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On Being a Successful Writer

February 26, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

If you have an interest in writing, and at some point you feel you’ve become a writer, is being a writer success in itself? If not, why not?

How should writers measure success? How should non-writers measure the success of writers? Should writers pay attention to what non-writers think about success? Should writers pay attention to how other writers define success?

Can the success of a writer be measured objectively? In judging your own success are there specific metrics that matter to you? The number of fans you have? The amount of money you make? The number of awards you receive? The nature of the awards you receive?

Are all award-winning writers successful? Can a writer be successful without winning awards?

If you make money as a writer are you successful? Is your measure of success tied to how much money you make? Can you be successful as a writer if you don’t make money writing?

If you never win an award and you never make any money but you have devoted fans are you successful? If you don’t think you’re successful does that make your fans wrong?

Are subjective measures of success more or less valid than objective measures? Is that true for all writers?

Is your definition of a successful writer fixed or does it change over time? Is your sense of your own success fixed or does it change over time?

Do you measure success relative to your writing or how your writing is received? Both? If you write something you don’t respect and it makes a lot of money or wins a lot of awards or pleases the public, have you been successful? What if you write something that garners no interest but you believe to be your best work? Is that success? Failure?

Is it possible to objectively prove some writers are good and some writers are bad? Do you believe good writers eventually succeed and bad writers inevitably fail?

Is there such thing as a failed writer? Is that something writers decide about themselves or something non-writers say about writers? Is a failed writer someone who failed at the craft of writing? Someone who failed to make money writing? Someone who failed to turn writing into a career?

Does writing itself sustain you, or do you need feedback from others? Are you driven by the process of writing or the outcome? Both? If you could choose only one, which would you choose?

When it comes to defining success as a writer you get to choose what success means to you. Choose carefully.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: success, writer, writing

On Being A Writer

February 25, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

If you have an interest in writing, what will it take for you to think of yourself as a writer? If you already think of yourself as a writer, what convinced you? If you write but don’t think of yourself as a writer, why not?

What does it mean to be a writer? Is being a writer like being a plumber? A doctor? A cleric? A singer?

What does it mean to be anything? Does it mean that label is your whole life, or what you’re doing at the moment, or what you’re doing at the moment for money?

Who gets to decide if you’re a writer? You? Somebody else? If somebody else, who? Your friends? Your family? An authority who knows nothing about you except what you’ve written?

What if there’s a difference of opinion? What if some people think you’re a writer and others don’t? Does it matter who thinks what? If your friends think you are and your family thinks you aren’t, are you a writer? What if your family thinks you are but your friends think you aren’t? What if an authority thinks you are or aren’t?

What if nobody thinks you’re a writer but you? Can you still be a writer? Can you be a writer by yourself? Can you be a writer if no one ever reads what you’ve written? What if you write in the woods and nobody reads your work until you die? Were you a writer while you were writing? Or are you a writer only after your work is discovered?

Can you be a writer if you make a living doing something other than writing? If you’re being paid to write are you a writer? Always? Is writing a profession? A career? If you work as a writer and you stop working as a writer does that mean you’re no longer a writer?

Do you think of some writers as real writers? Are writers who make money real writers? Are writers who don’t care about money real writers? Are writers who make money better or worse than writers who make no money?

There are a lot of questions in life. There are forty-one in this post alone. Some questions can only be answered with experience. If you think of experience as making mistakes you will always be in pain. If you think of experience as learning you will never know your limits.

When does your interest in writing turn you into a writer? You get to choose.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: writer, writing

The Website Platform Advantage

April 8, 2011 By Mark 3 Comments

While writing my Platform Evolution post I gave some thought to commenting on an excellent Infographic about content farms. No sooner did I decide against it than I ran across this excellent post on Publishing Trends about content farms. Then, a day later, a good friend sent me an unbidden and timely link to a post on Making Light, which, among other things, talks about — wait for it! — content farms.

