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I've been pretty busy lately, knocking out book proposals, preparing material for my agent to pitch to publishers, and just generally writing my brains out.
That's nothing new.
But it is something different. It's something different than how most people write, and it's something different than how I used to write.
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When I wrote my first book, a memoir, at the ripe old age of 14, I sat back, enamored of the experience and convinced that the 223 pages of typewriter paper (most of them filled to the brim with the expose of sheer genius) I held in my hands were my key to nirvana, I breathed in deeply. I was finished. Through. Whew! The rest, I knew, would be history:
"With this book, I thee wed." Damned straight.
I would wed myself to fame and wealth and a bevy of beautiful women (hey, even at 14, I knew the difference between fantasy and reality and how to appreciate the former when the latter was unavailable). I would wed myself to the glamour that came of instant overnight success. I would wed myself to my one-way ticket out of middle-income urban America and into upper-income urban America. Damned near overnight.
Writers, after all--and I'm talking here about your basic uber-successful, uber-wealthy writers, monolithic writers, iconoclastic writers!--make a ton of money, and a ton of money was all in the world that stood between my humble southside Chicago abode and the North Michigan Avenue digs of my dreams.
So, I wrote the book, sent it off to a few publishers, and waited.
And waited.
And when the waiting paid off in little more than a couple dozen (hundred, thousand, gazillion) preprinted rejection slips, I decided I needed to change my outlook on life. I needed to write another book, this one a novel, this one guaranteed to wow 'em down on the farm (and up on Publisher's Row). And when I completed that book, I did just about the same as I did with the first book and with exactly the same results: I continued my approach to writing in a hyperbaric pressure chamber for the next ten years of my life.
Finally, after landing a job as an articles editor at a national magazine and observing the difference between the most successful and the least successful writers querying me each month, I decided I needed a change. A real change. I needed to adjust my outlook on life as a writer.
I began cranking out not novels, not book-length nonfiction tomes, but proposals. Proposals with an outline and a couple sample chapters to back them up. And I began sending them around.
When one proved unsalable, I turned to the next. When that failed to yield the results I craved, I turned to the next. Finally, when one caught an editor's eye, I became a published author.
And I never looked back.
My point in telling you all of this is that there are, as I see it, basically two types of book writers. There's the one who writes something and doesn't write anything else until that first something sells. The fact that it may never sell because it never falls into the right editor's hands or never hits the marketplace in a timely enough fashion or never seems politically correct enough to get picked up be damned. If the first book doesn't sell, why work up another…and another…and…
Then there is the second type of writer, the type who writes knowing that sooner or later something is going to catch fire. If at first you don't succeed…
That's the type of writer I eventually grew to become.
Guess which type of writer I suggest YOU become if you really want a shot at making it as a full-time freelance writer. Guess which type of writer I suggest YOU become if you really ARE a viable candidate to become a full-time freelance writer…
I'm betting pretty much straight on down the line that you'll guess right.
Am I right?
Damned straight I'm right. Oh, and one more thing before I go...
Smoke if you got 'em.
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