. You can lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, and even though you don't believe in omnipotent father figures who sent dogma to Earth thousands of years ago, you know why such a being would create.

But when you hit the lows, you have to just keep doing the work. If you're not there doing the work when the muse shows up, she'll just move right along.

That's where my Grandpa comes in.

My Grandpa was a lot of things (and like everyone who ever was, not all of those things were wonderful, but that's not why we're here today), but one of the things he was really really good at was teaching. He was a music teacher at Arkansas State University and, before that, high school. My mom still has a picture of him teaching Bill Clinton to play the saxophone. (This is my family's "We Knew Him When" story; we're very proud of it.) He understood, perhaps better than almost anyone in this world, the way that art required the sort of practice, drills, and dedication that no one could possibly feel excited about doing every day. But he also understood, also perhaps better than almost anyone in this world, that the end result was worth all that work and that no end result worth anything wouldn't be work.

Grandpa got a lot of shit for his pedagogy (people thought he was too easy on his students), but he led every band he directed to more trophies than they could fit in a case, so he must have figured out how to do something right. And here was the bulk of how to make a grade in his class:

Suit up, and show up.

Grandpa knew that this was how it was done in art. You didn't cast a life raft out onto the mercurial waves of your inspiration and hang on, and you didn't judge an artist based on any one day of their effort. You treated it like a job and you knew that at the end, it was going to be worth it. He gave his students points just for being there and being in the right mindset. If they did that, day after day, the rest would attend to itself.

When I went to Arkansas to visit him in the last summer before he died, I experienced this philosophy first hand. I was a carefree early-teen on a lazy summer vacation to be filled with water slides and arcades. My school year of trumpet practice and scales was behind me.

Or so I thought.

When I arrived, a rental trumpet was sitting in his office. The first full day I was there, he looked at me and said, "We can go out for our afternoon activity as soon as you practice for an hour."

An hour??????

My most intense practice sessions before that had been perhaps fifteen minutes. I don't even think we practiced a full hour in class once you accounted for taking out and putting away instruments. I stammered, I protested, I dragged my feet. I assured him this wasn't necessary.

"One hour, boy," he said. "The longer you dawdle, the longer it'll take to be over."

The first day was a special kind of torture. I didn't even know what to do for an hour. I fiddled with my spit valve and played through some exercises. He came in midway through and put something skill-level-appropriate in front of me, turned a metronome on and left. My embouchure hurt by the end.

Day two he hit me up while I was still in pajamas: "One hour."

"But I just practiced yesterday," I complained.

"Do you want to get better?" he asked.

I nodded. Probably not as much as I didn't want to practice right then, but I sort of did.

"One hour," he said. "Just go in there and do it. You know I'm not going to listen whether or not you make mistakes. I'm only coming in if you're wasting time. An hour will go really fast."

I started to leave.

"Oh and change into your clothes."

"Huh?"

"Get out of your pajamas. You're in your pajama brain. You shouldn't be relaxed to practice. Put on your clothes."

I thought that was particularly petty, but I did so. By the time I was in shoes, I had already thought through what I wanted to work on, and was even unconsciously practicing the fingering. I was practically excited to get the trumpet into my hand.

By the end of that trip, I nailed that song. And by about day five, Grandpa didn't have to remind me to go practice. I just did it like I brushed my teeth at night. I got into the Advanced Band when I got to Sierra Vista chiefly because I practiced that summer. I never forgot that mindset. Not just the get-down-to-it-stop-whining-and-just-fucking-DO it mindset, but also the put-yourself-in-the-right-frame-of-mind, suit-up mindset.

When the blood is upon me, I can dive for my laptop and fire out 2500 words without ever leaving my bed or my boxers, but when I'm struggling against myself, I always remember grandpa. I get out of bed, shower, brush my teeth, shave, put on pants and shoes and sometimes even a nice button-up shirt like I'm going to work, even though I only have to stroll across the hallway to get to my writing space. And I'll be damned if every button I button and every tooth I brush and every shoelace I tie doesn't help me conquer that inevitable sense that this is just work I have to do, I'm going to do it, there's no getting around it (so I might as well enjoy it), and it'll be over when it's over.

Because here's the money shot, Luna. I don't know if this will work for you, but a zillion band kids can't be all wrong. Once you get over the idea that you can talk yourself out of something, you start to talk yourself into it. As you're suiting up, it just becomes a given, and then you start to make the best of it. Sure you maybe still have those days where you're just fighting yourself the whole way. But more often than not, that is when you come bursting out of the ashes with your arms akimbo. Because if you're going to do this, you might as well be fucking awesome.

And just between you and me (shhhhh), it's not bad advice for life either.

Suit up, and show up.

Progress is Progress

Got a picture here of another paycheck from Google--my second.  I'm not putting it here to brag.  I can't imagine bragging over making this little anyway.  (That three hundred dollars is representative of no less than 800 hours of writing, is the product of seven months of writing but couldn't pay my bills for even one, and even combined with donations from Paypal average out to less than minimum wage...in Malaysia.

A lot of people know the story of Stephen King's 400k advance (in 70's money) but not how long he wrote short stories for any place that would pay him a few dollars.  They know about Ray Bradbury's tenacity  for not giving upwithout really having a concept of the part about how long it *actually* took him even before he sold his first story.  They know that Rowling rose from welfare with her first book about a wizarding school but don't have a sense of how long she was writing ambitiously before she penned Philosopher's Stone.

I don't know if some genuine financial viability is in my future.  Right now I'm in that twilight between hobby and "really shitty-paying job." But I think it's important that starting writers have a sense of this part of the process.

One of the reasons I really like having a blog is that people can actually see how long I've failed, failed again, and failed better before I got there.  If you want to go back and see the first entries and how rough they could be and how they were WAY too long and WAY too wordy, it's two clicks away.  If you want to know how long it took me to make my first hundred dollar paycheck (ten months) it's right there to be seen in all its fantastically underpaid glory.  I think that's important because most starting writers seem to think they're going to sit down and write a novel that will get them a 400k advance or that they're only looking at a year or two of rejection before the money really starts pouring in.  And for many writers--even household names--that couldn't be less true.  They worked in ignominy for more like a decade (or more) before something really exciting happened.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, his probably will be the last check (or one of the last checks) I post online for the world to see.  When people don't see the grueling hours, they tend to think the paycheck fairy just stopped by or that the articles that got me that money were slammed out in ten minutes between episodes of The Big Bang Theory.

But in accordance with my Mission Statement, I want starting writers to take note:

A year ago, I was making an average of $20 a month.  Today that average is more like $100 per month.  This is if you take out the fluke success of "Creepy Guy;" the average is actually about $200 a month if you don't.  I tend to feel like that's not something I am likely to repeat for quite some time on a blog about writing, but who knows.  I also didn't expect it to go viral (at least not that much), so it's very hard to predict what future spaghetti will stick to the wall.

