In this WMG Writer’s Guide, international bestselling author Kristine
Kathryn Rusch discusses the destructive ways peer
workshops and the quest for perfection derail many
writers’ careers. Listening to critics and academics—amateur and
professional—often strips out the joy of writing. And a failure to
recognize writing as a business furthers the potential damage.

But Rusch
offers hope for writers who have suffered at the hands of
critique—external and internal—and outlines a path to healing.

The Pursuit
of Perfection

And How It Harms Writers

Kristine
Kathryn Rusch

Copyright Information

The
Pursuit of Perfection

Copyright © 2013 by
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

First published in slightly
different form on kristinekathrynrusch.com as the blog posts, “Perfection,” “Careers,
Critics, and Professors,” and “Writers and Business” June 27, 2012, July 4,
2012, and July 11, 2012.

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright
© 2013 by WMG Publishing

Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Iqoncept/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be
reproduced in any form without permission.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Perfection

Careers, Critics, and
Professors

Writers and Business

Copyright Information

About the Author

Introduction

In the summer of 2012, I taught a class
for professional writers in the short story. You’d think that pros would
already know how to write a short story, but many of them do not. It’s a
separate art form from novels, and it requires different attitudes.

That workshop reminded me, as every craft
workshop I teach does, how destructive the modern teaching techniques are for
fiction writers. Most never make it through the classes or peer workshops. Most
wannabe fiction writers give up their dreams after one semester of a creative
writing workshop or table their first novel after it goes through a rigorous
critique.

I spend most of my time in the craft
workshops that I teach repairing damage done years, sometimes decades, earlier.
That damage isn’t deliberately malicious. It comes from the assumption that
perfect stories not only exist, but can be revised
into existence.

That assumption is not only misguided; it’s
destructive. And I hate seeing what it has done to generations of writers.

I write a nonfiction blog on my website
www.kristinekathrynrusch.com every Thursday. After I finished
that June workshop, I blogged about the wrong-headed notion of perfection, and
received hundreds of comments in response. Those commenters asked
questions, of course, but they also gave their stories. Many of those stories
ended with “and that’s when I gave up on being a professional writer” or some
similar sentence.

My heartbreak increased. I answered a lot
of those comments on-site, but they inspired me to write two more blog posts
and do some digging into the history of peer workshops.

By peer workshops, I mean those workshops
in which everyone, from the professor (or editor or writer-leader) to the
unpublished students, gets to weigh in on the manuscript before them. Many of
these workshops have a no-holds-barred policy: the critiquers
can say whatever they want as meanly as they want and at whatever length they
choose. I’ve personally heard critiques from beginning writers, wannabe
writers, and writer-hangers-on (who have never written a word, but say they
will) that have lasted 20 minutes or more, often on stories of less than 3,000
words.

Someone might say something positive
about the work, but the writer never remembers that. The writer remembers the
excruciating evisceration of a fledgling story that seemed to go on forever.

So if traditional peer workshops and the
quest for perfection damage a writer, what will help them?

I explore all of that in this short book.
It’s an edited version of all three blog posts. I left some of the immediacy
here, because there is a lot of raw material. If you want to see the comments, go
to my website, click on The Business Rusch tab, and
hit the link for the post called “Perfection.” Read the comments there, and on
the next two posts.

If I don’t convince you that this method
of teaching writing is seriously flawed, then maybe the commenters will.

For those of you who have suffered damage
in a quest for perfection, I hope this short volume helps you on the road to
healing. I hope the rest of you find something of value here as well.

Whatever you think of this short book,
please realize that I wish you the best in your writing endeavors.

—Kristine
Kathryn Rusch

Lincoln
City, OR

December
31, 2012

Perfection

At every craft workshop I
teach, I make at least one writer cry. I wrote this chapter while teaching a
short story workshop for professional writers. The writers who attend are
workshop-hardened folk, people who have been eviscerated by the best of them,
people who come to my workshops having heard that I make writers cry, expecting
me to be the most vicious critiquer of all.

How do I bring writers to
tears? Usually by saying this:

I loved this story. It’s
wonderful. Mail it.

That’s my entire critique.

Is the story perfect? Of course not. No story is. Not a one. No matter how many
times it’s “polished” and “fixed” and “improved.” No one can write a perfect
story.

If such a thing existed,
then we would all read the same books and enjoy them equally. We would watch
the same movies and need reviewers to tell us only which movie is perfect and
which one isn’t. We would buy the same comics, again, going only for the comic
that is perfect, and ignoring all the others.

Am I telling people to
write crap? No. Because the choice isn’t between crap and
perfection. Those are false choices.

I learned this lesson long
ago. Dean Wesley Smith and I were visitors at a writing workshop taught by
science fiction writer and editor Algis Budrys. One of the early volumes of Writers of the
Future, which he had edited, had just appeared, and he asked the students
to read one of the stories in the volume.

Then, without telling Dean
and me what he was doing, he asked us to comment on the story.

Here’s what I remember of
the piece: It was 2,000 words long. I think we spoke more than 2,000 words in
our elegant, impressive critiques.

Algis looked at both of us
sadly. Then he said, “Ignore them. The story is wonderful—or at least it
is to this editor.”

He had expected us to
praise the story, thinking we all had the same taste. Instead, Dean and I both
had gone after the story in critique mode. When a reader critiques something,
he goes after it by searching for what is wrong.

And he will find something.
Something is always wrong. From an infelicitous turn of phrase to a plot point
that could have been stronger, something about the story does not work.

As I’m teaching this
concept to my workshop-experienced students, I always begin by asking them
this, “What’s wrong with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

Well, we’re all raised to
believe that Shakespeare is a god who never could do anything wrong. Had
he done anything wrong, had his stories been less-than-perfect, we wouldn’t be
reading them? Right?

Wrong.

If William
Shakespeare—professional writer—had turned A Midsummer Night’s
Dream in at a workshop I taught, I would have told him this:

“Bill, lose at least two of
your endings. The main story of the play ends in Act IV, Scene 2—and then
you go on for two more scenes. All of these endings would work. Pick one.”

Bill Shakespeare, dutiful workshopper that he is, would nod sadly, go back to his
room, and delete one of the most favorite and quoted scenes in all of English
literature. Puck turns to the audience and says,

If we shadows have
offended,

Think but this, and all is
mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did
appear.

I would have said to Bill, “Lovely.
Thematically significant. Beautifully written. Lose
it. You can do the same thing elsewhere.”

Yeah, right. My harsh
words, spoken with authority, and Workshopper Bill’s
insecurity would have stolen 400 years of enjoyment from audiences all over the
world.

Anything can be critiqued.
Criticizing something is easy. It makes the critiquer
feel smart, and just a little bit superior to the writer.

But that kind of critique
serves no real purpose, because that kind of critique is wrong from the moment
the critiquer picks up the story or the manuscript or
the 400-year-old play.

Readers read for enjoyment.
They vote for what they like with their cold hard cash. Traditional publishers
who recently ventured into the world of free online e-book promotions were
stunned to realize that people who receive a book for free are more apt to
write a vicious, nasty review of that book than people who paid money for the
same book.

There are a few reasons for
that. One is that people see no value in something they get for free.

But the one reason that’s
relevant to this essay is this: If people have paid a little for a book, they
have a vested interest in it. They take a small bit of the blame if the reading
experience didn’t turn out exactly like they hoped. They should have looked at
the cover more closely, perhaps, or read a snippet of the opening. But they
didn’t. So they got a book they didn’t like. It was an accident. They’ll do
better next time.

Readers are more realistic
than writers. Readers understand that many books out there in the universe won’t
be to their taste. All sorts of marketing tools have sprung up over the
centuries to help readers find works that will be to their taste. From cover
art to genre categories to back cover blurbs, all these things exist to help a
reader choose the right book for them—a book they won’t regret
purchasing. A book they will enjoy.

