Like most famous and successful people, over the years I’ve crafted a very careful brand and public persona. My brand has been carefully cultivated, and is centered on a sort of shambolic pantslessness that I vaguely hope makes me seem amusing and cool rather than sad and deserving of pity. This is, of course, in part a defense mechanism, as I learned long ago that the key to being a terminally lazy person is to always shelter in incompetence; once you establish that you’re essentially useless, no one asks you to do anything any more, and a life of leisure can be yours.
The only place where pride has prevented me from claiming complete incompetence is writing. It’s the one aspect of my existence that I’ve been able to monetize, after all, so claiming incompetence would be counter-productive to my desire to purchase liquor and Fritos on a regular basis. It’s also the one aspect of my life I feel truly confident in. As a result, despite my freewheelingly inebriated branding I do self-importantly appoint myself as an expert of sorts on writing and even the business of selling your work, at least in a localized, heres-what-worked-for-me kind of way. And so I get the dreaded question on a regular basis: How can I get published? How did you get published? This last question is usually accompanied by an exasperated gesture and tone of voice as they indicate my poor fashion sense and grooming, implying that if I can get published, surely any moderately educated laboratory chimpanzee can.
I don’t dispute that; in fact, that was more or less the initial subtitle of Writing Without Rules.
My answer is always the same, and it’s always pretty simple: I did the work. If you want to be published, do the work too.
The Work
So what does that mean? Well, there’s writing, of course—you can’t publish ideas, friendo, so step one will always be writing it all down, then putting in the dull plod of revision and polish. That’s stipulated—but let’s assume you have a story or a novel or a play or a poem or a 6,000-page manifesto about Doritos.
The Work then requires that you submit or self-publish your writing. This isn’t easy. It requires research, organization, and constant diligence and will most frequently yield rejection and criticism. But here’s the thing: Every book or story I’ve sold, every speaking opportunity and freelance writing gig I’ve landed has stemmed from the grind. With a few exceptions where I was invited to submit a story by an editor who was already familiar with my work, every story I’ve ever published is the result of mailing a submission to markets, sometimes dozens of them before getting a sale. Every book I’ve published is the result of submitting to publishers or stems from the meta-effort of submitting to agents, which resulted in signing with my wonderful agent Janet Reid, who then sold books for me. Every freelance job I have is the product of some kind of work, whether a cold pitch, answering an advertisement, or creating and delivering a presentation.
When I was a young, callow writer I sometimes imagined that I was writing such brilliant, incendiary stuff opportunities would bloom around me like magic. As I got older I realized the truth: If you want to publish, you’ll have to grind. It takes effort. I have hundreds, thousands of rejections. I’ve failed more often than I’ve succeeded. But slowly, if you do the work, you start to make a name for yourself and build a platform. As far as I can tell, there are no shortcuts.
Of course, I may simply be not very smart. This has been suggested to me many times, though I usually reject the idea as ridiculous. After all, I played all three Zork games as a kid and even solved the Oddly-Angled Room puzzle.