People don't seem to understand something about the "big scores" in writing (and art): 1) the planets only align for the Hail Mary once in a while, and in the meantime don't be afraid (or too good) to simply work the ball down the field, 2) you may not have the slightest idea what is going to catch on and what won't--some of my most "fire and forget" articles have done very well and some of the ones I really wrote for mass appeal have died a quiet death--and 3) in order for something really good to happen to a writer, you have to be on a few people's radars already.  Almost no writer (ever) simply bursts onto the scene from innominate origins.  It's okay for you to start small with people who know who you are and like your work.  In fact, those people will become better networking than you could pay for when you do write something that really nails it.

Using S.M.A.R.T.(S.) Goals In Writing

Unless you live in a cave, (and not one of those tricked out caves with easy access to the outside world, but a cave out of of a Dungeons and Dragons game where it's so deep and dark that there are whole civilizations of bipedal albino geckos) somewhere along the line you've probably run into the idea, or at least heard, of S.M.A.R.T. goals.  "SMART" is a mnemonic acronym that's been around since the early eighties designed to help people remember what makes for a good goal.

Obviously SMART goals have their place.  You don't set out SMART goals when you're hungry, you just go look in the fridge for something to eat. When you are not even quite sure exactly what you want, it's very hard to set SMART goals, and much more important to get a sense of your true desires. But when you have a clear idea of what you want, and it's not something as easy as making a sandwich, goal setting will help get you there much faster.

Most people suck spectacularly at making goals. They may not know how to get what they want, but the real problem is that they don't even know what it is they do want.

You've probably heard someone in your life talk about doing something at some point in a way that it's almost completely unclear what they would be doing or when.  ("I really need to learn Spanish one of these days."  "I should get healthier."  "I should go back to school eventually."  "I want to be a writer some day."  "I should get back into the habit of jogging."  "At some point, I'm going to start a business.")

These "goals" aren't even really goals.  They are more appropriately characterized as dreams or whimsical fantasies.  They're goals in the same way Madonna is an actress--they sort of fill the spot where the real thing should go, but they're not fooling anyone. Unsurprisingly almost no one ever gets around to doing the things they want to do in such a chimerical way.  At least not before setting some real goals first.

SMART criteria help turn daydreaming into actual goals.

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely (or time-based)
And to this I am adding a second S.  (Which I will explain below.)
S elf-contained

But what does that crap actually mean?

Specific- The more ambiguous your goal is, the less likely you are to achieve it.  A goal to "go back to school" is very vague, and more likely to be a platitude than anything.  A goal to get a degree in linguistics by taking two night classes a semester is much more specific, and thus more likely to be realized.   "Getting healthy" is meaningless.  Quitting smoking, dropping 30 points of cholesterol, and improving blood pressure by ten points is an actual goal.  (Just don't check on your progress when you're being chased by zombies.)

You can't hit a target that you can't see.

Measurable- This is a little redundant with specific, but I don't think SART goals or MART goals would quite have the same ring to it.  A goals measurability means that there is an actual bellwether or yardstick for success.  "I should lose some weight," is a meaningless goal that is technically achieved by voiding one's bladder or possibly not feeling like enough even after dropping 50 pounds.  "I will lose two inches from my waist," on the other hand provides a way to measure success.  "I want to do better in school," is meaningless, but "I want a 3.5 GPA gives one a beacon to pursue and a tangible point at which to say "I have achieved this goal."  (Endless goals are frustrating, and nothing succeeds like success.)

Attainable- Goals have to be realistic.  I could set all the specific and measurable goals I want to jump ten feet straight up into the air while shooting fire out of my mouth, but I will never hit them.  You're not going to lose thirty pounds in a month (not without reenacting 127 Hours....a couple of times.  You're not going to run a marathon next week if you're pushing fifty, completely sedentary, and a hundred pounds overweight.  You have to come up with goals that you can actually achieve or you set yourself up for failure very early on.  Learning to play Chopin's Piano Concerto #2 in one year is specific and measurable but if you're just starting piano lessons today, it's not very attainable.  Of course any goal could be too easy, but a goal that's too hard leads to frustration and dejection, and succeeding leads to improved confidence and self-esteem.

Relevant- A goal has to be good.  It has to be useful.  If you want to start a business a goal to lose ten pounds might be specific, measurable, and attainable, but it has nothing to do with what you want to do. .  And while that is an extreme example, a lot of people end up spending a lot of time doing things that are more subtly tangental to what they really want to be doing.  If you want to run a marathon doing a hundred push-ups a day might not be completely counter-productive, but it's probably not the best use of your time.  If you want to start a business making video games, you want to get good at making games, find an audience, create very very easy support systems so you can get paid.  Getting an MBA, or a CS degree, or going to graphics art school, or climbing the corporate ladder at a big game studio are all goals--and mind you, they aren't completely useless--but they are perhaps not the most direct route to your business making video games.  Losing 10 pounds is specific and measurable, but it isn't always the appropriate goal for someone who is building muscle.  "Staying healthy" is a good goal, but a better goal would be "Escape Zombies.  Then check blood pressure."

I just don't get it.  I keep giving myself infinite time to finish this project,
and it keeps not getting done.  I'm not sure what's going on.

Timely (time based)- A goal is just a dream with a deadline.  Even the most specific, measurable, attainable and relevant goal is useless without If you have forever to do something, chances are it will actually be a low priority in your life.  You have to set time-based goals or you will simply never get around to them.  Or possibly only when all other things are taken care of and your life is an idyllic unstressed sea of free time.  I think I had a moment like that back in the late nineties.  Losing five pounds eventually is a goal you will never really take seriously or take real steps to achieve.  Losing five pounds in two months places a sense of urgency on the goal that leads to actual action.

But just so we're clear, even if you have a goal to take your blood pressure every day, it's okay to skip it if you're being chased by zombies.

Self-Contained- To this list I add "self-contained," and here's why: a lot of people set goals that they can't actually control.  (And I don't just mean that in a "we can't control the weather" or "we can't control the economy" or "we we can't control whether or not we get taken over by parasitical worms from the first season of Star Trek TNG!" kind of way.)  For example, if your goal is to get a promotion at work, you really can't control that.  You can affect it, but not determine it with your own choices.  Factors like how much your boss likes you, the performance of your competition, and your company's budget would all be a factor in such a goal that you have no way to influence.  Better goals are goals over which you have direct control.  In our example, better goal at work would be to arrive early every day, never check Facebook, ask someone once a day if there's anything you can do to help them, and to learn one aspect of the job each week that you didn't know before.  Those are things you can actually control.  I have about forty different goals related to threesomes I want to have.  They are very specific, and measurable.  And timely because I want them later on tonight.  But...I can't control who gives enthusiastic consent.

