Good luck with the sex scenes
The writing profession
Lisa Gabriele / National Post
Thirteen ways of becoming an author:
1. Start small. Put aside a few words every week. Whatever you can afford. Words you won't miss. After a while, you'll have a few hundred words, then before you know it, you'll have a few thousand, and then suddenly you will have a book. Hopefully a good one that you can retire on. Writing a second book is really hard, and inadvisable.
2. Write what you know. But be careful. Just because you know To the Lighthouse by heart does not mean you should write that book. Somebody else already did.
3. If you hit a writer's block, stop and take a break. Try to keep breaks under ten years in length.
4. Have a muse. If none is apparent, hire one from the back pages of your local urban weekly magazine. Get a receipt.
5. Start young. God, not too young. But ask yourself, "Is 35 considered young, anyways?" Then stop worrying because it is so not young.
6. If you are going to write a memoir, ensure that you were wonderfully poor, or terribly rich, or
survived a brutal war (domestic ones, especially) and, in the end, you came out pretty much OK. If the
above criteria do not apply to you, write of baseball.
7. Good luck with the sex scenes. Again, write what you know (hee hee).
8. Stay away from ghostwriters. They don't really exist.
9. Get an agent. Thank the agent in your book. Give her billing just above your benevolent high-school English teacher and right below your crazy, misunderstood mother.
10. If you are lucky enough to get a publisher, read every single word of your contract. Even the fine print, rendered in some god-awful font. Get a lawyer to look at it. In fact, show it to all your friends, make copies and distribute it amongst family members, near and far. Go ahead and throw it out of a low-flying airplane, letting the evidence of your genius waft and scatter down your luckless street, because, can you believe it, someone's actually paying you to do this? Isn't it awesome? Then sign the damn thing.
11. If you are not writing, writing, writing, you should be reading, reading, reading. But you shouldn't be always reading, reading, reading what you have just been writing, writing, writing. That is called a block.
Re-read #3. But not over and over and over again.
12. Do not write in public. Do not bring your laptop to Starbucks. Do not scribble in restaurants. Other people are eating. Unless your home has burned down. Unless you are, in fact, homeless. Writing should be done in the privacy of your own dank, personal hell.
You wanted this nightmare deadline, didn't you? You brought this on yourself, always talking about how much you wanted to be a writer, ooooh, you have SO much to SAY to the world. Well then, shut up and write it and leave the rest of us at peace with our low-fat lattes and our mediocre lives, our RRSPs and our cottages.
Starving is sexy! Poverty is pious! No one wants to hear about how hard it is to be alone with your internal demons, begging and scratching to rush out and beguile the whole world. NOBODY!
13. Above all, avoid clichés like the plague.
*NM*