WRITING: Some Cold Hard Facts

I was recently asked by a friend to take part in a college Job Fair at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) to offer students some insight on writing as a career. Now far be it for me to claim this status and that for the very reason I would state as my first writer’s fact of life: It’s a non-profit job for almost all but the few, the celebrity, or the journalist.

In line with my previous post on online literary magazines, it is even harder to get anything but satisfaction and credentials from fiction writing in particular since few offer payment, and the “two copies of the issue” which was the standard offering no longer is a viable incentive.

Writing is an intensely demanding user of time. Not just in the writing, but in the editing process (and you damn well better spend time here), the reading of contemporaries’ work and the journals themselves to understand what they’re looking for in the work, the submission process itself which includes some timesavers like Duotrope but still involves a lot of juggling and meeting deadlines and writing to spec or theme, keeping word count in mind, changing language sometimes to suit, meeting the process requirements of double/single spacing, name on or not on pages, attachments or within the body of an email, font, margins, bio yes or bio no, etc. and then changing all to the standards of either .doc, .rtf, or plain text (.docx and anything Mac are still verboten) and then remembering (or using the spreadsheet) of who got what.

I put a lot of time into this. Not even counting the ten years of diddling around. For the past six months it’s been an almost non-stop venture of writing, reading, submitting, and all that entails. On top of that, there’s a certain amount of investment needed in supporting other writers. Yes! We’re not a vicious group of sneaky competitors, we try to help each other out. I personally tend to be nurturing and encouraging and so there’s a lot of time spent here as well. But that’s just a part of my nature (Scorpio) to do something either 100% or don’t do it at all. I’d say then that if writing is something that you love to do, you have to make that commitment–even if you’re simply allowing yourself some given period of time to publish or bust.

Then again, I’d not encourage anyone who gets enjoyment from writing a short story, a bit of poetry, but does not have the ambition to go through the process of publishing or getting paid for writing (which as I’ve noted, are not necessarily one and the same) to lay down their pen or stay away from the keyboard. There’s just as much satisfaction and joy in the doing.

So in summary, you don’t have to take it seriously. Writing can be as enjoyable or therapeutic as any chosen pastime. But if your intent is to share your work amongst a larger audience than your mother and your best friend, you really must take it seriously. It takes persistence and it demands dedication. It’s too much effort in both time and emotion to make only a half-ass hopeful stab.