Self-contained becomes particularly important for writers, as I'll get into.

How to apply this totally awesome shiz to writing.

One of the biggest problems would-be writers have translating their dreams and desires into tangible results is that the process of writing is almost completely self-motivated, and, like most people, they don't know how to actually set good goals.  No one has a personal ass kicker telling them what to do. (And in fact, getting such a thing is the most oft-cited reason for writers getting MFAs.) Most writers have a sort of vague sense of wanting to be successful as a writer, but they don't have a good sense of how to get there, or really even what that means.

One of the reasons NaNoWriMo is so seductive to so many young and new writers is that it is a pre-packaged SMART goal. You have to write 50,000 words in 30 days.  This is actually  Specific, Measurable, Timely, Self-Contained.  And while I would argue that at 1776 words a day, it's a little too ambitious to be Attainable to most, it is technically not so unrealistic as to be outside the bounds of plausibility.  The only real question is if it's relevant. Are writers really doing themselves any favors by powering out high quantity, low quality as fast as they can once a year?  Obviously not if their efforts stop there.

NaNo is compelling because it has most of the elements of a good goal.  But if a writer learns how to set their own S.M.A.R.T.S. goals, they don't need to be beholden to anyone else's.

Specific- "I want to be a writer."  "I want to make money writing."  "I want to be successful."  These goals don't actually mean anything.  They are fantasies wrapped in language--nothing more. You're a writer if you write. You could make between five and ten cents a day (like me) and be making money, and success is whatever you define it to be. Even a goal like "get published" is a little nebulous as technically that could be achieved through self-publication of a single blog article (which is likely to have more readers than most anyone's first time print publication) or in a local paper.  But that's likely not to satisfy most people who dream of doing Ricky Lake and Ellen. You should really focus in on what your goals are for writing in the most crystalized way you can. "I want to write a 4 pages a day," is a much better goal. "I want to publish my novel with a big six" (Although technically that fails the S.M.A.R.T.S. goal for not being Self Contained.) These are specific goals.

Measurable- Do you know what the most common thing I hear from other writers is. THE most common thing?  It's the sentiment that they should be writing more.  The problem is that "more" isn't measurable.  A vague sense that one should be writing more often can be assuaged by spending one Saturday afternoon writing. "More" isn't measurable. 5 pages a day is measurable. 20,000 words in a month is measurable.  An hour a day and ten on weekends is measurable. Finishing a story in three weeks is measurable. Drafting a novel in four months is measurable. Set goals you can measure.

Attainable- Writers have a bad, bad habit of overcommitting. They are constantly starting new regimens and failing them (often spectacularly).  "I'm going to start writing five pages a day!" they say.  Shortly after day three they can't handle having no free time and quit altogether.  The 80+% of people who don't finish NaNoWriMo are evidence of how people set goals that aren't actually realistic.  You can't write forty hours a week (or really even twenty) if you have a day job and a family.  You're not going to write a publishable book in a couple months.  And most people can't do any more than 2500 words a day in a sustained way.  Set modest goals and adjust them upward if you need to.  Failure begets frustration and dejection--which is probably my primary reason for warning newer writers off of NaNoWriMo--and too many writers throw in the towel on writing completely because they simply expected too much of themselves.  On the other hand, hitting an easy goal is a good feeling, and you can always adjust the difficulty upward later.

Relevant- One of the biggest pitfalls writers fall into is not setting relevant goals.  They forget that they have a finite amount of time and to consider their talent build.  They get involved in writing projects for money just because it's PAID WRITING and forget that it's not the kind of writing they really want to be doing.  It's just such a thrill to be writing for a paycheck.  Or they do writing challenges (like NaNo) even when it's antithetical to the type of writing they usually or makes them put down a project they're in the middle of.  Or they become an editor because it's something in the writing world even though it isn't actually writing.  Or they attend a crazy amount of literary events and readings and end up being social more than actually writing.  Or they spend more time doing online social media self-promotion than actual writing (which is a problem this writer and other bloggers have to keep a close eye on).  Or they keep going back to school for another degree instead of just writing.   There are lots of pitfalls that are technically "not useless" but also not really the kind of writing that most people want to be doing.  You don't need to have absurdly extreme examples like "eat two hundred eggs" to have an irrelevant goal.

Timely- If you ever stepped into a machine hooked up to angel food cake that showed you the number of would-be-writers who are going to publish a novel "someday," your face would melt off Raiders of the Lost Arc style.

There are so, so, so many.  And many of them are probably even pretty good writers.  At one point in my twenties it was actually a rarer thing for me to know someone who didn't have a book cooking in their brain or a chapter or two written with a clandestine plan to get to the rest eventually.   Of course then they all started having kids and getting serious promotions.

A goal without a deadline is just a dream.

This should be a no-brainer, but it isn't.   People continue to operate as if they will be just as productive when they have infinite time to procrastinate as they will under deadline.  Goals like "in a week" or "each day" or "by the end of this month" are good goals.  "I will write 5 pages a day."  "I will finish this short story by Tuesday."  "I will have a rough draft of this novel done in four months."

I think it is perhaps the most common mistake that separates working writers from "pre-success" writers is that the later waits for inspiration to affect them before they write, and the former roll up their sleeves and work with the trust that the inspiration will come. The merits of writing under deadline are well documented in everything from freshmen who get their paper idea at 10pm the night before it's due to journalists to novelists.  But it's almost like those other writers just don't want it to become work.

Self-Contained- A lot of writers have publication goals.  A short story every month.  Something in one of the big literary reviews by next year  A novel by thirty.  A career in ten years.  I've heard all of these as actual goals of actual writers.  (Sadly, in no case that I know personally were these goals achieved even when they managed to finish the writing.)  The problem with these goals is that the writer may have absolutely no control over them.  A story or novel gets rejected for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with the writer.  Personal taste of the E.I.C., length, a theme of the particular issue, the aesthetic of the magazine, or even budgets may all have more to do with a rejection than anything the writer can control.  Focusing on self-contained goals can keep a writer from buying a high powered rifle and climbing up a bell tower. "Getting a short story published each month" is something they cannot control.  "Submitting 20 times a month," or "get to a final draft and submit my novel by thirty" are much more self-contained.  The writer who focuses on the efforts instead of the success can't be frustrated by a gatekeeper.  And the writer who doesn't give up on self-contained goals will probably eventually succeed in the other stuff.

So remember to run your goals through the S.M.A.R.T. S. filter to see if they're good goals and tweak them if you need to.  Otherwise you end up chewing away your finite number of breaths thinking "I'd like to be successful...someday."

