I have been unbelievably lucky in my professional career. I have made my living as a writer from age 27 on — not a huge living, but a living. My family was just happy I didn’t end up in prison or on the street, I daresay, so I guess that counts as making them proud of me. I’ve been happy
and unhappy at various times, but always loved what I did for a living. Still, I know I’m an outlier.
A lot of people consider themselves “writers,” but hardly ever write for an audience other than themselves. They usually have at least one book project in mind — or, more usually, several book projects but these projects never venture outside the notebook, and certainly never get completed. A person might have accumulated a lot of notes for books yet to be written, plus a lot of random sentences or paragraphs that might or might not work their way into a published piece if only the writer could get around to actually writing the book and then finding a publisher.
I’ve published nine books so far, so I reckon I’ve earned the right to reveal how I learned to get out of that rut—in which, believe me, I dwelt for many years.
Here are my rules for being a successful author, worth exactly what you’re paying for them:
1. Always be working on a project not just writing. And let it be only one project at a time. If, for example, as of this minute, you are working on that novel about Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie that you’ve been meaning to write for years, your self-help book will have to wait; so will that book about how to teach yoga to children.Keep them on your “to be written” list, but don’t touch them again til you’ve completed your novel.
2. Set reasonable, reachable goals and deadlines. For instance, you might say, “I will have the first draft of this novel completed by the end of the year, on the assumption that I will produce X number of words in Y number of weeks.”
3. Commit to a certain minimum word-count, five days a week. It should not be an ambitious minimum. It should be a number you know you can hit, every day. Of course, if you go over that minimum on any given day, you should congratulate yourself. But don’t use that accomplishment
as an excuse to slack off the next day.
4. Treat each day’s writing like a golf shot. Know your objective; know how you want the ball to behave; envision the shot; choose the right club; and swing easy.
5. A book-length project is like shoveling a two-ton pile of shit. Never look at the shit. If you look at the shit, you’ll be immediately daunted, and you’ll never even start. Instead, keep looking at the shovel. Look at each shovelful as you lift it and fling it. Never let your eyes waver from the shovel. Keep lifting and flinging.
6. Speaking of shit, that is what your first draft will be. The first draft of anything is shit. But you can’t write a creditable final draft without first writing the shitty first draft, then several more drafts that might get progressively less shitty. Therefore:
7. Thou shalt not go back to revise, if thy shitty first draft is not completed. Sure, you can make notes now and then to remind yourself to rewrite, excise, or add a certain passage, or even insert another character or incident. But don’t do it yet. Go forward, forward, and only forward, till your shitty first draft is done, or you’ll spend the rest of your life perfecting the first two or three pages.