career

I often joke about my poor memory and how I live in the present like someone with brain damage. This is reinforced by the fact that I greet each and every day with a song in my heart, the sort of cockeyed optimism that only people with brain damage ever actually experience. Sure, by 5PM I’ve been worn down to a whiskey-guzzling nub and I’m ready to set myself on fire rather than face another second, but every morning I’m good.

The secret is short story submissions.

Never Tell Me the Odds

The secret to my bright and sunny mornings is possibilities. I submit a lot of stories, I respond to a lot of freelance jobs, and I usually have novels on submission and other projects in play. The vast majority of these efforts won’t pan out, but every day begins with the possibility that it will end with good news.

That’s powerful stuff. And it’s an addendum to my usual motto that you write exactly zero of the stories you don’t begin, and sell exactly zero of the projects you don’t submit: You also get to be excited about zero of the submissions you don’t make, or the jobs you don’t apply for.

That excitement is like oxygen. Every morning I wake up and it just might be the day I sell a story, or get a new freelance job, or learn someone is going to grossly overpay me to make a film adaptation of one of my novels. Or something else, who knows? The point is, because I keep my level of open potential opportunities high, I get to start every day with this rush of possibility. And, friend, let me tell you: It works. I don’t understand writers who don’t submit and have something in the works all the time for this very reason. Sure, 99% of my submissions, applications, and naked requests for free money fail. Doesn’t matter, because every day I wake up with a fresh scorecard, and that gets me through the rough times.

Of course, my liver also starts each day with a clean(ish) slate, and that helps too, not gonna lie.

One of my goals when putting Writing Without Rules together was to get past the idea that you needed to be an expert, a guru in order to write and publish a book. The whole premise is that if you spend any amount of time talking to me, you start to get the creeping feeling that this guy doesn’t know anything about anything, he’s just making shit up and then you realize that if I can publish all these books, for money, so can you!

So, success at writing doesn’t require expertise in a dozen different skill sets, it only requires one—the actual writing part. It also requires hard work, of course; saying that I’m an absent-minded guy who doesn’t understand business or social media isn’t meant to imply that I’m lazy. And there’s a third aspect to writing and publishing success (and success in general) that people don’t like to discuss: Luck.

90% of Success is Just Showing Up

Luck and its twisted cousin, privilege, make people uncomfortable. People think that if you point out their luck, their privilege, you’re taking away from their accomplishments. The fact is, luck is always a factor. Whether it’s the privilege you were born into or happening to be in the right place at the right time, selling novels and getting a writing career off the ground requires luck. It’s just that simple.

But luck just gets you in the room. It doesn’t actually write the novels or the articles. Being lucky—and acknowledging that luck—doesn’t mean your work isn’t great. They are separate considerations.

I’ve been lucky in my career. Plenty lucky. I’ve also worked my ass off. The former does not erase the latter, but neither does it work the other way around—no matter how hard I work, the fact is that luck has played a role in my career, as it has in most careers. I’m okay with that, and I’m also okay with efforts to spread the luck around more evenly. Success isn’t finite. The fact that some groups that have been underrepresented in publishing for decades—centuries—are finally getting more attention, more deals, more support doesn’t mean that my own career suffers. As long as I’m writing good stuff, I’ll get it published. With a little luck.

The bottom line is: Anyone who pretends that luck has never helped them to success is lying to you, or to themselves.

Last year I submitted a short story to an anthology, and a few weeks ago I got an email informing me that my story had been selected. This is always great news, and it was made even better by the fact that the antho was kind of prestigious and I could expect a bit of attention, so this was more than just a tidy sum of money and an extra credit on my resume.

The email noted that the although the editors had chosen my story, the publisher had the final say, but I figured, what could go wrong?

You see where this is going.

Thanks but No Thanks

Yup, the publisher pulled my story. They had their reasons, and the editor who contacted me to break the news was very awkwardly embarrassed about it, but hey, shit happens. I sold a story and then it got un-sold, and that sucks, but you move on.

