I decided, after burning out of Startupville a bit ago, that I was going to take some time off and... wait for it... write a novel. I love writing, I love blogging, so how hard could this be? It's the next natural step, right?
I thought this would be a dream experience, sitting at my computer and creating beautiful prose for hours a day, my creativity flowing like a river.
After about 20,000 words (a debut novel should be between 70-100k words), it turned into hard work. One thousand words a day becomes quite tedious, especially when the initial steam wears off.
Great, so I pushed through for months, putting in the daily grind. Draft complete at 90k words! First round of edits, cutting almost 20,000 words (about a month of work, all for "nothing"). Back at the writing grind again to get the word count and story aligned to be more marketable.
Edit number two complete. Edit number three complete. Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc. Just now wrapping up edit number four, and I'm actually quite happy with how it reads.
But now... onto the business end of this deal, querying agents. Agents reject about 99% of the pitches that come into their inbox. The 1% gets a full manuscript request. Of those 1%, about 10% get offers of representation.
An offer of representation often turns into several more rounds of edits before the agent will sell it to a publisher. So if I'm lucky enough to get an agent, it'll be even more editing (my least favorite part of this process so far).
THEN, the agent has to successfully sell the book to a publisher. The odds that this happens also pretty low. And since I'm a first-time writer, I'd be looking at a pretty small five figure advance for what will end up being about two years of work.
Anyways... writing, my favorite form of art, has become a roll-of-the-dice grind. I'm not sure I would go back in time and do this again, but regardless, I've come this far so...
I think chasing a "dream career" whatever that is can be a tough lesson in setting realistic expectations in what it means to make money.
It sounds like you were doing another form of startup. Perhaps some writers bang out the prose and have an editor help to trim the fat rather than trying to wear all of the hats required to launch a new novelist.
Also:
> Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc.
I think what makes a great story, and novelist for that matter, are some of those rough edges and you should ignore the critics just like an opinionated CEO might be advised to do. Those people may be looking out for you, but you're the artist and can use your vision to create your world with your unique voice!
Thanks - That's a really fun observation, that I'm wearing a lot of hats that a more established novelist/executive wouldn't. I also appreciate the positivity (it has been very easy to be negative about this process so far).
And you're right, it's important to only take beta readers' opinions as just that, opinions. It is super helpful though to get their take, as I've been so close to the project where sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees.
You can also see that when an author becomes too famous and starts to ignore the editor(s), the books become heavy and repetitive. Editors are sharp. Trust them.
Fingers crossed I make it to the point where I have an editor =)
Definitely noticeable though, sometimes authors get too attached to the smell of their own farts to realize their writing is suffering under the weight of their own hubris.
Writing is a discipline. I'd expect it (like almost any other discipline) to take around five years to reach journeyman status. I think a lot of people assume that writing is a lot easier and simpler than it actually is. The folk knowledge says that you should expect to write around a million words before you find your voice.
I think the secret to all of this is that the energy and enthusiasm of passion is ultimately overcome by pain. And pain slows us down, makes us retreat.
But if you find your work fundamentally painless, you can put any amount of passion in on top: you're still getting it done on your lowest days, and on your good ones you will cruise into exceptional output.
As such you can derive the well-known market preference for "bandaids over vitamins" from the sum total of all individuals looking for a way to take more of the pain out of their work. But the biggest optimization you can make is simply in choosing which work to do.
Pain is more nuanced. People run away from pain. But pain is like brakes on a car, you need it to go faster.
There’s a reason why people take pride in being “a professional” or “tough”. You need to suck it up and push through sometimes.
“Find your passion” is trope, but it’s also true, because that obsessive passion that people have about the ordinary is what allows them to create the extraordinary.
I once self published a book. Biggest mistake I made was writing it before i had an audience to sell to. I would take small snipets of your book and distribute for free to places where your target audience hangs out. Then publish more free bits on your site for email address. Maybe some complete short stories.
Then once you have an audience that likes your shit promote a book to them, and leverage those sales as social proof to go more broad.
I will teach you to be rich does this really well. I don't have a good analogy for fiction but I'm sure they exist.
You may want to consider self-publishing, depending on the book. It's pretty easy these days and there's no particular "vanity press" stigma on Amazon.
To make it easier, go back in time, choose different parents and become the 'first coder that be became POTUS', then write your novel.
Or go up to the top of a mountaintop at just the right time for the sky god to make an appearance and hand you the third testament.
Or, go back in time again, choose different parents and become a record scoring footballer. By adopting this strategy you would have the slight challenge of creating a time machine but you will also not have to write those 90000 words, a ghostwriter would be able to just magic out of thin air whatever you bark out loud. They would sort out the plot holes and the movie deal too.
Or you could go back to startupsville again and scratch this itch. It should be possible to crowd-source decent novels in a way that is not so humiliating and nigh on impossible. I know this has been attempted before but the nearest we have to it at the moment it self publishing on Amazon where people do reviews and people buy on the basis of those reviews. There have been success stories with this. But we know those reviews are bought and everything is corrupt.
Joking aside I do think that there is another way of getting published - write the book that needs to be written. Not a rehash of ideas, something new. A new story that does not fit into the existing pantheon of beginnings/middles and endings. Something that people must read and must get their friends to read, no publicity needed. You could make this free and entirely web based, no ISBN number or dead trees. Much like how musicians do stuff for free on YouTube and then a publisher courts them to do something for money. However, even this is not strictly easy and the stories you hear of this often involve a musician who happens to have chosen the right parents, e.g. Lily Allen and how she started on Youtube, only later do we learn of the famous and well connected dad.
Writing a book that has to be written might not be passion though. If you discovered some unjustice going on and were compelled to write then that would not be passion, more of a moral question of not staying silent.
Anyway, regarding the original article, why is it that 87% of people in the workplace are clock watchers, as if serving an eight hour school detention on a daily basis? Clearly they are not following their passion. But, of the 13% that don't clock watch and do have some passion for what they do, these people can be in any department, office or factory. They are not necessarily writing novels, making music, teaching yoga or directing films. Passion is more of a transferable skill that should be taught.
I thought this would be a dream experience, sitting at my computer and creating beautiful prose for hours a day, my creativity flowing like a river.
After about 20,000 words (a debut novel should be between 70-100k words), it turned into hard work. One thousand words a day becomes quite tedious, especially when the initial steam wears off.
Great, so I pushed through for months, putting in the daily grind. Draft complete at 90k words! First round of edits, cutting almost 20,000 words (about a month of work, all for "nothing"). Back at the writing grind again to get the word count and story aligned to be more marketable.
Edit number two complete. Edit number three complete. Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc. Just now wrapping up edit number four, and I'm actually quite happy with how it reads.
But now... onto the business end of this deal, querying agents. Agents reject about 99% of the pitches that come into their inbox. The 1% gets a full manuscript request. Of those 1%, about 10% get offers of representation.
An offer of representation often turns into several more rounds of edits before the agent will sell it to a publisher. So if I'm lucky enough to get an agent, it'll be even more editing (my least favorite part of this process so far).
THEN, the agent has to successfully sell the book to a publisher. The odds that this happens also pretty low. And since I'm a first-time writer, I'd be looking at a pretty small five figure advance for what will end up being about two years of work.
Anyways... writing, my favorite form of art, has become a roll-of-the-dice grind. I'm not sure I would go back in time and do this again, but regardless, I've come this far so...
I think chasing a "dream career" whatever that is can be a tough lesson in setting realistic expectations in what it means to make money.