Tag: Writer’s Digest

Make Your Writing Quirks Work for You

 

Anne Rice
“I’ve been told all my life that I was not a writer! I just marvel at it.”

Best-selling writer Anne Rice was the featured interviewee in the Nov/Dec ’13 edition of Writer’s Digest. It was so refreshing to hear Anne stress that there are no rules in writing. In fact, she’s been frequently told that she isn’t a “real writer”:

I was discouraged very early in my college years by people who told me I wasn’t a real writer because I didn’t write every day. Things like that should not be said. And anybody who says anything like that, you have to ignore them. You know, there are no rules.

And I love how she openly shares her struggles with certain parts of the writing process:

The biggest problem for me . . . is getting into the story. I can see the whole thing. The whole shape, all the characters, what they’re doing, and I can’t seem to find a way to break in. And I rewrite the opening pages over and over and over again. It’s like OCD—it’s like hand-washing. And finally I get so frustrated that I go and pick up something like The Godfather by Mario Puzo, which is great storytelling, but just any way he wants to do it. I mean, he may introduce Luca Brasi here, and never get to physically describing him until 50 pages later, to never get to telling who he really is until 100 pages after that. And that clears up my OCD. OK, just plunge—just start. Just go.

(She also added that it isn’t until she’s two or three hundred pages into a manuscript when she finally knows she’s not going to quit!)

I especially like Anne’s parting thoughts at the end of the interview:

Protect your voice and your vision . . . Do what gets you to write, and not what blocks you. And no matter where you are in your career, whether you’re published, unpublished, or just starting out, walk through the world as a writer. That’s who you are, and that’s what you want to be, and don’t take any guff off anybody.

You Only Need 1,000 Readers to Make a Living

Everyone wants to sell millions of books, but the days of reaching consumers efficiently through mass media are over. Technology has fragmented the market. Remember when there used to be three major TV networks? Now there are hundreds of channels – and exponentially more if you count Internet, video on demand, satellite, and crowdsourced outlets such as Youtube and Vimeo.

People no longer have to default to any one channel. They can find exactly what they’re interested in and ignore the rest. What’s exciting is that you don’t need to sell millions of books to make a living by writing. Small is the new big.

Consider the theory known as Dunbar’s number, named after the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. He suggested that there’s a limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain a meaningful relationship, and that number is probably somewhere around 150.

Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote an article based on a similar idea a few years ago. In “1,000 True Fans,” he theorized that an artist who would like to make a living creating art needs only 1,000 true, passionate fans to make that a reality.

You don’t have to speak to everybody. In fact, you shouldn’t. Think as narrowly as you can and find a pocket of readers who are passionate about the same things you are.

– Kevin Kaiser, “Rewriting the Rules of Marketing” in Writer’s Digest Jul/Aug 2012

*Photo by Shayna Hobbs @ Public Domain Archive / CC0