Reading for Writers

When my eldest daughter was a baby, I gathered the courage to attend a local writing course with some stories I’d scribbled out at the kitchen table.  On the first night, the teacher told us:

“If you really want to be a writer, all you need is someone else to earn all your money for you.”

I went home and looked at my husband, who was home from work and holding the baby, and I thought, “I can do this.  I’ve got what it takes.”

But scribbling out stories at the kitchen table while your husband is at work doesn’t make you a world famous author (neither does scribbling out blogs on your own web page, but I’ll worry about that later.)  I went to a seminar at the Sydney Writer’s Centre, where the lecturer told us:

“To be a writer, you need an audience, and you need deadlines.  It doesn’t matter if you only start out with one person in your audience, and if that one person is your favourite aunt.  Start with one, and slowly build your audience from there.  And it doesn’t matter if the deadlines are artificial and self-imposed.  Professional writers need to finish the story by a certain time.”

So I started sending my stories to competitions… they gave me a deadline and an audience.  I figured at least the judges were reading them.  And every so often, a certificate or a cheque would arrive in the mail, which was very gratifying and encouraged me to expand my audience.

But I couldn’t understand why some stories were sure winners and others were ignored time after time.  One competition offered to send a judge’s appraisal for an additional fee so I paid an extra five dollars for the judge’s opinion.  The judge read my story and wrote back to explain – quite sharply – exactly how to structure a short story.

“You start by presenting a situation and throw in a problem. From here, you have a certain number of words to solve that problem by the last paragraph. Then you finish with a twist, so there’s no loose ends.”

See, I didn’t know that.  I just wrote about anything that intrigued or amused me, and kept writing until I’d explained the source of amusement.  Then I stopped. Sometimes I did manage to conform to the short story structure but not in the story I sent to the judge, obviously.  I didn’t understand exactly what the judge meant, especially her indignant and mystifying lecture about the protagonist, antagonist, the beginning, the middle and the end.  So I enrolled in a professional writing correspondence course and discovered for myself that most of my stories were only half-written.

But this was a professional writing course, and the tutors expected students to actually earn money from their writing.  My collection of short stories was growing (not  as many as Scott Fitzgerald, but more than Zelda) but not even my little stash of certificates made me a professional writer.

“You can’t stick to one form of writing.  You’re a professional writer… When you’re versatile enough to write anything, you will get paid for it.”

So over the years, I’ve written news articles, features, blogs, speeches, brochures, newsletters, tutorials, corporate documents, short stories and poems (only three poems… it’s not my thing and nobody will pay you for it). 

As I evolved from scribbling at the kitchen table into a professional writer, these were the four pieces of advice that shaped and strengthened me.  Each gem was equally important… it is important to remember for example, that writers need someone else to earn the money, or you might question whether an average income of two thousand a year qualifies you as a professional.

One last piece of advice is useful for those moments when you have doubts.  A copywriter once passed on some advice from his Italian employer…

“All you need to be a professional writer is courage and a telephone. Nobody will come looking for you, hoping you’ll write something brilliant for them.  You need the courage to tell people you want the job.  Courage and a telephone.”

He said it in Italian, so it sounded better.  The Italian word for telephone rhymes with their word for balls, so it loses something in translation.

Happy writing!