When a reader samples an
e-book, she gets a small portion of the novel. If it’s to her taste, she will
then decide whether or not to purchase. But if the book is
really, really good, the reader will punch that “buy” button just to see what
happens next regardless of price. (That’s how a lot of e-books priced
over $10 sell to people who swear they’ll never pay more than $9.99 for an
e-book. The reader samples, gets hooked, and buys, without checking price at
all.)

What does that have to do
with critique? Simple. Critiquers get the manuscript
for free and they’re asked to criticize it. Of course, they will find
something wrong with it. In that circumstance, we all will.

So I change my students’
mindset to a reader/editor mindset. How do I do it? By giving them only three
valid responses to something they’ve read:

1. I liked what I read.

2. I quit on page [insert
number here].

3. I liked what I read and
I would have bought this.

Book and magazine editors
don’t have time to read every manuscript that crosses their desks, and
certainly don’t have time to critique them. Editors want to find something the
readers will enjoy. Better yet, the editors want those people to return for a
second bite from the apple. So they want the readers to enjoy the first book,
and come back for the second by the same author. In fact, the editors want
readers to return to the publishing house again and again, which is why
imprints exist. (If you liked this book by Suzy Q. Writer, then try this book
by Jane X. Author, published under the same imprint.)

In other words, editors
also read for enjoyment. And if they’re not enjoying a book on page 2, they’ll
jettison that book. The only time they use their editing superpowers on that
book is if they bought it sight unseen from a professional writer and can’t
reject it for cause. Then they try to help the writer “improve” that book, when
really, if the editor were an average reader, he would have simply tossed the
book aside and asked for another book (maybe even by somebody else).

Harsh? Not really. Not
compared to a thirty-minute critique of a romance novel by a hard-science
fiction writer forced to read said romance novel as part of a workshop. You ain’t heard harsh until then.

But I’m sure all you
writers out there have heard just such a critique. And many of you have taken it
to heart. I know dozens of writers who quit writing because they couldn’t stand
the pain they received from their peer-level writing workshop. That’s a
tragedy. How many stories have we lost? How many Bill Shakespeares
have dumped the “unnecessary” second and third endings from their immensely
enjoyable stories because some idiot told them to?

I don’t let students drone
on and on about a story, especially if they don’t like it. I will
occasionally give the student something to improve the story, but before I do,
I remind the student that 1) My word has equal weight to every other reader’s
word in the room; 2) I can be wrong; and 3) ignore everything I say if you
disagree with me.

I go last, after I’ve heard
the rest of the workshop. If anyone “buys” the manuscript at all and I didn’t
like the manuscript or had found “flaws,” I remind the writer that someone
already loved it and was willing to spend cold, hard cash on it.

Often, I tell writers this:
Do not touch this story. Mail it. Everyone in the room liked it but me.
Therefore what I have to say is irrelevant.

In other words, I never
tell a student to make a story perfect. I often tell a student that the story
is really good and needs to get out into the world where readers can find it.

I also teach writers bits and pieces of craft, things they might not be
aware of. I don’t want them to create my perfect story. I want them to
write stories that only they can tell.

So many writers table
perfectly good stories because someone—often someone with power (an editor,
a writer with a few novels under her belt, a well-published nonfiction
writer)—will nitpick the story to death. Or suggest revisions that will
alter the story dramatically. If the story already works, who cares if it has
three endings? Those of us who don’t like the story don’t know if the people
who loved the story loved it because of those three endings, not in
spite of them.

When I became an editor, I
learned just how important taste is. The difference between the short stories
in Analog and
Asimov’s, two of the science fiction
digest magazines (that now have e-book editions each month if you haven’t seen
them before), isn’t that there is such thing as an Analog story or an Asimov’s
story that I as a long-time reader can tell you about. The difference is in
the taste of their editors. Trevor Quachri of Analog
likes different kinds of stories than Sheila Williams of Asimov’s does.
Occasionally their tastes overlap. Most often, they do not.

If there were such a thing
as a perfect sf story, then both editors would always
buy the same stories, and you couldn’t tell the magazines apart.

As readers, you all know
this. As writers, you forget it.

And when you forget it, you
make the weirdest decisions.

You give control of your
product to the wrong people. You submit romance novels to science fiction
markets (and wonder why the editor didn’t read your manuscript—was it the
passive sentence on page 32?). You try to revise to please everyone in your
peer-level writing group.

You self-publish your
novel, make sure it’s edited and copyedited, add a fantastic cover, and then
revise to address concerns posted by reviewers who gave your book one star.
That’s complete and utter idiocy. Seriously.

Some nutty brand new writer
with one or two novels to her name posted a blog on Digital Book World
espousing just that. She says writers should always address their critics’
concerns.

I read that and nearly
snorted my tea all over my iPad. If I even tried to
address all the nasty reviews I’ve gotten over the years, I’d never write
anything new. If I tried to address all the somewhat valid criticisms I’ve
gotten on my books, I’d still spend forever revising.

Only a writer with one or
two publications to her credit would have time to even think such a thing is
viable.

Her blog post has gone
viral, and I’ve seen new writers everywhere wring their hands over the fact
that they now have to pay attention to their one-star reviews and constantly
revise.

I’m here to tell you this:
If you want a career as a writer, ignore your critics.

When the book is finished,
when the book is published for heaven’s sake, then it’s done.
Irrevocably done. Mistakes and all.

And there will be mistakes.
Lots of them.

One of my copy editors has
been comparing my final manuscripts to the previously published editions of my
novels as a final prep for the books’ reissues. She’s done that for two years
now, and she’s found many things that copy editors missed. (Failing to
capitalize Diet Coke in a novel published by Dell, for instance.) We’re fixing
those tiny copyediting things because WMG Publishing is reissuing the books.
Reissues always need proofs as they go into a new format because the format itself
can introduce errors.

But she’s been having fits
over one of the latest two Grayson novels, which will be reissued this summer.
She complained in person to me about it. I frowned and said that I seemed to
recall a bad copyedit on one of the Grayson books.

She wrote an e-mail to me later saying, “You really did have a
horrible [copy] editor on this one. S/he/it (and yes, that really does say a
lot about it) faithfully reproduced nearly every misspelled word, and
introduced some errors...in the ms. Yeesh!”

In other words, the entire
book was riddled with typos—and yes, we’re fixing them. But am I taking
the opportunity to revise the book? No, I’m not. The book stands as it did when
I originally wrote it. Readers loved those books. I’m not going to try to
invalidate their reading experience by “improving” on it. I might take out the
thing that they love.

A writer whose work I adore
has revised my favorite novel of hers twice, publishing each revision as a new
edition, neither of which I will buy. I loved that first edition of
that book. I don’t care how much better she’s gotten as a craftsperson. That
book didn’t need a word changed, in my opinion.

At the workshop, one of the
students pre-critiqued his own manuscript right after I called his name. We
were well into the workshop by then; the writers knew the drill. We’d talk
about the manuscript and then the author could speak. But he picked up the
manuscript and volunteered to throw it away before we could comment on it.

Another student turned on
him and growled, “I loved this story.” Then everyone else piled on. Yep,
most of us had loved that story and all of us who had loved it were deeply
offended that he thought it flawed.

When you learn a new bit of
craft, when your skills have improved, when a reader points out a valid
storytelling mistake in your published book that would take a complete revision
of that book, what should you do?

Leave the book alone.

Incorporate what you’ve
learned into the next book. You’ll learn something new on that book that you can
then incorporate into the next book. Keep writing, keep learning, keep improving. But for God’s sake, don’t look backwards.
Those books are done.

