Don’t Take My Advice

Why most writing "rules" don't apply to you, and why that's okay.

Image: Vitaly Gariev

A little while ago, I had a bit of a rant about writing blogs—particularly the didactic ones that try to tell you what you need to do as a writer. Fundamentally, my issue is that not all writers are the same. We all have very different aims and very different approaches to our writing.

Stars and Dreamers

At the top, we’ve got the Stars. These are what a lot of people dream of being: the people who make a full-time living writing books. They’re continually on the bestseller lists; they’re the household names that everyone’s heard of. Whether we’re talking about popular writers like Stephen King, or literary darlings like Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami, they’re the superstars of the writing world.

The reality is, there aren’t very many of them. It’s like being a superstar in the music world, the art world, or in sports—they’re very rare birds indeed. They make up less than 0.01% of published authors. The chances of you getting to be one, even if you get published, are very low indeed. Almost every one of these elite writers is represented by one of just five or six agencies, and they sign roughly 0.05% of the authors who submit to them.

At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the Dreamers. You’ve got people who read all the books on writing; they’ve got ideas about writing, and they’d love to write. They’ve tried a few things, but it’s not much more than an idea. Being an author is who they’d like to be, if only they weren’t constrained by other commitments or goals.

In between, you’ve got a whole range of different writers.

Published Authors

You’ve got the Published Authors. They’re the ones who write primarily for their editor or their agent. They don’t necessarily get to choose what they’re going to write; they’ve found themselves forced into a mold, and they’re delivering what the market wants. Many of them can make enough money from their writing to be professional, full-time writers, but even in that bracket, most still struggle to get much more than a small advance.

Those are the writers who are constantly reading about how to write a bestseller, how to pitch, how to get an agent, and how to write a query letter—all those things you absolutely need to do if you’re trying to break into the professional publishing world. That world is very rigid in many ways. They have their processes and procedures, and you have to conform to them. If you don’t know what the rules are, you haven’t a hope of even getting in through the front door.

Obviously, once you get to that “Star” status, the rules probably don’t apply to you anymore. You just say, “Hey, I want to write this,” and somebody will publish it. They’ll probably fight over it because they know it’s going to sell regardless. But the rules do apply to the majority of professional writers.

Hacks

The next level down, I’ve got what I call the Hacks. That’s not a pejorative. It comes from my days of being a journalist, where a “hack” was a writer who would turn up every day, write their stuff, and get paid. The pulp writers often described themselves as hacks. Hacks are professional writers: yhey turn out what they need to turn out.

These days, these are often self-published writers. They put their stuff out and know they only need to find a small audience. They try things until they hit something that works, and then they keep doing it. If they can find a thousand fans, they’re happy.

For those writers, query letters, understanding publishers, and learning about the market is irrelevant. They’ve found their market, and they don’t need an agent or a publisher. When they find what works, they have their own formula. They know what their market wants, and they keep doing it. I know of plenty of authors who’ve written 20, 30, or 40 books in a series, and they keep churning them out. For them, the biggest challenge is to keep it fresh without changing too much. The audience generally doesn’t want anything too different; they want more of the same.

Amateurs

Then, you’ve got the Amateurs—people like me, who write purely for pleasure. They write the books that they want to write. They don’t care whether they get readers or not. Readers are nice, but that’s not why they do it. They do it because they enjoy writing; they do it because they want to tell a story.

It’s a hobby, and like most of my hobbies, I don’t do them to monetize them. I don’t do them for anybody else; I do them purely for me. I actually enjoy sitting down at a computer and writing. I hate having to put it out and publish it and share it with the world because all that time I’m spending marketing and promoting is time I could spend being creative. (This always reminds me of my friend Tim, back in our biker days, who declared one day that he hated working on motorcycles. This was heresy. But then he pointed out that if we were working on them, we weren’t riding them, and that was hard to argue with.)

Mercenaries

And then finally, you’ve got one other category, who I call the Mercenaries. These are the ghostwriters and the corporate writers—the ones who are writing commissioned books. I’ve done plenty of that in my lifetime. In most cases, they don’t get to develop their own style. Their style is whatever the client says it is. It’s professional writing, and it’s creative, but it’s not at all the same as coming up with your own stuff.

Arts and crafts

There is one other axis to look at. We’ve talked about the different types of writers: the Stars, the Dreamers, the Hacks, the Published Authors, the Amateurs, and the Mercenaries. But let’s look also at what they’re trying to create. Are they trying to create great art, or are they trying to simply follow a formula and get it right?

We’re often told to think about how to create great art and how to be an amazing artist, but for a lot of people, that isn’t the aim. All they want to do is write a simple romance, a thriller, or a murder mystery—a cozy mystery or a paranormal romance. They aren’t trying to create great art; they’re just trying to do something entertaining.

It’s kind of like in the art world: at one end of the spectrum, you’ve got Picasso or Hirst creating things that nobody had ever seen before, and which a lot of people don’t like; at the other end, you’ve got the kind of crowd-pleasing work you see in a local craft fair—simple watercolors of landscapes, flowers, or pets.

Image: jasontheexploder

I recently read The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, which isn’t a book on how to be creative; it’s more like Taoist or Buddhist philosophy on how to live your life. Specifically, he talks about what it means to be an artist.

He makes a clear distinction between an artist and a craftsman. A craftsman knows what they want to do, and does it as skillfully as they can. An artist has an idea and sees where it takes them. One’s about execution, the other’s about exploration, and they’re both equally important and valid.

One of the other things that struck me was that he kept saying you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. He would even tell this to some of the musicians he worked with when they got fed up and wanted to quit the business. Instead of persuading them to stay, he’d say, “Don’t. If you want to go, go.”

And so, when it comes to taking advice, remember that most of the advice out there doesn’t apply to you. If you’re not trying to be a professional published author, you don’t have to do the things that professional published authors do. You don’t need to stress about it. Just figure out who you are and what you’re doing, and be comfortable with that.

I’ve been many of those different writers, often at the same time. In my day job, I’m a merc. I’ve been a hack. I’ve been a published author. I’m a proud amateur. And when it comes to my audio drama, I’m still a dreamer. At times, I’m a craftsman. At other times, I try to be an artist.

Create what you want to create. If you want to do something completely different, do something completely different. If you want to do something just like somebody else’s work, do that. Do what you want to do as long as it makes you happy. That’s what’s important.