The Secret

Good grief. Is it really the Winter of 2017 already?

When I first launched The Friday Challenge in March of 2005, it was with one idea in mind. After what was then 25 years of being a successful and published professional fiction writer, I was getting a constant stream of email from a tremendous number of people who couldn’t seem to find the answer to one very simple question:

How do I become a writer?

Because they couldn’t find this answer, these people collectively were wasting an ungodly amount of time, money, and energy on self-help books, seminars and workshops, and college-level creative writing programs, all in a desperate search for that tightly held secret—that magical incantation—that je ne sais quois that would enable them to make the leap from saying, “I want to write,” to being able to say with a straight face, “I am a writer.”

In my more cynical moments, of which I have no shortage, I came up with a number of alternative ideas. Perhaps to become a Real Writer you must have a sheet of Magic Paper™—parchment made millennia ago in ancient Biblyos from the hide of the Golden Fleece, but still possible to find today if you have enough money and know the right—

Nah. On second thought, mail fraud prosecutors are a notoriously humorless bunch, and I doubt if any of them have seen Dumbo. Okay, next idea. How about if it requires calling together a Dark Triumvirate consisting of one Hugo winner, one Nebula winner, and one Philip K. Dick Award winner, and kneeling in the center of the Triangle of Power while they lay hands upon you and, invoking the names of past SFWA Grand Masters, repeat the ancient incantations that—

Nah, again. While this gag would be fun to do once at a con, I’ve met far too many young women (and more than a few men) who truly believe that becoming a successful writer does involve kneeling before a SFWA Grand Master, or at least a couple of book publishers and a magazine editor or two. And, sadly, I’ve known far too many industry pros who would be unable to resist the temptation.

After a few more ideas, none of which were any better than the foregoing two, I came up with The Friday Challenge. At heart, the challenge is based on a belief, and a methodology.

Credo

  1. You cannot become a writer. You either are a writer—that is, a person with a burning need to write—or your time is better spent doing other things.
     
  2. While publishing is a business, writing is a craft, which sometimes rises to being an art.
     
  3. To become a writer who is successful in the publishing business, you need a mix of raw talent, good craft skills, solid work habits, dumb luck, and chutzpah.
     
  4. Great big gobs of dumb luck trump all else. However, you can no more become lucky than you can become an elephant.
     
  5. I used to believe that being a successful writer required at least some modicum of talent, but, well, Fifty Shades of Grey.
     
  6. Expressing vast amounts of chutzpah may work for a short time, but in doing so you will annoy everyone else for miles around. This may come back to haunt you.
     
  7. Good craft skills, solid work habits, and a little natural talent beat great gobs of raw talent and lousy work habits any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
     
  8. Therefore, the best way to improve the odds of your becoming a successful writer is by improving your craft skills and work habits and becoming a better writer.
     

The Methodology

How then do you become a better writer? It’s simple. You must:
  1. Write something.
     
  2. Put it out where other people can read it. (And by other people I mean other people, not just people of the same general age, educational background, political/religious belief system, and socioeconomic status as yourself.
     
  3. Listen to what those other people have to say about that which you have written.
     
  4. Learn from the feedback you receive.
     
  5. Apply what you have learned, write something else, and go back to step 2.
     
Follow this recipe with self-discipline and dedication and you will, in time, become a successful writer.

The Flaw in the Methodology

After decades of participating in writer’s workshops and critique groups, though, I’ve found that the two places where most writers fall down are in steps 3 and 4: listening and learning. This is because, let’s admit it: it’s damned hard to sit quietly and listen to someone else’s criticism of something you’ve written.

Our stories are our children. In some cases we’ve carried them around inside our heads for years. When they do finally come out into the daylight, we want to believe that each and every one of them is an Athena, emerging fully grown, armed and armored, ready to peal to the sky a clarion call that will make Ouranos and Gaia tremble. No one ever likes to hear: “Um, yeah, on page 13, Athena’s left sandal is untied, but two pages later it’s somehow tied again?”

...and how we adjusted to correct it.

So right from the start, The Friday Challenge was designed to make it easier to learn how to listen and learn. The design points are:
  • We present it in the form of a challenge, because that way, it’s not your brain-child being tortured, it’s mine, and if the results turn out badly—well it was my stupid idea in the first place. Blame me and move on.
     
  • We present challenges weekly (well, okay, now bi-weekly), because that forces you to write quickly, write economically, and to learn from, apply, and let go of the critiques you receive. There simply isn’t time to hang onto hurt feelings.
     
  • We encourage—in fact, beg for—everyone including passive lurkers and readers to participate in the criticism, in order to teach three simple lessons that seem to be very hard for writers—even successful writers—to learn:
     
    • You can’t please everyone all the time.
       
    • No one critic is right all the time.
       
    • Just because the people in your immediate peer group think you’re brilliant, that doesn’t mean anyone else understands what the Hell you’re saying.
       
Writing for professional publication is not like writing to impress your mother or your creative writing class. As a writer, you must develop a thick skin, or at least the ability to fake having one. If you do make it to being professionally published some day, your work will sometimes be criticized unfairly—sometimes praised unreasonably, which is always more embarrassing—sometimes damned by people whose opinions you respect and sometimes loved by people you thought you despised.

The single hardest thing for a writer to learn is how to handle criticism: how to figure out what’s valid and what’s not; who you should listen to and who you should ignore; how to avoid going into tailspin over a bad review or becoming irrationally exuberant because of a good one; and when you should shrug off your best friend who loves you but is totally missing the point and listen to your worst enemy, who also happens to be absolutely right.

This is how you become a writer. This is what defines us as writers. We learn to dig deeply into our hearts, guts, and souls, and pull out some words that seem important. We put those words out here for other people to read, and with luck, get paid for our work once in a while. We suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous critics and ignorant Philistines, and console ourselves by saying they only seethe with bitterness because they wish they could do what we do half as well as we do it. We accept the praise of our fans magnanimously, and then tomorrow, we get up and do it all over again.

And once in a rare while, when the time is just right and the stars align perfectly, and Serendipity smiles down upon us, we can capture lightning in a bottle, string together some words that take on a life of their own, and write a story that puts a noticeable dent in the Zeitgeist—

And when that happens: that, my friends, is a feeling like no other.

Closing Benediction

Having said all that, I now lay my virtual hands upon you and offer up these closing words.

Don’t be content to work the traditional tropes. Don’t follow precisely in the footsteps of those who have gone before. Don’t set your sights on being merely “good enough” to get published, and don’t let “what they’re buying now” be your sole guide.

Write a story that makes Ouranos and Gaia tremble! Write a book that makes a difference! Write something that thirty years from now will have schoolchildren and reporters looking you up, to ask, “Mister (or Ms) [your name here], what was it like, to be the author who wrote [your title here]?”

NOW GO THOU AND WRITE!

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