How do you know when a
manuscript is done? That’s trickier. I think you should trust the process, fix
the nits, and move to the next book. Writing is a subconscious art, not a
conscious one. You heard your first story before you could speak, so your
subconscious knows a lot more about writing than your conscious brain ever
will.

Trust that.

Many writers don’t believe
what I just wrote, and that’s fine. You need to define it for yourself. Set a
limit on revisions, set a limit on drafts, set a time limit. (My book must be
done in August, no matter what.) Then release your book on the unsuspecting
public.

The book will never be
perfect. Take the advice that those of us who’ve worked in broadcasting learned
long ago. I think it was best expressed by Tina Fey in Bossy
Pants: The show doesn’t go on when it’s finished; it goes on
because it’s 11:30.

Exactly. At some point, you
must simply let go of that book or story or play and move to the next.

If our workshopping
friend Bill Shakespeare strove for perfection, we would never have heard of
him. We wouldn’t have gotten all of that marvelous writing, all of those
wonderful—flawed—plays. (You don’t think A Midsummer Night’s
Dream is the only one riddled with possible workshop-identifiable errors,
do you? Think of Romeo and Juliet. Why didn’t those crazy lovesick kids
just move to another town????)

With so many publishing options,
it’s harder now for a writer to believe in her work. Does she go to traditional publishing and ask them to validate her book?
Does she self-publish and hope for the best?

I understand that. I also
think that writers need to understand that they’re not writing for one editor
or agent or for a small subset of people like a critique group. Writers write
for readers.

And it’s up to the writer
as to how to find those readers. As Sarah A. Hoyt said in last week’s comments,
ask yourself, “How will this book best reach its audience?” The key words here
are “book,” “reach,” and “audience.”

Not “How do I impress
Editor A?” or “How do I get an agent?” But how does this book best reach
its audience? Sometimes that answer is through traditional publishing.
Sometimes that answer is to become an indie writer.

The question should never
ever be, “How do I write the perfect novel?” because the perfect novel or short
story or play or article or essay does not exist.

A better question is, “How
do I make the book the best it can be?” That you have to
answer for yourself. Me, I make sure I have outside help—a
dedicated first reader or two or three before my book goes to my editor
in traditional publishing or to the people I hire when I self-publish. A copy
editor in both cases to make sure that my dyslexia doesn’t make my books
impossible to read. A “stet” stamp so that I can disagree with said copy editor
when I wanted a particular misspelling or poorly constructed sentence to stand for
story reasons. The best possible cover. The best possible interior design.

Sometimes I get a say in
those last two things. Sometimes I don’t.

I also don’t always get a
say in how the books get distributed either. Remember, my goal is to find my
audience, and when my traditional publishers choose not to pursue every
distribution option open to them (because it’s too much work or there’s “too
little return”), I get angry.

My readership varies from
book to book, series to series, genre to genre. I never know who will like
something I wrote. I just have to give that person the opportunity to find what
I did.

Sometimes readers like my
work. Sometimes they don’t. Once the book is released into the wilds of
publishing, however, it’s done. Finished. I will not revise a published book.

Is my craft better than it
was twenty years ago when I published my first novel? Oh, hell, yes. But my
craft is so much better that I could never have written that novel now. Because
there’s something in the middle of it that no established writer, steeped in
craft, would ever attempt. At the time I wrote the book, I didn’t know you
couldn’t do that thing, so I did it.

Had I workshopped
that novel, more experienced writers would have told me to remove that thing.
Yet that thing is what readers remark on the most about that novel.

When you strive for
perfection in your writing, you’re dooming yourself to perpetual failure. When
you strive to be the best you can be, you will have a fulfilling life.

Writers who are always
improving, always learning, move forward. They are secure in the knowledge that
the book they wrote ten years ago is the best book it could have been given
their level of craft and their understanding of the art of writing at the
time they finished the book. They’re better now,
so they write new things, explore new pathways.

They grow.

They also realize that they
have a career, not a novel. The people who tell you to endlessly revise,
the people who tell you not to try something new until you’ve mastered the old,
the people who believe that you should make every word perfect before you move
onto a new project, those people don’t have writing careers. They might have
things that seem like writing careers, like a few published stories, one
or two novels.

But they don’t make their
living from their craft (in other words, publishing their writing). They also
approach storytelling from the point of view of perfection, not the
point of view of enjoyment.

If a flawed novel
entertains, it has done its job.

How do you know if a novel
entertains? Talk to its fans. Look at its sales figures. See how many people
recommend it to their friends.

How do you learn to be the
best writer you can be? Step one: Read other people’s work for enjoyment.
Stop critiquing manuscripts. Stop thinking everything can be perfect.

Then write a lot. Practice, practice, practice. Find your audience—and respect
them.

After all, they’re forking
out their hard-earned cash to pay for one of your stories. If they buy more of
your work, then you’re doing something right.

Perfection in
publishing—like perfection in life—does not exist.

So why do people cry in my
craft workshops? Essentially because I tell them they don’t have to be perfect.
They just need to have fun. They need to share that fun with their readers.
Writers understand that. We all do. We like to share our work—the best
work we can do—with other people. Not perfect work. The best. Even if it has two additional unnecessary endings.

Like this.

Careers, Critics, and Professors

I just spent forty-five
minutes clicking through various websites on careers in the arts to double
check one of my assumptions from my past. When I graduated from high school,
everyone I knew casually would have thought that I would have become a
politician or a musician. My interests seemed to be in public speaking and performing
music. Many of my friends knew I wrote, but those friends would have guessed
that any writing career I chose would have been in journalism—and it was,
for a while.

When I went to college, I
would walk past the music school and see the notices on the door about
auditioning. Auditioning scared the piss out of me. Music performance scares me
to death. It still does. I’m a half-assed musician. I can sight-read extremely
well—can actually hear the music in my head when I read the
music—and I get to the point where I can play what I’m seeing on the page
(or can’t play it in the case of some piano pieces because my hands aren’t
large enough), and I move onto another piece of music. I don’t want to master
that piece of music; I just want to understand it. I suspect, had I gone
through the doors of those two different music schools at my two different
schools, I would have become a composer. Yep, the creative bent always remains
toward creating my own stuff, not doing someone else’s.

(And jazz, which is often
about improvisation, requires a mastery before you get
to improvisation on stage, which meant I would have had to conquer my stage
fright to get there. Oddly, I don’t have stage fright when speaking publicly,
especially extemporaneously. I do whenever I play music, sing, or work off a
script before an audience. Yeah, weird. I know.)

Anyway, after writing about perfection in my business
blog, I found myself thinking about education and
attitudes and training, which is what led me to the music schools. I wanted to
see if my undergraduate assumptions were correct.

What were those
assumptions? I assumed that as a musician-in-training, I would have to perform.
I also assumed that the music school would train me for a musical career in any
one of a dozen disciplines, including performance and making a living as a
professional musician, not just as a professional teacher.

But I wasn’t sure that my
assumptions were correct. So, today I researched. I not only found that the
music schools I didn’t attend put a career in performance, conducting,
composing, and arranging front and center, well before any teaching or
research, but also that there’s a National Association of Schools of Music,
which provides accreditation for music schools around the country, setting
standards for those schools. Both music schools I avoided were accredited.

Before those of you who are
familiar with all of this jump all over me, I know, I
know. Everything is filled with politics, particularly universities. I’m the
daughter of a professor, the sister of two professors, the sister-in-law of yet
another professor, and I spent decades in and around higher education.

I also know that music
schools, particularly those at universities, tend to focus on classical music
(although some also have prestigious programs in other musical disciplines,
like the University of Idaho does in jazz).

I understand all is not as
it seems from a quick website search.

However, I did a similar
website search for my home university’s graduate program in creative writing. This
program is (according to its website) ranked third in the country for a
Creative Writing MFA.