If you’re not familiar with content farms you can get a quick overview here. As a writer, what concerns me most about content farms is that they are to writing and publishing what Ebola is to the human body. If I was an astrophysicist I would also add that content farms are to information and knowledge what solar storms are to communications. And if I was a logician I would say that content farms are to accuracy and reliability what tsunamis are to fishing villages.

Which is to say that everything about content farms is bad, but not equally bad. The worst aspect of content farms is not that they’re the new frontier for spammers and swindlers, it’s that producing so much crap at such an incredible rate renders every single aggregating and filtering mechanism useless.

Google as a search engine for retail products and reviews has been beyond broken for years. (Try searching for “best _____”, where the blank is any product you’re interested in.) Amazon is currently the default search for products, but it’s starting to fall apart as well. (Am I looking at the latest version of the CD/DVD/book I want to order? Is it new or used? Does it ship free or for a fee? Is it shipping from Amazon or some fly-by-night third-party reseller?) And of course the idea that all that ballyhooed user-generated social-media content is pretty much crap is also nothing new.

What content farms do that’s new is automate the production of internet crap by exploiting free labor and making liberal use of other people’s content in a plausibly deniable way. For independent writers trying to attract attention, fighting through the noise pollution generated by content farms may seem impossible, and all the more so as content farms begin to pollute e-book retailers like Amazon. The antidote to this virulent hemorrhage of obfuscating web text may seem to be a gated social networking community, but I think the opposite is true.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Publishing Tagged With: author, Facebook, Google, platform, SEO, Twitter, writer

The Dysfunctional Workshop

August 10, 2010 By Mark 4 Comments

For the purposes of this post I’m going to break the universe of fiction workshops into three categories. First, there are helpful workshops that teach you something useful. Second, there are boring workshops where you learn little or nothing, but nothing bad happens. Third, there are dysfunctional workshops where you risk damage to your writing soul.

Careful readers will have deduced that this post is about the third category. What it’s not about, however, is legitimizing the self-centered writer — a malady considerably more prevalent in the writing universe than the dysfunctional workshop. There is a ton to learn about writing fiction, and some of the lessons you learn will be hell on you. There will be times when you will be so sure you’re right you’ll bet your life and still be flat-out wrong.

Nothing that follows excuses authorial narcissism. Fiction writing requires an author to constantly debate their own weaknesses and biases, even if only for reasons of self-preservation. Because if you can’t police your own nonsense, others will be happy to do it for you.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: drama, ego, Fiction, workshop, writer, writing

F&FW: The Most Important Thing [10/10]

August 6, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

This is the most important thing anyone will ever tell you about the feedback process. Because feedback from readers is the only way you’ll ever know if you hit what you were aiming at, this is also the most important thing anyone will ever tell you about being a writer:

You have to have enough ego to take the crap,
but not so much that you can’t listen.

Nothing else is more important to your overall success. Not your natural talent, not your connections, not luck. Nothing.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: Respecting Readers [9/10]

August 5, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

Readers are hard to come by, and good, trusted readers are almost impossible to find. If you disrespect your readers or trivialize the effort they put in, they may not want to read your work again. Worse, if they do read for you again they may not give you their honest opinion — either subconsciously, out of a desire to avoid another bad experience, or on purpose, to punish you for being a jerk.

Trusted readers are people who show a consistent capacity for providing useful feedback. Maybe they simply have a good batting average; maybe their batting average isn’t great, but they’re particularly sharp about plot logic or character development. Such readers are rare, and should be treated accordingly.

Trusted readers come in two flavors: people who can reliably respond about the effect a story had on them, and people who can articulate why something in a story didn’t work. The difference between the two is that the people in the second group are almost always writers themselves. While honest readers are valuable, professional-grade writers who are willing to give you feedback are worth their weight in gold.

If you have the choice, get feedback from as many readers as you can before asking for feedback from writers. If you’re confused about any reader reactions, the writers might be able to help you solve those problems, but the reverse will probably not be the case.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: The Advanced Writer [8/10]

August 4, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

As you grow in craft knowledge you will probably need fewer readers in order to get the same information from your feedback. Where before you may have needed the weight of opinion to convince you that a problem needed addressing, long experience will tell you almost immediately which reader concerns are important — either because they are outright mistakes, or because the resulting effect was not what you intended.