Luckily, stuff like this is rare, and usually it’s me doing the un-selling. I once sold a short story to a magazine, but their contract turned out to be very shitty, so I pulled the story. I’ve been ambushed by vanity publishers and had to pull stories. Usually, once you get the acceptance, though, the rest is just details.

Not much you can do about it. Losing opportunities like this is just part of the game, because there are two sides to every sale: The editorial, and the business. And whenever you get a story past the editorial part, there is always the possibility that the contract will be bad, or the terms not what you expected—or that someone on the bean-counting side will object for bean-countery reasons.

The lesson is simple: Don’t brag on your sales until it’s a done deal. When I was sixteen, I sold a novel to a tiny publisher. I immediately began bragging to everyone about, and was very likely insufferable for a very, very long time. Two years later, as I started college, the tiny publisher had gone out of business and had mailed back my manuscript, half-edited. And I had to start admitting to everyone that I wasn’t getting published after all.

It’s part of the game. The fact that the game’s rules were apparently written by a drunk and vengeful god is beside the point.

I’ve often discussed the fact that I’m pretty much the worst judge of my own material, as well as the most clueless person in the room when it comes to my own career. The books I thought would sell usually haven’t, and many of the ideas I thought were nuts when I first heard them have turned out to be the most lucrative decisions I ever made.

In other words, I’m a moron. The only reason for you to take my writing and career advice seriously that I can come up with is the fact that I’ve made every mistake, so you can definitely learn from my general drunken incompetence.

This also means that there’s always a disconnect between the work I’m doing and my feelings towards it and the work that has sold or hasn’t sold. For example, sometimes when working on a new novel I start thinking about whether it can sell—whether a publisher will like it and pay me money for it, and whether it actually appeals to readers assuming that happens. It’s tempting to start comparing it to older books that succeeded or failed, and before long you’re in your own head and the work suffers.

You have to build a Privacy Screen.

Or a Wall

What I mean by that is that you have to disconnect your creative work from your business. While there may be writers in the world who can combine their sense of the market with their creative endeavors (outlining and writing novels based on their sense of what will sell), it’s usually a losing proposition, at least for me. If it works for you, that’s great. It never works for me, and thinking about sales and publishers and contracts while I’m writing usually leads to a lot of dubious decisions in terms of plot, character, and literally everything else that goes into a book.

Instead, when I’m writing a new story, I don’t think about anything except the story part. Years later, after that story has sat for a while and browned up, been revised and had the dark edges trimmed off, that’s when I will tentatively wonder if it has any legs in an economic sense. The best part is, I grow disconnected from my own work over time. A few years after finishing something, it’s like someone else, a stranger, wrote it, so I can usually judge pretty fairly whether something has a chance or not.

Personally, I think this separation is necessary. If I start thinking about a story’s saleability while I’m still writing it, it’s just so easy to talk myself out of what I’m doing out of insecurity and panic.

The cure is obvious, though: Every time I start to think about selling a story while I’m still writing it, I drink until I black out. Usually when I wake up, the story is miraculously finished!

Different writers take different approaches to their careers. There’s no wrong way to pursue your literary goals—some folks want bestsellers and big advances, some folks want more control over their own writing, some folks want to self-publish and some folks want to publish small, smart books. Some folks want to stick with short stories, some people want to spend decades working on a single, epic novel.

You do you. Personally, the only thing I don’t understand about other writers are people who don’t try to basically publish everything they’ve written that’s any good at all.

Paper the World

Me, I basically plan to publish everything I’ve ever completed, even the stuff that is pretty terrible, even the obvious juvenelia. I’ll put out a self-pub book that’s 5,000 pages long called SOMERS SUCK and it will just be all the awful stories I wrote plus several awful novels, plus all that poetry I wrote when I was in my tortured 20s. The world may never recover.

I’m only slightly kidding. I firmly believe that writing—or any creative endeavor—should ultimately lead to getting your work read or viewed or listened to by as large an audience as possible. I believe that if you wait for your work to be polished and perfect enough you will wait forever, for the simple reason that everything I wrote five years ago seems awful to me today, but that is a moving target. The stuff I’m writing today will seem awful five years from now. So judging your own work is a loser’s game—just get it out there and let the world judge you.