I poked around the site and
didn’t see much mention of a career in publishing at all. In fact, the only
mention came through the list of visiting authors, who would spend time
discussing “the academic job market or the ins and outs of publishing.”

I dug deeper into the
website, and it became clear the benefits of the MFA program in Creative
Writing are an opportunity to edit the school’s literary journal, and the
opportunity to teach courses in Creative Writing and English Composition.

Training in how to publish
works doesn’t exist, nor is there any real mention of how to have a
non-teaching career in publishing. The only hint of that comes from this: there
will be visiting editors and agents who are “on the lookout for the next
generation of American literature.”

I saw the name of one
visiting “professional” who is currently scamming literary authors with a
horrendous contract and promise of major publication. This particular
author/editor is actually buying ownership of the unsuspecting writer’s
property in the contract he offers, and paying that writer a pittance.

Am I bashing my former
university’s creative writing program here? No. In fact, nothing I’ve told you is new to me.

I learned about that
program back when I was a hotheaded journalist, newly returned from the Clarion
Writers Workshop. For an article I was writing for the local indie paper, I saw
the then-head of the Creative Writing division of the
English Department and asked him why his writing program didn’t feature
published writers or emphasize careers in writing.

He took my questions very
well. First of all, he said, he didn’t believe that genre writing was writing
(just like, at the time, there were music professors who didn’t believe that
popular music was music). He stated that the program as designed was to help
the MFA candidates become PhD candidates in Creative Writing so that they could
get prestigious jobs teaching creative writing at major universities.

He also pointed out,
correctly, that I should have researched the creative writing program before
taking classes there, to see if it fit my goals as a student. (I didn’t have
the heart to tell him that at the time I was in his program, I only took the
writing classes to fit in my fiction writing along with my homework for my
history degree.)

He also told me that (at
the time) there were no programs at reputable universities that offered the
kind of writing education that I wanted. Clarion itself, which was then
sponsored by Michigan State University, was a graduate course taken for a
handful of credits, not an entire degree program.

So, why am I talking about
this now? Because a number of things happened in the past few weeks that got me
thinking about the deeply ingrained attitudes that writers have about writing,
their work, and their futures.

First, the response
to my blog post on perfection was a
revelation to me. I did expect a lot of comments. Certainly
not as many as I got, however.

I fully expected to have
more questions about what I teach. I also expected to have a lot of negative
comments. Now I might have circumvented those by telling people that if they
were rude, they couldn’t comment, but I figure people who disagree with me
should be mature enough to do so politely. I’m told there’s a lot of
disagreement on writer boards and other listserves,
but I haven’t followed any of the links I got sent because I’ve said my piece
and flame wars don’t interest me.

What surprised me was that
the bulk of the 200-plus comments are from writers who feel relief, who are
happy to be released from this idea of perfection, who are pleased that they
can just write what they want without fear of having to continually revisit
past work without doing anything new. See for yourself. It’s startling. (At
least I think so.)

So I’ve been mulling over
the comments, both the content of them and the sheer number of them. The post
went viral, which I expected, but not because of the folks who disagreed with
me, but because the folks who agree with me are passing it along. (Usually it’s
the angry folks who share.) So that’s a surprise as well.

Then last week, I received
yet another Google alert about a post of mine someone disagrees with. This
time, it was something I said about promotions. The person who disagreed with
me was convinced I didn’t know what I was talking about when it came to the
necessity of promoting work, particularly for a new writer. The writer actually
said that I had never had a point in my career where I was unknown, which made
me laugh. Um, we were all beginning writers once upon a time.

The writer challenged me to
self-publish things under a super-secret pen name, and was convinced I would understand then why new writers need
to promote. I actually responded to this writer’s blog post—I usually don’t—because
of the challenge, and because I’d met that challenge years ago.

I have four things up
online under four super-secret pen names, things which
I put up with no promotion. One outsells everything I do under my name and my
known pen names. One isn’t doing very well at all, and two are doing okay. All
outsell some titles I have under the Rusch name. So I
have met the challenge, plus some.

I had to explain to this
new writer that back in the Dark Ages of Publishing when I started there was no
such thing as Twitter, blogging, Facebook, and the like. If a writer wanted to
promote her work, she had to spend more than her advance to do so. Because even
back then, publishers didn’t promote 95% of the books they published. Those
books would sink or swim based on sales in bookstores that might or might not
carry the books. Some of my early work wasn’t even listed with description and
a cover photo in the publisher’s catalog. Just a one line
listing under “Also Available” which was arranged by genre.

So how did a writer sell a
lot of copies of her book? She wrote another. Back in the Dark Ages of
Publishing, before the conglomerate bean counters got involved, most writers
(even new writers) got a multibook contract. Because
back then, publishers knew it was the number of titles on the shelf that sold
books, not the quality of an as-yet-unread single title, that got a reader to
pick up a book.

So I not only met the
blogger’s challenge in this new world of publishing, I met that challenge every
time I had traditionally published a book with a brand new name on the spine.

As I wrote my response, I
realized that this writer/blogger didn’t have a clue about a writing career.
It was all about the book. The book had to be promoted because it might sink.
And that, according to the writer/blogger, would be a catastrophe.

This writer/blogger is not
alone. Most of what I do in my nonfiction and in my teaching is about training
writers to think about a career, not about a book or a single story.

I continually teach
professional writers just that very concept: write and release. Write and
release. Get your work out there. Build an oeuvre. We don’t talk about business
much—at least overtly—but we do talk about it all the time as I
show them how to get rid of the roadblocks that they, and their training, have
put in the way of the writing.

The thing, though, that
rattled through my head was a realization about my friend Bill Trojan. Bill was
a bookseller and a dear friend who died in August of 2011, leaving his entire estate to my husband Dean Wesley Smith and Bill’s friend Larry
Woodside. Dean was also the executor. Bill was a collector and a hoarder, so we
now have 4500 square feet of boxes, many of which are filled with amazing
treasures and many of which are not.

Dean’s been sorting through
those collections, keeping some of the books and setting everything else aside
to deal with later. By some of the books, I mean rooms filled with shelves of
books. For most of May and June, Dean used my desk at the office as a place to
sort. (I’m not there much, obviously.)

Every time I went through, I
saw books—famous books, blockbuster books—that I had forgotten
about. Some were published in the 1970s. Some in the 1980s.
Some before I was born, with many going all the way back to the dawn of the mass market paperback era.

Those books that I
remembered often made a huge splash, made someone’s name—at least for a
little while. And then the book(s) and the author disappeared.

I finally understood a
comment that Bill had made to me shortly after I met him: He believed all
published writers were “neo-pros” (a derogatory science fiction term for new
professional) until they’d published at least ten novels.

I thought ten was an
arbitrary number, just something Bill had pulled out
of his hat. But, as Dean sorted and organized, I realized that ten wasn’t
arbitrary at all.

First, ten mass market
paperback books filed alphabetically by author fill a quarter of an average
bookshelf. When publishers increased all book sizes and started demanding
authors write longer books, that ten-book gathering started filling half a
shelf. Which made the books—and the author—noticeable to the
average book browser (back in the day when books were actually on
bookstore shelves).

It was more than that,
though. It was amazing to see the number of writers who had that blockbuster or
critically acclaimed novel who only published one or two or three books
afterwards. And sometimes not even that many. Yes, the
book came out to great reviews. Yes, it sold tens of thousands of copies. And then what? The next book wasn’t as good (usually sophomore
efforts aren’t) or the third got critically savaged (critics often respond
poorly to success), and the writer either changed names, or couldn’t sell
another book because it wasn’t as good as that first book.

Or the writer realized just
how hard this business is, and how much effort it takes to actually make a
living at it, and went on to other things.