A Writer's Attitude: A Dozen Adjustments Toward Success

A dozen things a writer should start believing to improve their chances of success.  

There is definitely a point of limited returns on the power of positive thinking but the power that attitude can play, especially in a career (or serious pursuit of writing) where you are almost always both your own worst enemy and your own best ally. Though it would unfair to suggest that attitude adjustments would matter one flip in the absence of hard work or many many hours of practice or that you could just positive attitude your way into a book deal with your December 1st NaNo manuscript, it is also true that a positive attitude will help with everything from your daily efforts to handling gatekeepers.

Panacea? No. But foolish to ignore.

Yes, success involves luck. It involves privilege. It may even involve genes and aptitudes and shit like that.

But here's the thing: all that crap is out of your control. You can't control how tall you are or how rich your family is or how many people want to sleep with you and will give you opportunities to curry favor.

Many of us can control our attitudes though (it would be ableist of me to say all can). And here are some things to remember:

1- If I can read this (online), I am probably in a group of some of the most empowered human beings of all time.  Social mobility may be increasingly a myth in our modern society, and far, FAR more mythical than our charming fairy tale about the meritocracy ever tried to convince us, but we have a lot of things better than our ancestors. There is no caste system. You will not do what your father did for a living. You are not a slave or a serf. You do not have to be a housewife if you are a woman. You do not have to be a provider if you are a man. Further, you have a computer that is connected to more information than your parents could have fathomed. You absorb more information in a day than a peasant in feudal Europe did in a lifetime. You can Google a major portion of the sum of all human knowledge and that amount is growing every day.  You can communicate with one of eight hundred million people with a few hours of effort, and solicit the opinions of people from a wide variety of folks about practically anything. You have rights that were unheard of four centuries ago and liberties that we haven't even dreamed of for most of the time we've been human beings.

You don't even have to use the Readers Guide to Periodic Literature.

It is also true that there is unequal power in our society. And certain groups push others to the margins. I can't underscore that reality enough. But these things are also in contexts.

2- Only I--and no one else--get to define my success.  A piggy back off of what success looks like to you.  Empower yourself.  You don't need others' approval.

3- My intentions can help shape my reality.  I have to be careful here because I really, really hate the idea that motivational speakers are always spouting that anything you dream can come true. I don't care how focused you are, you can't do a backflip 60 feet into the air from a standing position and land balanced only on your tongue. And privilege is a very real thing that makes life just a whole lot easier for some folks than others. But consider the difference between a writer who has an idea in their head that they would love to turn into a published novel "some day," and someone determined to "win" NaNoWriMo. One has no focus because their intention is vague. The other sits down and writes 1667 words every day because they know exactly what they want to accomplish. This really applies to anything.

4- People are facilitators, not obstacles.  Not everyone is going to be helpful to you, so be careful. Some people will sabotage you consciously or unconsciously just because you're doing what they didn't have the courage to.  But for the most part we see people as competitors and road blocks when we should see them as allies.  (I gladly write a review for an artist friend's book because when the physical version of the book comes out, it will involve a link on Huffington post back to that favorable review.  I get traffic.  He gets a good review.  Everyone wins.)  If you see the opportunity to network, you should.  Find good people; collaborate with them.  Give them what you do best and let them give you what they do best in return.  Almost no one is capable of doing great things alone--even if we had time to wear all the hats, our skill sets mean we're probably not as good at some as we are at others.

One caveat: this is a symbiosis.  People aren't there to be used.  Give back.  Parasites have a hard time once they're recognized for what they are, and the writers who populate the world around you are probably more observant than most.  Don't use people.  They'll know.

5- Even as a writer, I am not isolated.  Writing might feel isolated when you're clacking away at book six of your Dragonspleen Saga, but once you need a reading group to give you feedback and especially once you get into the business end, you will not be alone by any means--even if you desperately want to be. One of the biggest problems I see is people who expect everyone to be interested in their art when they make and take no interest in others'.  Everything is interconnected.  Form bonds and hold them tight. Work with people.  Pimp your friend's shit--especially before you ask them to pimp yours.  Read friends' fiction (even if they never even thank you). Who knows when you'll make friends with the next Random House editor whose opinion will tip a book into the "Let's give them a chance!" pile. Circle of life shit, you know. Be one with the universe. All that crap.

6- How can I benefit from this?  At some point, something is going to suck.  And not in the good way.  Something won't go your way.  Some shit will hit some fan somewhere.  How will you respond?  Will you find a way to turn the situation to your advantage or at least learn a valuable lesson (which is trite, I know, but....it became a cliche for a reason).  Or will you just complain ad naseum about how unfair life can be and on how X situation prevented you from doing Y.  We all hate the asshole who responds to someone getting laid off with that "This is an opportunity in disguise crap."  Oh yes we do!  We want to find that person and punch them in their pancreas.  You don't have to be chipper when things go wrong.  You just have to look for a way to turn it around.  Look for a way to make every shitty thing that happens into a benefit and you will find a few.  Because the sad fact is that here's what happens if you don't look for a way to make the best out of a bad situation:



(See what I did there?)

7- Hard work and tenacity may not merit out, but nothing else ever will.  Believe it because it's true.  We live in a world of instant gratification and shortcuts so this is really hard to be patient enough to have faith in grandpa's tired old wisdom, but it's true. Yeah, you might have to face the music that your door-to-door pickled hotdog van idea isn't taking off like you thought it would, but with most art, and certainly writing, you have to give it an ungodly amount of work before you start to see even a sliver of success. Just don't forget that it is work. Sitting around and dreaming for 15 years isn't really tenacity. (Trust, ol' Chris on this one.) Hard work may never get you there (so love it for its own sake) but you're not getting anywhere without it.

8- When I am ready, the master will appear.  The student/master adage is not one about surreptitious masters hiding out in the shadows and waiting for the day some wunderkind student almost perfectly performs the Vendrizi maneuver and becomes worthy. It is about the fact that masters are everywhere, at all times, always, and once someone has the frickin humility to admit that they have something to learn, the "student" will begin to see masters everywhere. Many teachers will tell you that they learn more from their students than they did in college. Once you stop being too good to learn from everything and anything around you, the world will rise to that opportunity and teach you things that you can't even imagine you don't know.

9- I embrace failure because it rocks.  If you fail at something, take the lesson, look for new opportunities it may have provided and move on. If it was something huge, take a night to nurse a scotch, pout, and THEN do all that other stuff. Your life will be defined not by your successes, but by how you handled your failures.  Failure is the single greatest crucible for progress in all of humanity. Learn to cherish it.