Too, as your craft knowledge grows, you may be able to get as much out of a one-on-one response as you do from a workshop. Part of this is that you won’t need to learn the basics, and part of it is that you will know how to ask focused, craft-based questions of your readers.

As always, the goal in doing so is never a defense of your work, but rather trying to determine whether and why an intended effect failed, or why a reader was brought up short by something you wrote. Unless the issue is one of editing (typos, syntax, grammar, etc.) the issues readers report are almost invariably sourced not at the location of the confusion, but somewhere else in the story. Learning how to identify the source of a problem from feedback about the effect of a problem is the goal, and being able to do so consistently is a practical definition of mastery.

When you have reached this level of expertise you will still need readers, but you will probably not need a formal or large workshop in order to gauge your own work.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: What To Give [7/10]

August 3, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

Whether you’re in a workshop or not, giving feedback on other people’s stories helps you as a writer. A key question involves the formality of the response you give, and here my views are decidedly aligned with writers and others who focus on craft, and decidedly against critics and others who focus on meaning or worth.

For example, here’s a blog comment I wrote on a site a few months ago, on the subject of ‘critiquing’:

I don’t disagree with anything you say here. It’s a good introduction, and particularly so because you guard against giving the reviewer authority. Every writer will define themselves by their ability to listen to and sift responses. And of course that’s one of the benefits of a workshop: you can have confidence that issues that affected the majority are substantive simply because of the number of people agreeing on a point.

The one thing I might add here is that over my writing life I’ve de-emphasized the formality of the critiquing process to the point that I no longer even use that word. Why? Because the word is both formal and critical, and I find that both of those aspects of the reviewing process tend to goad the reviewer into responding as a critical authority.

When I respond to something, or offer to respond, I simply promise feedback. It’s a useful descriptor that imposes no weight of responsibility or attitude on the process. Too, because almost all feedback is useful, it allows for anyone to contribute — and there is always a shortage of readers. (To say nothing of trusted readers.)

If you’re a beginning writer and you have the opportunity to respond to someone else’s work, take it. Don’t worry about formal responses, don’t try to explain the author’s story to them and don’t try to write it for them. Just read the story, note your own reactions to what’s happening, and report those reactions.

Why is this important? Because what a writer is trying to do is create specific effects in your mind. Only by reliably reporting your experience with a story will the writer know if those effects were achieved. The job of the writer is to figure out why the intended effect may have failed in your particular case. Your job as a reader is to tell the truth of your reading experience.

This is one area where workshops tend to complicate the feedback process because of the social dynamics involved. Nobody wants to come off like an idiot in a roomful of their peers, and more than a few people will be determined to come off like geniuses. Not only does having the floor lead to words like ‘verisimilitude’ and ‘anthropomorphism’ being used more in a twenty-minute span than you will ever hear them used during the rest of your life, it prompts readers to pontificate about everything from the comma to the meaning of life, none of which ever really helps fix the story.

As a reader, if you genuinely believe you know why you had trouble with a work, go ahead and give your reasoning. But remember: the most important thing you have to give to any writer is your honest reaction. If a writer doesn’t have the craft knowledge to judge and act on what you’re saying, the complexity and detail of your analysis probably won’t matter.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: The Workshop Advantage [6/10]

August 2, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

Here’s a quote from my initial post on the subject of workshops:

The reason a fiction workshop works, and generally works better than any other method of settling the question of authorial intent and accuracy, is the same reason that any broad-based sampling works. By providing more responses to the author, outliers are marginalized and there is at least the possibility that an informative consensus may emerge.

(Note: when I used the word ‘consensus’ here I meant a consensus about points large and small, not simply an overall judgment.)

