I thought I’d start today’s post with a story about someone – not me – who attended a course on writing childrens’ books.
The average age of the audience was about 60. Most, it seemed, had retired and decided to ‘become’ childrens’ writers, mostly by picking up a pen for the first time and writing. After all, childrens’ books don’t have many words. They’d written letters, diaries, corporate reports and so forth. How hard could it be? So they were asking questions about whether to have the publisher contract read by a solicitor, and how much advance to negotiate.
‘No no’, the facilitator said. ‘Before you can sell anything, you have to learn how to write.’
Fact is that writing is a learned skill like any other. It takes as much time to become fully competent as to become a concert pianist, or a surgeon, or engineer. By this I mean, ‘make it part of your soul’ – unconscious competence. Doing the mechanics of it without thinking – allowing you to focus on the quality. The typical estimate to get there for any skill is about 10,000 hours. Writing is no exception. It includes time spent receiving formal instruction, even if you pick up self-learning after that (most writers do). Most of it is time spent on your own, writing.
Typically, a writer will push out about a million words to get unconsciously competent. Often these are exercises. Usually the process is completed as they swing into their publishing career - two or three books in, even.
Now this is a typewriter I didn’t wear out – my trusty Adler Gabriele 25, bought new in 1983. It survived. Partly because it is built like the proverbial. But mainly because I switched to computer. I still typed around a million words on it, many of these exercises that weren’t published, but which did teach me to write.
I did that. I wore out two typewriters along the way. But wait, I can hear you saying. What about passion? The satisfaction of writing – the pleasure? Sure, absolutely. Passion is essential. And you have to find it satisfying, too. The feel-good factor. That’s certainly why I write.
I think passion translates to a drive to get that competence. To do the hard yards. To be prepared to take lessons. To write. And then throw away what you’ve just written. And write some more.
What’s more, today’s market demands more than just competence as a writer. It’s a crowded world and authors need a whole toolbox of skills. That applies whether you’re self-publishing or going the traditional route. It includes – but is not limited to:
1. Learned and practised writing skills including style, structure, content and ability to write to a specified length.
2. An expertise in the topic they’re writing on (be it fiction or non-fiction).
3. An understanding of the market – how crowded is it, what will work, what won’t, the likely audience. And how to sell the book into it.
4. An understanding of proofing processes, systems and publishing mechanisms.
5. A professional approach – meaning the written material isn’t used to define your sense of self-worth.
It sounds daunting. But it isn’t. Not when fuelled by passion.
I’m going to cover the items above as we go along.
Passion and learning. And that begs a question. Are writers born or made? I think it’s ‘both’. People are born with the aptitude – they want to write; they have to write. But they still have to learn, if they want to succeed. And that learning never stops.
What do you figure?
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013
Coming up this week: Summer inspirations, more on kindness, and sixty-second writing tips.
Good to see some commonsense advice to new or wanna-be writers. With the democratisation of the publishing process all too many writers are rushing to get their work online to see if the world salutes their genius when they really need to do the hard yards to polish their skills first. Its the same as with painting – it’s easy enough to slap some paint on a canvas, but can you convince anyone to buy it if it doesn’t have artistic merit?
Thanks! The problem, I think, is that everybody gets taught how to put words together, it’s an essential life skill. But that is only the first step for ‘writers’, and the old problem of ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ surfaces. Most people can drive, too – but do they drive like The Stig? Not likely, though I bet some people think they do. My ‘Write It Now’ post next week covers off the issue (I already have it written… I run this blog like I ran my regular columns during my journalism jag…Rule No.1 – plan and stack content).
Do you think all writers should be professionally trained? In other words, should they have a master’s degree in writing? Or do you think a self taught education can be just as effective?
I think professional training provides an essential and important basis for any writer, but the majority of the effort – the learning, fuelled by enthusiasm and the joy for it – has to come from the writer themselves. There is no substitute for practise, and that is the ONLY way to get good. The key skill – which I’ll be pursuing in these blog posts – is knowing ‘how to learn’ – what’s important to pick up as a skill, then practising it, and understanding what is ‘good’ writing and what is not.
I am dubious about the benefit of pursuing higher academic qualifications in this field for their own sake, because I don’t think they produce better writers. On my experience of doing it, at the higher levels the main rationale of academia – certainly in the arts – becomes self-driven around ‘intellectualism’ for its own sake, well removed from the real world. Writing – which is all about communicating emotions to people – is a practical matter and, while the theory is essential to know, carrying on down that path doesn’t add a lot.
Putting that in a practical terms, here in New Zealand there is an academic writing community which includes some very good writers, but to me their work is not much different from the good writing produced by some of our other authors who are not in the academy. Sometimes it is worse, because it is written and framed around content designed to bestow academic status. Whether it is actually good writing, or accessible to the wider public – to me, a key arbiter of quality – is another matter. Usually it fails on this point.
The other down side of the academy, certainly in New Zealand, which is a very small place, is that it also seems to attract and cultivate people who define theirself-worth via their academic status and become irrationally vicious if they think this is threatened. There are some self-proclaimed authors I can think of who don’t particularly write anything, but enjoy employment in universities or otherwise on the fringes of such in-crowds, and wander around pretentious literary gatherings pronouncing their status as ‘poets’ (apparently a superior form of ‘writer’) and issuing condescending put-downs of well-published commercial authors who are not part of their tight little in-crowds. I am not exaggerating.
“,,,know what you don’t know.” When I started getting more serious about writing, I remember saying to a friend, “I wish I could remember what they taught us about sentence structure back when we were in school.” Like many things, the more I do them, the more I realize how little I actually know. but, the learning is almost half the fun.
[...] post in question was titled, “Write it now, part 3: passion and learning – the writer’s toolbox.” I highly recommend popping over there and giving it a read. Amazing [...]