What surprised me the most
were the working writers. They had twenty, fifty, one hundred books under one name, and even more books under other names. Those
books, when shelved alphabetically by author, didn’t take a quarter or a half
of a shelf. They took two, three or four shelves all by themselves. And
that didn’t count the pen-name books.

Some of those books are
truly forgettable. I found a book the other day by a rude, snotty writer (now
dead) who had been unbelievably nasty to me in person about the “literary”
quality of my work. That book made me laugh. Because the book I found was a
tie-in novel, published in the late 1960s, for a cult TV show (not Star Trek).
This writer had written dozens of tie-ins in the 1960s and 1970s, then berated
me for doing the same in the 1990s.

Maybe I had heard him wrong
way back when. Maybe he hadn’t been criticizing my literary abilities, but
concerned about the time the tie-in work took away from my other writing, and
expressing it badly. After all, like most writers, his social skills
were…um…lacking to say the least.

Or maybe he was just a mean
old jerk. That was possible too. But, by Bill’s definition, this guy had a
career. A long, varied, and, with some titles, storied career. One of his books
is a mainstream classic. A couple are science fiction
classics. Out of the hundred-plus books that he wrote, of course.

That number isn’t unusual.
Dickens wrote a lot of novels, short stories, plays and nonfiction. I was going
to include the actual number here, but I just Googled
him and discover that the Interweb disagrees with
itself about the exact number. I’m seeing everything from 22 to 34 novels, and “dozens”
to “hundreds” of other works.

My point, however, is that
only a few of Dickens’ works are considered classics, although I disagree with
one website that said the most famous of his works is Oliver Twist. The
most famous is A Christmas Carol, because it has so permeated the
culture. Of course, that wasn’t a novel, but a short work, which we would call
a novella.

If you look at all classic
works by a famous long-dead author, you’ll find dozens of other works that the
author wrote that aren’t nearly as famous or nearly as well thought of. If you
look at those famous authors, you won’t find one work behind their name, but an
entire career.

So why, in that instance,
do we spend all our time trying to write the perfect short story, the perfect
novel? Why are our writing workshops and our universities training writers to “improve”
only one or two works?

Take a look at the
beginning of my essay again. If you go to music school, you go knowing that you’ll
have to perform, knowing that you’ll spend time learning all of the disciplines
in the profession—from performing to conducting to composing to teaching
to research—before deciding which discipline is for you.

If you go to a creative
writing program, you’ll learn about teaching and research and oh, yeah, you
might be lucky enough to be discovered.

And the universities aren’t
the only ones with that attitude. The peer-level workshops also focus on one
story, one novel, one sale. Not on careers. Not on
business. Not on anything long-term that will teach a writer how to survive the
ups and downs of the business.

We as a culture don’t give
wannabe writers the tools they need to survive in the real world.

We give those tools to
budding musicians. We even give those tools to budding artists (they can get a
graphic arts degree or a fine arts degree, but the choice is made in
graduate school, not undergrad). Theater majors learn how to put on plays,
act in them, direct them, stage manage them.
Journalism majors learn how to write for publication and often publish in
professional venues. Broadcast majors learn how to work (and sometimes intern)
in radio and television with the hope of getting a job in those mediums. I
could go on.

Creative writing, so far as
I can tell, is the only degree a student can get that doesn’t offer any
study of how to make a career as a professional who makes her living at the
craft described in the title of the degree. In fact, in most universities,
creative writers are told from day one that they cannot make a living at
their chosen profession.

And that’s
just bullshit.

(Which I have debunked
dozens of times. Go to my website and look at the contents for both the Business Rusch and the
Freelancer’s Survival Guide if you want
more. Or look at Dean’s post on this topic in his Killing The Sacred Cows of
Publishing.)

So, if we’re not training
writers to be professionals who make a living at their chosen career, what are
we training them to be?

Critics.

We’re training critics and
editors (kinda, but there are actual degree programs
in editing/publishing) and professors. Think about this professor part, as
well, because according to at least three websites I looked at, these
professors-in-training are teaching creative writing courses as early as their
first year of graduate school.

In other words,
nonprofessional writers are teaching creative writing at the university level,
often as assistants, in preparation for teaching creative writing at the
university level. People with no experience with the
profession at all.

And here’s something even
screwier. I (and writers like me) can’t get a teaching position at any university
in the creative writing department because I don’t have a master’s degree or a
Ph.D. Even if I had an advanced degree, I’d need one in Creative Writing or at
least in English to get said job, learning from people who know nothing about
my profession and who, later in life, often come to me to learn how to be
professional writers.

For more than seventy
years, the teaching of creative writing has worked like this. The professional
workshops affiliated with universities often had English professors overseeing
the entire thing, and all of those workshops dealt with critique only,
not with the business of a writing career itself even if the guest lecturers
were professional writers.

Is it any wonder that
writers who go to peer-level workshops get savaged week after week? Is it any
wonder that writers who manage to publish one thing believe that they have to
promote, promote, promote that one thing? Is it any
wonder that writers have no idea that long-time writers actually had to work to
get where we are?

After all, we successful
writers were anointed by some editor/agent who came to our writing workshop and
discovered our talent, right? Right? The myth is that we didn’t work at getting
published; we worked at improving our story. And once our writing was perfect,
we were accepted in the club of published writers.

Which is why, someone who
seems pretty reasonable in correspondence (that writer/blogger) could make the
boneheaded statement that writers like me were never unknown and
unappreciated. If we were “discovered” in our creative writing classes or our
peer-level workshop, if our one brilliant short story got the attention of a
big-name agent when said story was published in a pay-by-copies “prestigious”
literary journal, then of course we have never suffered the slings and arrows
of anonymity.

We were “lucky.”

Those of us who get that “lucky”
word leveled at us all the time find that term insulting as hell. Of course we
weren’t lucky. We just worked harder than everyone else. We learned our craft,
and we learned the business of a profession that does not teach anyone
business, and we managed to survive all kinds of mistakes we wouldn’t have made
if we’d actually had the opportunity to be mentored or we studied such things
as accounting as part of our training.

Training. That’s the other
thing. The more I talked with successful, long-term career writers, the more I
realized that very few of them had been English majors in college. Or if they
had been, they got their graduate degree in something else.

One of the writers at the
June workshop thought it amusing that the bios in the year’s best science
fiction I had the students read were full of engineers and scientists by
training, not English majors. These engineers and scientists who became
full-time writers have had long careers, whereas the English majors seemed to
cluster with their English professor counterparts in The Best American Short
Stories, and almost none of them have had writing careers.

Romance writers almost
always come at the profession from a variety of non-writing related jobs, often
as small-business owners. The bios of mystery writers have a preponderance of
police officers, forensic examiners, and lawyers.

I don’t think this is a
coincidence. I think these folks weren’t trained to be critics. These writers
also weren’t repeatedly told that they couldn’t succeed in their chosen
profession. I think most of them believed they couldn’t be successful writers,
so they went on to another profession, wrote a book to please themselves, and
then had some success with it, so wrote another and another and another,
thinking their success made them outliers when, in fact, if you look at the
statistics, you’ll discover that the majority of people who write and publish
on a regular basis actually make a living at it.

It is a profession, after
all.

This is why professional
writers stop going to writing workshops relatively early, although they’ll
occasionally “teach” one—if you call critiquing teaching, which I don’t.
Professional writers don’t have the time to go to workshops, considering all
the demands of the career.

That career is what no
aspiring writer understands. How can they? No one talks about it. No one tells them how it’s done or how it works.

Unfortunately, the people
that the aspiring writer asks to help with those questions have a vested
interest in the wrong answers.