So, I submit most of the short stories I write. I have inflicted some mediocre novels on my agent. All in the hopes that maybe I’m wrong about how mediocre they are—after all, we’re the worst judges of our own work, as you may have noticed.

Oh, sure, there are some things that even I know are too terrible to submit. Slowly, short stories I once liked drop off the submission list as I rack up rejections and slowly realize they weren’t very good to begin with. And novels get retired too—although sometimes resurrected if I happen to see an opportunity. But I more or less intend to publish everything, and I put a lot of constant effort into that goal. I’ll likely never achieve it, but I think it’s useful as a career motivator.

Also, I’d love it if people in the future started wearing T-shirts that read SOMERS SUCK. Actually, that would be cool right now.

As you all know, I’m not a complicated man. Give me a cat in my lap, a glass of scotch, and a keyboard and I’m more or less complete. Also, I have a tendency to reduce all of life’s questions to an extremely brief list of bullet points; I am comforted by limited choices, and so I boil everything down to insane levels of generality.

For example, my writing career philosophy (not to be confused with an artistic philosophy), which is essentially three nested rules:

1. It’s better to finish stories than not.
2. It’s better to be published than not.
3. It’s better to be paid than not.

That’s it. Those are the guiding principles of my writing career.

Simple Rules for a Simpleton

Better to finish stories. I make this point a lot, but it bears repeating: You sell exactly zero of the stories and novels you don’t finish. Even if I’m not feeling 100% confident in a story’s success, I try to finish it. I can always revise a mediocre story later. I can’t do anything with a story that isn’t even a story yet.

Better to be published than not. I firmly believe that the only reason for writing, for creating, is to share your ideas and works and let people read them. Possibly to force people to read them, too, but that’s a whole other blog post involving the small private army I’m organizing. The point is, I intend to publish everything I write, someday. And so should you.

Better to be paid. You can’t always control market forces, and you can’t always get paid. But you should aspire to always be paid, because being paid for your work recognizes the value of it, being paid means your publishing partner values your work, and being paid means you might be able to write more.

Those are simple rules, but they make all the difference. Notice there’s a lot of wiggle room with each, though; I don’t see much value in being rigid. Sometimes you might not finish something for a good reason, sometimes you might be okay with not being paid. Guidelines instead of rules, maybe—but useful nonetheless.

On the other hand, my rules for alcohol are even simpler:

1. Whiskey.

There’s an old saying that goes something like ninety percent of success is showing up. The precise figure quote and the attribution changes depending on where you stumble on this gem, but the basic premise is the same: Success is more about doing the work than anything else. Yes, there are other factors—luck, privilege, talent—but ultimately if you don’t show up you’ll never get anywhere, but if you do show up you’ve just increased your chances at success tremendously.

This of course applies to writing, as well. Of course, often there’s nothing to show up for in a writing career; you’re working alone in your room, toiling away, and that’s the showing up part. But there’s another aspect to it that seems so obvious it doesn’t get discussed much: Part of showing up is taking the opportunities you come across.

Yes Man

This seems obvious, right? Not so much. A while ago I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest about my “year of saying yes,” in which I discussed launching my freelance writing career by basically taking any job I could get, no matter how bad the pay was or how boring or distasteful the subject matter was. And I took some low-paying, mind-killing jobs that first year—but I also established myself and paved the way for better-paying, more interesting work because I took every opportunity I could find or manufacture.

Fiction has a similar sort of dynamic. You have to not only read and write consistently, you have to seek and crate opportunities and then take them when they’re offered to you. Don’t just write stories, submit them to markets and contests. Don’t just work on your novel, submit it to agents and publishers (or publish it yourself). If someone offers to pay you to write a story for an anthology, you say yes.

This might seem obvious, but the twist in a writing career is how much you have to create your own opportunities. You can’t sell a story you don’t submit. You can win a contest you don’t enter. You can’t sell a story you don’t write, either. Selling your work requires a lot of research and constant diligence, and sometimes the main lesson regarding making a living as a writer is that you’re going to have to be willing to write stuff you might not necessarily want to write.