10- I won't take it personally.  You're in for some pretty epic rejection if you're serious about being a writer. You're going to get some scathing criticism. You're going to get enough form letters to wallpaper a room. And don't think going the e-pub/self-pub/blogging way is going to get you out of that either. You should see the anonymous letters I get in an average week. I have one here suggesting that I eat powdered glass. Honestly what the actual fuck??? Just don't read it if it's that bad. Jesus! You just have to remember that as much of your soul as you're pouring into that writing, the rejection is about the writing, not you. And the criticism is about the writing (or about the circumstances of the other person) and not about you.

11- I want to be refined and improved.  Hate to bring some buzzkill juice to this  positivepants party, but you're not perfect. And even though most people sort of intellectually grasp that. ("Yeah yeah, I'm not perfect. Of course I'm not.") Most people sort of kind of think they are about as good as they can reasonably be expected to get. Fuggedaboutit! Seek opportunities to be better. Both in your craft and as a person. You can always get better. Always. Shakespeare was not that good at plotting or pacing. He had room to improve. You surely do too.

12- Don't be too quick to close the doors.  You don't have to forgive your abusers or work with people who take blatant advantage of you, but the publishing industry is a kind of incestuous little clique. Even in non-traditional publishing, a reputation can matter. Nothing will knock your risk vs. reward out of balance quite like having to go way upriver to cross because you burnt the local bridge. Allot your grudges sparingly.

Ziglar and Success: Define It For Yourself

After you turn three,
success might be more complicated than a fist full of sand.

Zig Ziglar joins the ranks of a number of white, heterosexual, able bodied, rich, cis, thin, Christian American, male motivational speakers who I can't help but roll my eyes at every time they start talking about how positivism will take you anywhere.  I wish all motivational speakers would be more honest and say positivism can't help you do anything you dream.  I've been dreaming of groupie threesomes for YEARS now, and it hasn't happened. Positivism can't make anything possible.  For starters, at its most basic, it simply has a limited return on those whose lives exist at the less fortunate end of social inequality. Positivism also fails epically when it comes to defying physics.  And no matter how positive you are you won't sell your NaNo "novel" that hasn't been revised since December 1st. All positivism can really claim to do is take you further than negativity can. But "further" might just mean someone has only rolled their eyes instead of blacklisting you.

Still once you acknowledge the limitations of this kind of motivational advice, it's much easier to take the whole line of thinking more seriously.  Just bring your grains of salt and take three or four any time anyone says the word "anything."  To Zig's credit, he kept talking after a fall in 2007 left him with some memory problems and the "abled bodied" part was less true.  He recently passed away.

Ziglar was really good at the zingers.  Gems like:  "People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily," or "a lot of people quit looking for work as soon as they find a job," were often part of his speeches and got him quoted a lot which led to his continued success in motivational speaking.  Most people can't really remember his complex arguments about success.  They remember his zingers.

Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.   -Zig Ziglar

One thing I have always remembered of his is a description of putting a blindfold on an archer and turning them round and round and round and then telling them to hit their target.   This scenario was written to illustrate a single point.  It is very, very difficult to hit a target that you can't see.  To this end most people struggle to get somewhere but they don't really have a sense of where or what that might be.  I'm pretty sure my archery instructor would have had an aneurysm from hearing this story--all those arrow safety rules...ignored.

I talk a lot about success being a vague concept.   Almost more than I talk about threesomes. That's because it is.  I usually put scare quotes around success or add the caveat "whatever that means" when I talk about it.  That's because success isn't just a concept that differs from person to person (though it is).  Success is a concept that most people don't even understand within themselves.

Success is dependent upon the glands - sweat glands.  

-Zig Ziglar

At first that question may seem absolutely simple.  It may even seem almost insulting.  "Success is....SUCCESS man!  Being successful!  Making it!" a friend of mine yelled at me once.  But the more you think about it, the more you will realize that it is actually probably a harder question to answer than you might think.  What does success even mean?  And more importantly, what does it mean to you?

Recently a friend of mine working in the game design industry asked everyone on her various social media how they defined success and got answers ranging from financial independence to making the world a better place to being approached for projects instead of having to look for them.  A lot of people think success is paying the bills, though you might be surprised how many have other answers.  One person told me (not on this page but somewhere else) that she defined success as not questioning every single day whether or not she was a real writer or just a faking imposer who no one had yet recognized.  She's on her eighth novel, and lives quite well off from her writing, but is still struggling with success in her mind.

Many of these answers were vague even when they were specific as well.  "Paying the bills" could possibly be broken down further.  Is that scraping out the rent on a crummy apartment, walking everywhere, eating Raman three or four times a week, and a health insurance plan that involves power crystals and prayer?  Or is that a townhome, private school for the kids, an economy car that still has a good stereo and airbags, a Kaiser insurance plan, and eating out three or four times a week.  Because I assure you, those two goals are very, very far apart even if they both might technically be "paying the bills."  Seriously just the Raman alone might mean hundreds of dollars.  That stuff is criminally cheap.

The point is there is a huge disparity about what success even means.  Not just between folks, but usually a painful ambiguity within each individual as well.

A lot of aspiring writers (and artists in general) talk about "making it" or "success" but they don't really take the time to think about what that means to them.  They struggle, but don't seem to know exactly what they're struggling for.  And Ziglar has at least one part of achieving your dreams dead-on right--if you don't know what success even IS, what is the chance you're going to stumble across it.  I mean I guess if everything in your life simply explodes into awesomeness, then you will reach your equally undefined sense of having "made it."  But if you had to work toward one vision (and really...you do), what would it be?

Publication?  A published novel?  Three published novels?  A published novel every year without fail?  "Paying the bills" with writing even if it means renting a room and learning to love rice?  Paying the bills with writing and making a middle class income?  $53,500--for no particular reason?  Chairing a panel at Wondercon?  A good home life?  Raising a decent kid?  A fish tank with exotic fish and a male whore who you call "fish guy"?  Asian cheerleader threesomes?  If you cannot define success for yourself, no one else is going to be able to define it for you.  How will you know if you're getting close.   How will you even know if you're working in the right direction.  How will you know you aren't wasting time doing something that has some aspects of what you want (I'm writing!) but not others (but it's tech writing, not fiction, and I'm miserable) if you don't have a sense yourself of what you want?

When we struggle for nebulous goals, we often have nebulous struggles.  Leaving the world a better place might be noble, but it lacks the concreteness of "publish one critically acclaimed game."  The latter is, ironically, an easier goal to work toward and a goal one could be satisfied in achieving.  With the first we could satisfy ourself of success if we smile at a stranger one day, or we could spend a lifetime working for Greenpeace and still convince ourselves we'd never quite made it.  This is why any major goal setting effort involves specific and measurable results.  And the biggest goals of your life--the all pervasive idea of success with your most meaningful endeavor--should be no different.