The universities aren’t
interested in writing the career when their entire system is set up to teach
writing instruction. The book editors have their own jobs and really don’t
understand how professional writers make a living. (In fact, most editors will
tell writers that they can’t make a living, especially after seeing the small
advances that writers get, not realizing that writers make their living from
more than one source.)

The agents make their money
off writers who believe an agent knows how to build a career, when agents don’t
have any idea how to build a writer’s career. Agents know how to build an agent’s
career, because—guess what!—agents have a
mentoring system. They get hired as an assistant in an agency and learn the
business before ever striking out on their own.

Is that agent’s business
how to make one writer’s career? No. It’s how to make a living on 15% of a lot
of writers, some of whom are successful and most of
whom are not. The long-term agents in the business—the ethical ones, the
ones who are still around (but you have to search for them)—make their
living off writers like me, career midlist writers who have more than ten
books, because we’re constant earners. We make tens of thousands for the agents
who represent us, year in and year out.

Now, with the new world of
publishing, all of that is changing. Agents, the middlemen in all of this, are
feeling squeezed, and many are moving toward a new (and unethical) business
model which will help the agent and harm writers.

Some book editors are
already discovering that their business is changing too. Writers who’ve
indie-published are asking uncomfortable questions. Formerly pliable midlist
authors are demanding new contract terms—and walking away if they don’t
get those terms. The writers who remain are either older and
already established, or brand-new and not likely to remain in the business long
enough to be called anything but a neo-pro.

And the
universities? They continue to churn out critics and professors instead of
savvy writers. There’s an opportunity here to change that Creative Writing MFA
program into something businesslike and useful, but it won’t happen because no
one in charge of these programs understands a creative writer’s career.

So, where does a writer go
to learn how to be a professional writer? Unfortunately, writers will have to
continue to do what they’ve always done—cobble together their own
curriculum and learn by doing. There’s some good information on the web, but
there’s even more bad information. Dean and I teach established professionals,
but we’re not a degree program
and we don’t take beginners. We have started some online workshops and a
lecture series that might appeal to beginners, but that’s all we plan to do. We
have our own careers to maintain, after all.

The best thing a writer can
do is remember this: If you want to have works that are considered art by
succeeding generations, if you want to write classics, then you need to have a
writing career.

A career spans a lifetime.
A career has ups and downs. A career requires building, and lots and lots of
hard work.

A career changes over
decades, and requires constant learning. Would you go to a fifty-year-old
doctor who is still repeating all wisdom he learned in medical school, but hasn’t
done a bit of study since then? Of course you wouldn’t. Nor should you listen
to someone who has no experience in the career you want. You should never treat
that someone as an expert.

This writing business has
been upside down for almost a century now. Those of us who have careers have
been quiet about our hard work for too long. We didn’t make it because we’re
the best critics or the best teachers. We’ve made it because we know how to
learn, improve, and persevere. And—ironically—we don’t think we’ve
made it. We have yet to achieve our goals. We keep working, and probably will
until we die.

But we’re working on our
careers, which are a major part of our lives. We’re not working on our novel.
We’re working on a novel.

And that’s the biggest
difference of all.

Writers and Business

The last two weeks have
been quite a revelation for me. My post on perfection led
to the following week’s post about writing
workshops/writing culture, and even
then, it wasn’t until the comment sections of both blogs that I realized just
how prevalent the whole writing problem thing is.

What I consider to be “the
whole writing problem thing” is this: writers have never learned how to become
professionals. They have learned how to become critics and academics.

Farther into this post, I
will talk about the problems caused by what we learn and how we learn it.
Before I do, however, I want to remind you of something:

I write these blog posts
for professional writers and those who want to become professional writers. By
professional, I mean someone who makes a living at their
writing. Not at teaching writing, not at lecturing, not at criticism. But
at their actual writing, their published works.

So when I’m talking about
problems in what writers learn, I’m talking about what writers who want to
become professionals learn. I have nothing against English teachers; there are
several in my family and more among my friends.

I am talking about the
problems in the teaching of creative writing only. Other degree programs help
their students become professionals in their fields—in other words, those
professionals know that when they graduate, their field offers work, paying
work. It might take a while to get there, but the students know they can if
they follow a particular path.

(Please note that some
creative writing degree programs are trying to change this attitude. Folks have
mentioned such programs in the comments section of my blog. I have not vetted
these programs and, in some cases, was unaware of them. So check them out on
your own. The tide might be turning—slowly.)

Writers do not get a training in their profession (an existing profession, in
which thousands of writers work and thrive), and not just because of the
reasons I had assumed. These blog posts and your comments have sent me on a
journey of discovery into just how old, deep, and pervasive this
misunderstanding of our profession truly is.

I spent some time looking
for the very first writer’s workshop. I vaguely remembered an article I read
about famous prose writers and poets on the East Coast setting up their own
degree program (Robert Lowell’s name comes to mind), but before I searched for
that, I decided to go the easy, Google route. I wanted to find the first degree program in the United States on Creative
Writing.

It was, as you probably
guessed, The University of Iowa, which still has a famous writing workshop, a
prestigious one. According to its website, the university offered its first creative writing class
in 1897 (which was the first creative writing class in Iowa. Dunno about the rest of the
country).

I dug deeper. I have a
(badly produced) book from Hyperion on the Iowa Writers Workshop called,
unsurprisingly, The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers Workshop. The
book is a wealth of rather shocking information. Instead of quoting from it,
though, since it’s more than a decade old, I’ll refer back to the website
(which reinforces what I found in the book). Some of the information below,
however, comes from the book.

The core of the degree
program began in 1922, with the workshop itself coalescing in 1936, headed by
someone named Wilbur Schramm. I’d never heard of Professor Schramm, so I looked
him up as well. Seems he’s considered “the father of communications studies”
and has quite a real-world pedigree, including writing for the Associated Press
and winning the O. Henry Prize for fiction in 1942. He went on to other things,
such as working in the War Information Office during World War Two, and then
founding more influential degree programs at other universities.

I do not know Schramm’s
intentions when he started the Iowa program. I’m sure it’s somewhere in his
papers (housed at the University of Iowa). No matter what his intention,
however, I suspect it was the same as the founders of Clarion Writers Workshop
and other workshops that eventually become institutionalized. The intent was to
educate and help the students.

Nowadays, Iowa is the gold
standard writing program in the United States, and the model for several degree
programs around the world. According to the website, the program has two parts.
It has a Master of Fine Arts in English, “a terminal degree qualifying the
holder to teach creative writing at the college level.” It also offers the
actual workshop.

In the website’s
description of the workshop are these jaw-dropping sentences. Please note that
the words in quotations inside this quote I’ve pulled are from the university
itself, not from me:

“As a ‘workshop’ we provide
an opportunity for the talented writer to work and learn with established poets
and prose writers. Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that
writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent
can be developed, and we see our possibilities and limitations as a school in
that light. If one can ‘learn’ to play the violin or to paint, one can ‘learn’
to write, though no processes of externally induced training can ensure that
one will do it well.”

Well, that made me hurry
over to the University of Iowa’s music department to see if it mentions the
word “learn” in quotes or claims that no one “learns” to play music but just
absorbs it.

Nope. The music school
talks about skill and moving on to other levels once the skills “are acquired”
through practice, study, and performance.

I found no mention of “skill”
at the prestigious literary program. No mention of practice, either. Instead,
more jaw-dropping stuff:

“Accordingly, the fact that
the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent
poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of
what they brought here than of what they gained from us. We continue to look
for the most promising talent in the country, in our conviction that writing
cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.”

Considering that tuition at
the University of Iowa on the undergraduate level runs anywhere from $4,000
(resident) to $12,000 (nonresident) per year (and is probably much more for
degree programs), writing students are paying for what, exactly? Encouragement?
Meeting famous writers they could also meet at faculty mixers and at book
signings? Asking a few questions…and really? Encouragement??? Really?