Everything I’ve said about feedback so far applies to any feedback you get. You might be more comfortable getting or giving feedback in a one-on-one setting, then again you might not. Sitting down with someone who tells you what you wrote is death is not fun. In a workshop, even if others generally agree you came up short, there will also be people who point out some bright spots, or at least keep you from reaching for a bottle of pills.

For writers new to the craft of storytelling, however, a fiction workshop provides benefits that cannot be acquired in any other way. In fact, when it comes to learning how to give and receive feedback about stories, a workshop advances the cause by orders of magnitude over and above any other approach.

Consider the benefits:

  • In a workshop setting the weight of consensus can help break the subjective-opinion deadlock between writer and reader. As I also noted in the earlier post linked to above: “If ten people (out a workshop-normal fifteen or sixteen) agree on a particular concern, it’s probably something you should take a look at.”
  • This appeal to consensus cuts both ways. If you blew it, you can be convinced by sheer weight of numbers to look at your work rather than argue your cause. If you were successful, however, it’s a pretty heady thing to have a group of people say, “This is good,” and it’s hard to walk away thinking the group reacted positively for any other reason than the work itself.
  • As noted in an earlier post, you’ll learn as much or more (probably a lot more) by giving feedback than by getting feedback on your own work. There are two reasons for this in a workshop, neither of which can be replicated in one-on-one feedback sessions. First, you get to see how your take compares with the feedback of others. Did you miss something? Did you see a character one way, maybe as a result of your life experience or bias, while others had a different response? Second, you get to see how other members of the workshop and the writer interact. Believe me, all you need to do is watch a few people go through the workshop process and you’ll have a much better idea how to approach the process yourself.

When it comes to learning the craft of storytelling, nothing speeds the process like giving and receiving feedback. When it comes to learning how to give and receive feedback, nothing speeds the process like being in a workshop. Nothing.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: The Explanation Question [5/10]

July 30, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

There is no more difficult question for a writer to address than the balancing of their intended communication. Readers are not clones. Logical ReaderG may be very smart about plot nuances, while empathetic ReaderT may be intuitive about character motives.

Whether you’re writing genre fiction or literary fiction, how do you accommodate varying levels of audience taste and sophistication? There’s no easy answer here because the problem is not simply one of revelation. If you’ve written a murder mystery, and at the end of the story none of your readers knows who the murderer is, then yes, you failed. On the other hand, if you’ve written a literary piece that attempts to describe torture by means of a subtle metaphor, yet nobody has any idea that your story is about torture, then maybe you’re not showing your work to the right people.

What’s critical in both of these examples is calibration, which you should think of as an intrinsic part of your authorial intent. (It can be tempting to talk about markets in such instances, but I don’t think you should do that. Markets speak to money, not craft.) Your job as a writer is to meet your craft responsibilities, and calibrating your stories for your intended audience is one such obligation.

Again, if you’re writing a murder mystery, you want every single reader at the end of the book to know who the murderer was. To achieve that goal, you will — regardless how oblique or subtle you’ve been in other ways — write something like this: “The murderer is none other than…Mr. Blithers!” And in the mystery genre you pretty much have an obligation to be that bald in your explanation.

On the other hand, if you’re writing a literary work, you don’t want to bludgeon your readers with literal metaphors. Writing, “Each day passed like a day on the rack,” is not simply inelegant, it’s going to turn off readers who appreciate subtlety, which is a de facto definition of the literary audience. Unfortunately, calibrating your story for the sophistication of a literary audience is not only difficult, it may distort your intention as an author. Balancing these two needs — your own, and the needs of your readers — never gets easy, no matter how much experience you have.

How much should you do to explain your work to readers? How determined should you be to make sure your message gets through? There’s no easy answer. Again, you have to take feedback on a case-by-case basis, and you have to ask yourself whether any particular confused or oblivious reader is a reader you intended to speak to.

Please note, however, that this is not a license to dismiss feedback you do not like. In my experience, writers who dismiss feedback because they think a reader doesn’t understand their genius are more common than truly oblivious readers.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

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