A lot of writers feel liberated when they consider what success means to them.  They don't feel so pinned by a dream, but almost like "Fuck now I can actually figure out how to GET there and start working."  They find that "making it" was just too big.  But "one published novel" seems like it's actually manageable.   Or "financial independence" is just too open.  But "contribute 25,000 to the household expenses annually" gives them something tangible and reachable to work toward.  By defining success, they not only figure out where to go and how to get there, but that it's closer than they think.

So....what would success look like to you?

Why Failure is Awesome but Quitting Sucks Hardcore (Like Titanium Hard)

Evil Chris here...

And only 3903 of these words
are related to threesomes.

With a little over three hours left in NaNoWriMo as of writing these words, I face the distinct possibility of failure.  2,500 words is probably not going to elude me, but let's pretend for the moment that it totally would or that I'm twenty thousand words shy...or that it's closer to 11:45.

Let's pretend I'm going to fail.  Go on, it's okay.  You can make believe.

See how I didn't change into all caps and start using lots of exclamation marks?  Notice how I'm not questioning my worth as a writer or whether I'm cut out for this sort of thing?  And I assure you if you were sitting next to me, you would not notice a distinct waver in my voice.

Witness my total lack of existential crisis.

In Western culture (in as much as that term means anything) it is extremely rare to find those that value failure.  Success is our singular premium.  It is so important to us that most of us have a healthy fear of failure. It's so scary to our cultural vicegerents that they tried to hoist participation trophies on young children who didn't even want them because they projected into them that it must make them feel so terrible. It's not that we're ambivalent or neutral about failure. Failure is something we dread, try to avoid, and hate when it shows up--like an alcoholic, libertarian uncle dropping in on the holidays. "Failure is not an option" is a cliche for a reason. If we tip our hat at all to failure, it is usually only in a broader story about success. Failure is more an obstacle to be overcome by unswerving tenacity. It's like how the Bad News Bears always lose their early games so that they can rally and their final victory is that much sweeter.

The problem is, failure is the good stuff.  Failure is the engine of human progress. Failure--not success--pushes forward science, innovation, and especially art.  I know it's hard to imagine that if this is the first time you've run into this idea.  It's like someone telling you french kissing light sockets is good for your complexion or something. But despite being counter intuitive, it's true. (The failure thing--please don't French kiss any light sockets.)  Every study of successful people reveals that they are usually the ones who fail the most.  (A statistic that is still accurate if you remove George W. Bush's and Donald Trump's particularly hideous track records and particularly lofty destinations.)

Failure is important to who we are as people. The way we deal with failure defines us far more than our successes. It toughens us. It reveals new opportunities. We learn valuable lessons that we wouldn't with an easy win. Failure helps us consider our goals and objectives, as well as our approach. (There's nothing quite like falling on your face to make you question if you're doing the right thing for the right reasons.) And, there's the fact (which is much more profound than it sounds at first) that failure tells us what not to do.

The problem is failure stings at the time. Failure doesn't reinforce our narrative that we are awesome. Failure isn't something people are likely to say "is an option." Failure is scary.

Everyone has to fail. They just have to. Artists have to fail more than most.  If you aren't failing some of the time (even a lot of the time--seriously...around half of the time), you aren't actually trying to do anything challenging.  The old Atari version of Ms. Pac Man used to have an option to have fewer ghost monsters. You could even have one. I could play that game all day with one ghost, and there were a couple of days when I was still numbering my age in single digits that I'm pretty sure I tried.

"You seem like you've got one ghost monster down, Chris,"  my mom would say.  "Why don't you try it with two now?"

"Because then I'll die," I replied.

I knew that two ghosts would eventually corner me, so I kept things easy.

I am the one-ghost master!  
Which basically only means I have a high boredom threshold when it comes to video games. 

You would think that once people hit like TEN or even ELEVEN, you wouldn't see this sort of thing anymore. But a lot of people coast through life. They never fail because they never risk. The progress of their lives--such as it is--is measured only by them dribbling from one sure thing to another, and a very careful and calculated avoidance of risk.

But it goes beyond that. We are SO afraid of failure that we actively eschew it. We may do this by "taking chances" that are basically non-effort Hail Mary passes at life. That way we never have to get invested in the bitterness of the outcome. If we fail, we can just say we didn't really try and keep telling ourselves that if we did really try, we would succeed. I know several writers who submit early draft writing for publication. They send out everything they write--usually after no more than a first or second draft. That way if it gets rejected, it's no big deal. They are much more reluctant to pour some time and effort into a two or three solid revisions before they submit because getting rejected about something they put some energy into that might actually feel like failure.  Far too many people have this sort of "reach for the stars" idea.  Rather than realistic goals and genuine effort (and the horrible risk of failure), they would rather have lofty dreams (that are nothing more than grandiose and non-urgent fantasies rather than goals) and then not really work at them.  They can "risk" failure only in as much as they never really try.

But people also quit.

We are a culture of quitters.  Whenever failure seems like it's coming, you can bet that most people will trot out the rationalizations and quit.  It's easier on our fragile egos to convince ourselves a battle isn't worth fighting than to face the prospect that we might fail...miserably.  Writers (and other artists) are perhaps more guilty of this than any others.  The fear of rejection...the fear that we are not perfectly articulating the wonderful story in our head...the fear that we might fail grips every artist--usually about fifty to sixty times before breakfast.  And out come the excuses to quit:  it wasn't a good idea, this is dumb, I need a better computer, I don't have time, this is futile, I've got too much going on in my life right now, and my personal favorite I'm not good enough.  And so we quit.  Or if we're extra savvy we "put that project on hold, but we're totally coming back to it later."  And if we're really slick, we might even claim some other project caught our attention--preferably with artsy sounding bullshit that uses words like "inspiration" and "my muse commands."

Any one of those excuses above might be true.  They might be hella true.  They might be SO true that they will cause you to fail.  But there is a fundamental truth at work here and there is no getting around it:

Failing is not quitting.  Quitting is not failing.

Failing means you fought the fight.  You showed up and tried.  At least you were there.  Quitting means you retreated. You ran like a two year old with a skinned knee.  Failing means you met the bully at the bike racks after sixth period and got your ass kicked (but they know they're going to have a sore fist every time they mess with you).  Quitting means you left campus on the opposite end of school and tried to tell everyone that it was totally not because you were afraid (and it means the bully really owns your ass now).  Failing is asking someone to the prom and they turn you down.  Quitting is not even asking, spending your life wondering what could have been, and convincing yourself it's because you're obviously too nice.   Failure is ejecting from your plane after it gets shot up and looses a wing. Quitting is ejecting before you even take off or as soon as you see there are more MiGs than you think you can fight. Failure means you're doing something, and that means you're improving and developing. Failure means you suited up and showed up, learned something, and took it on the chin with aplomb. You made an effort instead of an excuse.