[Breathing now. Setting
aside some quite real shock. Moving back to my point.]

Okay. For twenty years now,
my husband Dean Wesley Smith and I have made it our mission to teach new
writers business. Over time, we realized that professional writers needed to
learn business as well. We were told by the folks running
Clarion East in the 1990s that we weren’t wanted back because of our business
focus. Gently, over a rather uncomfortable dinner, our two old mentors
who founded Clarion reminded us that Clarion was a craft workshop, not a
business workshop, and it wasn’t about to change. We accepted that. We thought
it Clarion only. Universities only. MFAs only.

But it’s not.

Dean and I haven’t been
fighting an isolated attitude. We’ve been fighting seventy-six years of
indoctrination. Seventy-six years of worrying about words, when writers needed
to worry about stories. Seventy-six years of worrying about the wrong things so
that someone else can take care of the “right” things.

If you count a generation
by the customary definition of twenty years, then nearly four generations of
writers have come to believe this stuff. That’s a lot of cultural baggage, and
a lot of misperceptions that the professional writer (or the wannabe) has to
fight.

We’re all familiar with
that fight. But what most writers haven’t considered is the harm that this
attitude embodied by the University of Iowa and copied by every writing program
(and most workshops) causes.

There are two levels of
harm. The personal harm, and the professional harm.

The personal harm is easy
to define.

Talent versus skill

A God-given right versus a
craft that can be learned

A talent is, by its very
definition, something you’re born with. Either you have it or you don’t. As the
précis for the University of Iowa states, it can’t be learned. It can only be “encouraged.”

Of course, if that were the
case, then writers couldn’t improve. They would have the same ability at the
beginning of their careers as at the end of their careers. Study, classrooms,
research, practice, none of it has any meaning whatsoever in the face of Great
Talent.

Talent is, as the cliché
says, its own reward.

And its
own curse.

I have watched
hundreds—and I do mean hundreds—of talented writers fall by the
wayside as their less-talented (by the judgment of a teacher, editor, critic)
fellows succeed. Why are the less-talented succeeding
where the talented fail?

The convention wisdom is
that the less-talented appeal to the masses, as if the
masses are a bad thing. But what’s really happening here is this: The so-called
less talented feel that they must work harder to get where their talented peers
are naturally. So the so-called less-talented end up with a
work ethic where the talented have none.

But what
about the people who are clearly better at writing than others in the class? Aren’t those people
talented?

No. Sometimes what’s
considered talent by a professor is simply that a writer writes to that
professor’s taste. More often, however, the “talented” writer has had more
practice than others and is more skilled by the time they get to the class.

For example, I come from a
literary family. My sister taught me to read when I was three. (One of the
benefits of having an English major in the house; she practiced her teaching
skills on little old me.) My family put an emphasis on language, learning, and
books that most families didn’t have. Is it any wonder that I was pulled aside
as a “talented” writer from grade school on?

What about other kids, the
kids whose families didn’t worship at the altar of the book? They might not
have been any less talented, in fact they might have
had better stories to tell. But they had less practice with writing and
storytelling, had read less, and weren’t yet as skilled.

Nothing more.

Kids from athletic families
tend to play ball early. Dean, the son of a professional golfer had a golf club
in his hand at the age of three. Guess who was considered a “talented” golfer
by junior high school? Guess who had had more practice than his teammates?

So the idea of talent, the
idea that writing cannot be taught but can only be encouraged (what a wimpy-ass
word), teaches laziness. If a writer works hard, by definition he is not
talented. He is striving for something he cannot achieve.

In other words, a work
ethic is the sign of a mediocre writer.

Writers have a lot of
trouble with this. It creates a built-in conflict. If they work hard,
practicing, writing a lot, writing fast, they’re “squandering their talent.”
They’re taught to wait for the muse to strike, fickle creature that she is,
rather than learning what other craftspeople learn—hard work trumps
talent every single day.

Bestsellers aren’t lazy
writers. Bestsellers work hard. James Patterson, Nora Roberts, and Stephen King
work every day on their writing, on their storytelling, on their
books—not because they want more money, but because they are
craftspeople, doing their job, a job they get paid well to do.

By bringing up work ethic,
I’m moving into the other place the workshop attitude harms
writers—in business itself.

If a writer’s job is to
wait for the muse, the writer doesn’t turn out enough work to have a career.
Very few writers ever become famous or “great” on one work alone. Yes, a writer
might be famous for a single work, but that work might’ve been five novels or
ten novels in, two million to ten million words written and published
before the famous work ever came out of that writer’s pen.

Shakespeare, Dickens,
Hemingway, and even good old James Joyce were not one-shot wonders. They worked
very hard on their craft, and the works that people remember, the works that
people love, usually were not the first thing they’d ever written.

Writers who believe their
works are golden are doomed to be forgotten or never discovered at all.

Writers with this attitude
never try to have a career because they believe a career is impossible.
Therefore, the writer will do stupid things they would never do in their real
life.

Let me give you just one
example.

If a stranger walked up to
you on the street, told you he could make you famous, and asked you then to let
him handle all of your decisions and all of your finances, would you do so?

Of course
not.

But writers do that all the
time. They hire an agent based on nothing more than a listing in Writer’s Digest. They don’t vet the
agent, they don’t see if the agent has a criminal record, they just hand their
work over to the agent along with any money that they might earn on that work,
and trust the agent to handle everything fairly.

If you believe you will
never make money at writing, such an act carries very little risk.

If you think of your
writing as your career, your livelihood, then that same act becomes foolish. Because you could lose everything to a scam artist.
Everything.

The fact that more writers aren’t scammed by their agents is a damned
miracle. There are a lot of ethical old-time agents out there who are appalled
that anyone would think of scamming a writer.

But there are many
more—especially now that the writing business is changing, and agenting is no longer profitable—who are scamming
every single writer they can find. They’re offering agency agreements that give
the agent ownership in the writer’s work, they’re starting e-publishing
businesses that are illegal under all laws governing anyone with “agent” in
their job title, and some agents (even so-called reputable ones) are embezzling
from their wealthiest clients.

What else are writers doing
wrong because of this workshop attitude?

Let me make a list in no
particular order:

1. Failing to understand
why publishing contracts exist. If writing isn’t a
business, then a contract wouldn’t be important. But the writer is the only
one in the publishing industry who believes that no one can make a profit
on writing. And that automatically puts the writer at a disadvantage. She’ll
sign contracts that hurts her because some stranger
(the agent) tells her to. She’ll sign clauses that are against her own best
interest because she doesn’t understand them, because no one explained them to
her.

For example, one clause she’ll
sign is a non-compete clause. If the writer writes only one
book every five years, that might not be an issue. But if the writer
writes five books a year, no traditional publisher can handle the output.
Therefore such a clause restricts everything the writer does and tanks any
possibility of a career.

There are a million other
such clauses and I’ll revisit them in the next few weeks. But that’s the worst
one, and the one most writers willingly sign.

2. Believing that
business is bad. How many times have you heard that writing is an art, and
artists let others worry about business? I
have people for that,
says the writer/artist, waving her hand. If she’s making any money, she doesn’t
understand that those people might be digging their hands into her profits long
before she sees a penny.

3. Successful books are
junk. This one actually makes me sad. It also makes a writer’s brain
explode if that writer does become successful. Jonathan Franzen
had a public meltdown on this very issue when Oprah Winfrey chose his book, The
Corrections, for inclusion in her then-highly popular book club. He worked
out his confusion in public. He said such things as “I’m embarrassed by [the
book]’s success, but I’m happy it’s selling” to Powell’s
Books Blog. In a comment
made to The Oregonian that got him
uninvited to the Oprah book dinner, “I feel like I’m solidly in the high art
literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this maybe helps
bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood.”

