Serious Writers Write, Persevere, and Get Published

362 days of the year, I surround myself with writers. I lead creative writing workshops; I take writing workshops; I hang out in cafes with writer-friends; I socialize with writers. But I always feel like I'm the most serious writer I know.

Then I go to a 3-day writers conference and I am surrounded by over four-hundred people who are serious about writing and getting published. I discover that there are lots of people out there who take it more seriously than I do. They actually write 2,500 to 5,000 words per week. That's 500 - 1000 word per day, five days per week.

That might not sound like much, but try it for a year and you'll discover how much commitment and discipline it takes to do that. These are people who write for a living and get published. These are serious writers, career writers, not hobby writers.

So if you want to be a serious writer, which means getting published and eventually earning a living from it, make a commitment, and discipline yourself to write 1000 words per day, at least 5 day a week. That's 2 single-spaced typed pages per day.

So the first lesson I learned this weekend is that serious writers write seriously.

The second lesson I learned is that in order to get published, and eventually earn a living as a freelance writer, you must persevere. During brunch today, I sat next to Kelley Armstrong and I asked her to tell me the time-line of her career. She said, "When I was 22, after graduating from college, I took writers workshops and tried to learn the craft of writing for about 3 years, then got serious about publishing. I got my first publishing contract when I was 30, then it took another year before the book came out. So, it was basically an 8-year apprenticeship, but 9 years before I made any money at it."

My path toward a writing career hasn't been quite that clear-cut. But she suggested that I balance sending out queries and submissions with writing my fourth novel, Journey to Artemisia. That way I keep something floating out there all the time, but don't get obsessed about it.

It's clear from listening to the stories of other published writers that if you write and persevere, you will eventually get published. It's like if you step out your front door and start walking toward San Francisco, you will eventually get there. You can't not get there if you keep moving in that direction.

I wish I would have taken my writing seriously a lot sooner, but it was so pounded into my head how competitive it is. Now I see that competition is not the obstacle to publication. The obstacles to publication are not writing enough and not persevering.

The way I look at it, I KNOW there is no other form of work I want to do other than writing and teaching writing. So I may as well write and persevere. The years are going to pass one way or another, and in five years from now I'll be five years older either way. How lovely it would be to find myself, five years from now, the one standing at the podium giving the keynote speech to 400 hopeful writers, the one signing books, rather than still dreaming about it.

One more lesson I learned this weekend is that commercial and genre fiction are easier to sell than literary or general fiction. Fortunately I'm now half-way through writing a fantasy novel and I think this is probably an excellent move for my career in terms of getting published. If I stick to my goal of 1,000 words per day, I could have the first draft completed in 50 days from now.

I invite you to give yourself a goal and stick with it. The simple act of disciplining yourself to meet your writing goals will make all the difference in the world.