Besides, you can't have an eleventh hour turn around if you quit during the eighth hour. Where's your fucking sense of drama?

You are not the first person to doubt yourself.  You are not the first person to realize that failure is a very real possibility.  You are not the first person to be scared--especially of writing (or art).  But if you trot out your rationalizations for quitting, you just joined the teeming throng of people who have a fanciful irresolute fantasy about being an artist that is nothing more than a facade that gets you scare quotes around your artistic label by those who know you.  (As in: he is a "writer".)

Stand up and give something a real try.  Don't give up at the first sign of trouble.  Take a chance.  Risk failure.  Have a spine!

At the end of the day failure yields fruit.  In the final analysis, I have a lot more to show for failing NaNoWriMo.  I have some insight.  I have some perspective.  I have a better idea of how much work NaNo AND daily blogging will be if I decide to do NaNo next year.  I also know I can write a serious fuck ton of words if my back is to the wall.  And,  not to put too fine a point on it, but  I have 47,501 words!  (It's not like they'll vanish if I don't "win.")  I have grown and improved as a writer.  I did something, and I have something to show for November's efforts.  All in all, not a bad haul as I head into December 1st.

Quitting yields nothing.  Quitting gets you a sense of inadequacy and the skepticism of people that know you that you really care about this as much as you say you do.  If I gave up three weeks ago with an excuse about how busy I was,  I wouldn't have any of the things I have today.  I would just be patting myself on the back for not failing...but it wouldn't matter because I would suck feces covered donkey testicles.

So whether it's NaNo... or writing in general...or finishing an (actual) novel...or publication...or making money with writing...or winning a contest....or whatever it is...get out there and give it everything you've got.  Rock the casbah and the party that rocks the party.   Take a risk by really trying. And if you fail, that's okay.   You'll have a lot to show for it.

But don't let go.  Don't give up.  Don't make excuses.

Don't quit.

Want to be a writer? Earn your "Er"

All the people who wanted to be a writer in my high school.
1993 only.  

Want to be a writer?  Earn your "er."

When I was earning my amazingly useful and in no way pointless Creative Writing degree at SFSU, Janusprof liked to use the phrase "earning your 'er'" to describe the simplicity involved in achieving what so many of the program's fresh-faced members wanted (to be a writer).  It was as simple as earning your "er." I always liked the turn of phrase and so in the tradition of great artists (and Janusprof's direct advice), I'm going to steal it.  

See, I did learn something!

There are a lot of aspiring writers in the world. I don't mean that like there are a lot of doctors or a lot of redheads. I mean there are so many aspiring writers that they make legions look like cozy get togethers, and it is entirely possible that if they could all somehow be gathered together, armed, and trained, that they would be so numerous as to make getting involved in a land war in Asia lose its spot as the most famous classic blunder (to be immediately replaced by going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line).  

Go ahead.  

Look around.

Maybe you'll notice a couple here and there...

I don't often spend emotional energy judging who is "worthy" being called a writer or not, but every once in a while it's useful to speak (in very broad and general terms, not to anyone person specifically) about how common it can be for folks to want to be a writer, but not read. And perhaps defying even more comprehension, to want to be a writer, but not write.
Lots of people want to be a writer. The girl who did really well in English class in high school.  The guy who liked to tell stories to his friends.  The gal who thinks her troubled teens are a story that everyone would be interested in because she got drunk a lot, tried heroin, and had a couple of threesomes.  The guy who sees writing books as a more "realistic" way into Hollywood and the director's chair than being a screenwriter.  The woman who won a short story contest back in junior high. They rarely read. They never right. Yet they are sure their memoirs will coast right to the bestseller list even if they never did anything more exciting than manage Denny's through the post-World Series rush with a broken frier. The legions endless are those who ever thought, "holy fucking archbishop balls, this thing I just thought of would make a good story," is probably harboring the fantasy of smithing words and cobbling them together.

And not all aspiring writers are just casually noodling a desultory fantasy either. Dig through those "aspiring writers," and you'll find many (oh dear GOD, so many) who are taking aspiration to the next level. They burn to be a writer. They yearn. They want it more than anything. It's their childhood dream and their adult goal. They dream about it what life will be like once they get there. They fantasize. They consider everything they do to be a temporary stop on the road to writerdom. Just as soon as they write that book, they will hit the bestseller list and make it big. Their ship is coming in. Life happens to them while they're busy making all their writerly plans.  

Dig through those dreamers, and you will find another strata. People who think they are writers....even though they don't really write (and a surprising number don't read either). They call themselves writers and are perpetually a single get-off-their-ass moment away from greatness. They tell social networks they're writers, and list "writer" as their job on Facebook.  

Among those, you can find an even higher pretentious strata: those actively pretending to be writers. They network. They market. They meet and greet. They do drinks. They work the writer world like an ex vice president trying to score a speaking gig. They just don't get much writing done--and who could write with a schedule that busy. Oddly enough (or perhaps not really), none of these behaviors really fools anyone unless the person is actually earning their "er" instead of making excuses. They may insist that they are writers, but the world doesn't really agree.

This is a disconnection that isn't found in many arts. People who haven't played an instrument since high school band don't call themselves musicians and dream of the philharmonic. Couch potatoes don't insist they are dancers and dream of Broadway. Aspiring painters don't comparison shop potential galleries and rub elbows with patrons before they've actually painted anything. And while there are plenty of garage bands destined for nothing more than a tragic break up when their first member gets a real job, has a kid, or sleeps with another member's partner they at least dream of grandeur while practicing twice a week. Only aspiring actors even come close to the hope of success-before-work that aspiring writers display so brazenly. So if it helps you put this behavior in perspective, imagine the starry-eyed Iowa farm boy getting off the bus in Hollywood who hasn't done so much as local theater since high school and hopes to be discovered.

That's what most aspiring writers are acting like. And in the writing biz you can't even get empty promises made to you by sleazy a-holes on the casting couch.

I can be such a fucking killjoy, can't I?

I'm not one to throw around the word "pretentious" very often. It smacks of elitism and judgement that I, Chris, do not get to make about anyone....except maybe me. And lord knows most writers struggle enough with imposter syndrome that I don't need to run around giving that shit health and mana potions.