By 2010 Franzen
got over his feelings of being misunderstood and he gratefully accepted Oprah’s
recommendation of his novel, Freedom.

Franzen’s attitude, expressed in
those early post-Oprah interviews, isn’t unusual. It’s the attitude of a writer
trained in criticism, dealing with success in a real-world business.

Other writers go through
the same thing in different ways. The romance writer Eloisa James kept her true
identity secret for a long time. She’s the daughter of poet Robert Bly and
writer Carol Bly, and she’s a professor at Fordham university.

In an
interview with Time Magazine, James said her secret life started when she was an
untenured professor.

“I wrote my first book, Potent
Pleasures, in order to pay off my student loan, and found such pleasure in
writing it. The contract was for three books. People magazine named the
second book a page-turner of the week. And I went to my chair—I had then
moved to Fordham—and I said, ‘People magazine would like to run a
picture of me.’ And he said, ‘You can’t do that. You
won’t get tenure.’ Once that happened, I really did keep the lives separate.”

She “came out” later when
she realized “if I keep this secret, it’s as if I’m ashamed of it, and that’s
implicitly shaming my readers, right? I decided this is not good…”

The reaction at her job was
good, but her mother never thought James’s writing amounted to much, even
though she’s sold more than 6 million books and has been on The New York
Times bestseller list 17 times.

James is clearly not one of
the writers who believes that successful books are
junk, but her mother did. James said, “My mother couldn’t get around the fact
that I wouldn’t try and be Chaucer or Dostoyevsky. She thought if you have
talent, then you know you have to use it to better mankind. But my talent is a
kind that doesn’t involve changing America’s view of war. So that was hard for
her to accept.”

And there’s that talent
thing again.

But more than that, what
these two examples show is how insidious the workshop attitude is even for
writers who have successful careers. I know dozens of writers who have done
what they can to torpedo their success (like Franzen
did ten years ago) to prove that they’re “good” writers. I know even more
writers who circumvent the entire discussion by introducing themselves as a
writer of “junk.”

4. Writers who believe
you can’t make money at writing often don’t. Funny, that.
Those writers will sign bad contracts, fail to market their work, fail to
write, get “real” jobs without trying to succeed in their chosen profession,
and give up at the first sign of trouble. If you believe you can’t
succeed—if you believe there is no point in even trying, because no
one succeeds—then you’ll avoid doing all those things that make a
career. You’ll make mistake after mistake after mistake because you have no
idea that you’re in the business world.

As I wrote above, Dean and
I have taught writers about business for two decades now. When we started
teaching professional writers, we focused on writers whose careers had stalled.

Their careers had stalled
for a hundred different reasons, most of which had nothing to do with craft.
(The craft issues could be—and still can be—resolved with a few week-long workshops.) Most of the reasons have the same
thing in common, though.

The writer needed to know
or understand business to revive her career. Most of the writers we’ve taught
believed they weren’t in a business, believed their problems were that their
writing “had gotten worse” or that they had “lost their talent,” when, in
reality, they needed to do what most business owners do in a downturn. They
needed to examine the business and make changes in personnel, approach,
attitude, and money management.

If I said any of those
phrases on the first day of our classes, the writers would run screaming. In
fact, Dean and I learned at the beginning of the Master Class for professionals
to give those professionals a financial quiz composed of what we believed to be
simple concepts. Ten questions, covering everything from definitions of net
worth to gross income, questions that we believed any functioning adult already
should have learned in daily life.

American financial
education is so bad that most of our writers who came to our classes, people in
their thirties, forties, and fifties, flunked that
quiz. Flunked. It was rare to get one student to answer all ten
questions correctly. A few would get 8 out of 10.

We had to dumb down our
financial talk to get our students to understand us. I blamed the educational
system for that—and still do. I think Americans get a crap-ass financial
education. However, until this month, I also blamed the writers for it,
thinking that they hadn’t bothered to learn it.

Honestly, it never crossed
my mind that no one had ever offered to teach it. And
not just finances, but the idea that writing is a career, a profession,
something that writers must learn alongside their craft.

No professional school in
the university system teaches everything a professional needs to know to
practice a trade. Law schools don’t spend much time on how to run a law
practice, but they do at least mention it now and then. Medical schools have
only started dealing with money management in the last decade or so, but
wannabe doctors always knew that they had the option of opening their own
office to make a living.

Writers never get that. Not
once in seventy-six years have writers thought of their work as work, let alone
as a profession, let alone as something they could make a good living
at.

When you don’t even know
that something exists, you can’t learn about it. You can’t admit you don’t know
enough about it, because it’s not even a part of your world-view.

That’s why writers whose
careers have taken a downturn blame their craft. That’s what they learned, that’s
what they believe the writing profession to be—only craft. Yet, if these
writers knew business, they would understand that all businesses have
cycles. Every business has downturns, and sharp business owners learn how to
survive them. Sometimes tweaking the product (fixing your writing) is the exact
wrong thing to do. Sometimes it’s necessary.

But if you can’t even see
where the problem is, then you can’t solve the problem.

It also works on the
flipside. If you’re successful, you can’t continue that success without
understanding what you’re successful at. If you’re a good storyteller, but you
believe you’ve become successful because you write pretty sentences, then you
might jettison story to write even prettier sentences when, in fact, it might
be your raw storytelling power and idiosyncratic grammar that makes your work
sell.

In other words, in trying
to “improve” upon your success, you might destroy it.

The myopic view of writing
as offered by seventy-six years of university writers’ workshops and their non-university satellites has harmed entire
generations of professional writers. Now it’s clear to me why so many writers
have at best a ten-year career. At some point, a business sense must kick in.
If the writer has farmed out the business part of her career to someone “who
knows better,” then she has no idea if the person that she hired is doing
something wrong. She has no idea if the reason her career is having a downturn
is because she has trusted the wrong people, or because she’s writing in a
genre that is glutted, or if she has signed a contract limiting her chances for
success.

She is ignorant of all that
will help her in her profession. She might be the best writer on the
planet, but if she doesn’t know how to get her writing to
readers—repeatedly—she won’t have a career.

Honestly, that saddens me.
It’s the reason Dean and I have taught business for twenty years. We’re trying
to rectify what we believed to be a small problem. In July of 2012, I realized
just how big the problem is and why we’ve had so much trouble making inroads.

If you want to be a
successful professional writer, you need to learn business. You will not have a
long-term career if you fail to learn how the profession works. You also need
to keep working on your craft.

Contrary to what writers
learn in MFA programs, writing is not an easy profession, one in which a writer
should be “encouraged.” Writing is hard work. Writers who want to put in the
hours, who have a good work ethic, will survive in this profession while the “talented”
will get eaten alive.

The university programs and
that workshop attitude have it exactly backwards. To succeed in this
profession, you need skills. Writing skills, business skills, survival skills.

Those skills are not taught
in university writing programs. Right now, the only reliable way to get those
skills is through the school of hard knocks.

I’ve been through that
school repeatedly. It’s painful. I hope someday someone comes up with a system
that helps writers through the early years with a formal education in business
as well as craft.

Until then, cobble together
your own curriculum. It’s directed study here in the school of hard knocks. You
won’t get university credit, but you will end up with a lifelong career.

Good luck.

About the Author

Award-winning, bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch has published books under many names and in many
genres. She has owned several businesses, and has worked for herself for more
than thirty years. For more information on her work, go to
kristinekathrynrusch.com.

If you found this short book helpful, you
might want to read these books as well:

The
Freelancer’s Survival Guide (Third
Edition)

Goals
and Dreams

How
To Make Money

Time
Management

The
Secrets of Success

Surviving
The Transition