2100 Articles, Chris. A career. Millions of readers. You're a really real writer!
But no book, so obvi that's all lies.

I don't want you throw down your pen in dejection and quit the field. I'm telling you this because there are two kinds of motivational messages in this world. There's the motivational messages that business seminars pay top dollar, given by those who publish bestseller after bestseller, and who sell their CD's in a singularly epic display of just how unremarkable it is for people to enjoy (and even pay for) things that make them feel good. And if you want some white, cis, heterosexual, able bodied, upper class, probably Christian, American male to tell you that you can do anything you set your mind to, go for it. I mean they manage not to laugh at the irony as YOU PAY THEM to tell you that if they can get rich off of you, anything is possible. So if you're cool with the idea that you can unlock the secrets of the universe by keeping a day planner and thinking good thoughts, by all means tune out everything but their fluffy brand of rainbow-shooting, unicorn-splooge positivism.  

It's not all bad, after all. We all need to be reminded that we've let non-priorities slip into our lives once in a while and that figuring out what we actually want to achieve really is the first step in success. And you can walk away from these messages determined to actualize your visualization with a spring in your step.  If you want to think that is all there is to success and get mad at anyone who dares harsh your moti-fucking-vational squee, that's your choice. But let me be honest, you're missing at least half the story.

At the motivational tools stores,
we've been making the best motivational tools since 1000 B.C.E.
Get one in your rectum today and unlock your hidden potential!

There's also the well-needed boot in your ass motivation that you ALSO shell out top dollar for–especially when you want actual results. If you hire a personal trainer, they do not tell you that if you imagine a fit body and write down your goals, fitness will not happen because you will it into being with positive actualization of your will-chi. They do not sell you some CDs or a day planner filled with the motivational quotes of physically fit athletes. They might ask you about your goals for about five minutes, so they can plan how best to get you to your finish line. Then they stick something heavy in your hand and tell you to do something unpleasant in three sets of 10-15. They do this for an hour, and when you think you are about to die, they tell you to come back in a couple of days. And, if you had certain goals, they tell you that if they see you anywhere near a fast food joint, that you'll spend your next session doing an extra set...and five extra reps...with a fifty pound barbell shoved up your ass. And you don't walk out the door with a spring in your step and an uplifted heart so much as you stumble out relieved that you cheated death by ducking today's scythe swipe.

But you see results in five weeks.

I take a lot of crap when I bring out the boot. People don't like the boot. People want to buy the 20 CD set and be told there's nothing they can't do, and that they're awesome, and that there's nothing between them and the fantasy fulfillment but cotton candy clouds, sugarcane fields, pixie/mermaid orgies, and maybe some token mention of work that will happen in a power-chord montage and won't ever actually be difficult. No one wants to face the truth about earning their "er." Not if it means telling the Tinkerbell fairies flitting about their fantasy to stop "practice kissing" and get lost so some actual work can happen.

So wait just a second before you go saying: "That Chris is just such a fucking assburger with asspickles and assmustard next to a bed of assfries drenched in assketchup for pointing out that there are a lot of people who want to be writers. How could he do such a thing? Why does he insist on spewing his stupid factually facty facts every time I'm doing my super-duper dream stretching exercises (where I reach for the stars)? Doesn't he have any respect for my artistic ambition?" And wait just a second before you go looking for the validation of the internet that you're totally entitled to have your dreams come true just because they're yours. Wait just a second before you change the channel to the warm fuzzy messages that acknowledge how fragile your crystalline ego can be.  


Yes, I'm the bastage with the boot headed for your southernmost sphincter at ramming speed. I'm the one who killed your leprechaun on MDMA who was doing the Macarena to Celine Dion's dulcet vocalizations about belief in the heart going on. I'm the one telling you that your desire to be a famous writer is only slightly less common than brown hair.  

But I'm not doing that to make you feel common or make you give up. In fact, I'm here to tell you how to leave all those "aspiring writers" with their fantasy dreams and their actualized artistic visions, but who can't seem to get what they want out of their writing life, behind. I'm telling you how to actually make yourself extraordinary. 

Aspirations are a dime a dozen. In fact, they aren't even a dime a dozen--you can get a fifty pack for a nickel if you're willing to buy them in boxes of a thousand at Costco. You know how many people have a great idea for a book? ALL OF THEM. Every. Single. One. (Except R. Pete. He has ideas for books, but none of them are great.) But actually doing something difficult, day in and day out, sets you apart almost instantly from those who only aspire.

The number of fucks the world gives–flying or otherwise–about what you aspire to do is best expressed with a negative integer. If give-a-shit for your aspiration were measured on a scale from the floor to the moon, it would barely clear the fibers of your carpet. (And not even that if you have shag.) If you aspire to scratch your nose, but just talk about how much it itches all goddamned day long, people are going to start to treat you like you're a very special caliber of jerkwad, and this is exactly what most aspiring writers do. The only way to distinguish yourself from an ocean of other aspiring writers is to write. Ditch the "aspiring" and earn your "er." Until and unless you execute the verb "to write" you aren't really a writer. 

Maybe you're a dreamer, dreaming of writing.    

Maybe you're a talker, talking about writing.

Maybe you're a networker, networking all the people in the writing world.

Maybe you're a marketer, finding the markets for future work.

Maybe you're a drinker, having drinks with editors, publishers, or other writers.

Maybe you're a performer, performing to an audience.

None of those things is writing. But until and unless you earn your "er" for the verb "to write" before all of these other things, you are not a writer. Stop dreaming about writing, stop talking about writing, stop thinking about writing.....and just write.  

So cry your bitter artist tears that you seem to believe are (to me) the sweet corporeal ambrosia of your silly dreams shattering and will sustain my body long after my mortal time has lapsed on this world. Get it out of your system. And when you're done wiping those thick runners of snot from your nose, buck up, put on your big kid underpants, and face the fact that unless you want to be just like every other aspiring writer crawling over the Earth like the eleventh plague of Moses, it's time to earn your "er."

Do not despair now, fair writers. For we come to the other side of this equation. (And unlike the "other side of water," this shit is actually pretty sweet.)

If you write...you ARE a writer. And don't let the world tell you otherwise. I don't care if you're a multi-bestseller novelist or an every-other-day updater on Tumblr. If you write, you're a writer. The world can go fuck themselves, and in the final analysis it will be the aspiring writers, not me, who will do their level best to try to tear you down and keep you from proving it's possible to do what they won't. If you're earning your "er," you are a writer. Maybe not published. Maybe not rich. Maybe not even GOOD. Always in need of improvement (for we all are). Foolish if you don't take every opportunity to improve your craft. Foolisher still if you don't read...critically...as often as you can. Likely in need of many more steps before "success" (whatever that means). But you ARE a writer. You have earned your "er." Let the snobs and the dilettantes alike talk about doing what you actually do.  Let them suck your ink spill.

You have earned your "er."

And when you have earned your "er," you are a writer. And no one can tell you otherwise.