Scott William Carter

Here at Mutterings Central, I’m pretty honest about my goal to eventually make a living writing fiction.  It doesn’t mean I’m unrealistic about it, or that I’d be willing to put my family at risk to achieve it, but it has been and will always be one of the ways in which I measure my success with my writing career.  It’s not the only way, nor is it the best way, but it is important.  It’s something I work toward — whether it takes years or decades. 

There’s certainly plenty of writers who don’t think this is important — in fact, I find it amusing how many writers who do make a living writing fiction discourage others from trying to do the same, not for nefarious reasons, but because they know how hard it is — but I don’t think I’d ever be satisfied until I at least gave it a shot. 

What some of these writers may not realize is that the goal of making a living from your craft is not a rational one, any more than trying to become an Olympic gold medalist in archery is rational.  Few worthwhile goals are rooted in rationality and logic.  So trying to dissuade someone by telling them it’s more logical to keep your day job and write on the side is rather pointless.  That’s like telling someone she should fall in love with the guy next door becuase he’s an accountant and good for her when her heart flutters at the sight of grease monkey down the street working on his Mustang.  And who wants to live in a world ruled completely by logic anyway? 

So that brings me to what I wanted to write about:  who to share your dreams and goals with, and how much you should choose to share.  Especially in the beginning, I’ve come to believe it’s very important that you get unflagging support from those you share your dreams with, and if you can’t get it, then it’s better that these people remain in the dark.  Let them think you just do that “writing thing” as a hobby —  or better yet, don’t let them know about your writing at all.  I’m now at a point where I’ve achieved enough success that it serves as a bullwark against the doubters and the skeptics, so I can afford to be a little more honest about it, but even I’m careful.  Why?  Well, let me tell you about an incident that happened to me a couple years ago at the day job.

I work at a small university in technology support, helping with online classes and such.  A new colleague, the director of a program on campus that also had some oversight with online classes, invited me out to coffee.  It was just a meet and greet deal, a chance to socialize.  This colleage, let’s call her Karen, said at one point, “Scott, you seem like a talented guy.  I’m surprised that you’re not in graduate school or trying to work your way up the ladder.  It seems like you could go far.”

I made the mistake at this point of letting my guard down.  (Maybe it was the poppyseeds in the muffin.)  I told her that while I liked my day job, and it was a perfect fit for me, my overall goal in life was to become a professional fiction writer, so I deliberately chose a job that would help me achieve that goal — a job, that while challenging and interesting, was one I could leave behind at 5 p.m with a clear conscience and maybe even squeeze some writing in during my lunch hour.  So while I didn’t fault anyone from “working their way up the ladder,” I focused that time and energy on my writing. 

She nodded in agreement, the conversation moved on, and I didn’t think anything more of it until about a year later.  My program was being transferred under another director, and unbeknownst to me, he asked a number of people on campus about me and what they thought of me — Karen being one of them.  Pretty much everybody said glowing things about me, but Karen had some “concerns.”  You see, we worked together on a grant-funded program a few months after that coffee meeting, and even though it seemed, from my point of view, to go quite well, apparently she didn’t think my work was up to snuff.  And she told my boss this.  In fact, she told him quite a bit more, that, in her words, “my priorities were elsewhere.”

This is not the way to get off on the right foot with your new boss.  At his request, we had an airing out meeting, the three of us, and when she got defensive — probably realizing how shallow her criticisms were — she brought up my comment about my goal of becoming a professional fiction writer.  It was a low blow, and I think my new boss saw through it, but the damage was done and the doubt was in his mind.  I had to make sure I worked extra hard to prove to him that her concerns, however irrational, were unfounded.  And I think I did.  But at a time when our university was making budget cuts, it was not the kind of thing I wanted in the back of my boss’s mind.

Both of those two have left the university (in fact Karen had lots of personal problems, which I think, in retrospect, contributed to her warped perceptions of me), but the lesson remains.  Be careful who you share your dreams with.  While I wish it weren’t true, there are lots of small-minded people out there who will try to use them against you if the need arises.  This isn’t to say you shouldn’t share your dreams and aspirations with others.  Sharing such things is how you develop meaningful friendships.  But it’s good to be cautious until you know whether someone can be trusted.

In Publishing News . . .

I have a new story out in the DAW anthology, Mystery Date.  The tale, “Motivational Speaker,” involves a man’s rather unusual relationship with a stereo system he purchases from a department store.   Check it out.

In Writing News . . .

I finished a new story — one involving a famous Civil War sword, a ghost, and a black boy who faces a test of character in the face of the worst kind of bigotry.  I enjoyed writing it — which doesn’t always mean it’s publishable, but it’s a good sign.  

Otherwise, it’s back to the novel in progress.  Not writing nearly as many short stories these days, and that’s by design.  While I do love the form, and have no plans to stop writing them, it does come down purely to economics.  That may sound crass, and I guess it is, but if your main goal is to eventually make a living writing fiction, then you do have to pay attention to the numbers.     

Think of it this way.  Except for some of the very best short story markets out there (The New Yorker, etc.), most professional level markets for short fiction pay between six and ten cents a word.  (And there’s a ton of markets, some quite respectable, that pay considerably less.)  If you apply that six cent word rate to a 100,000 word novel, that nets you $6000. 

Six grand is pretty much the bottom for a professional-level novel advance.  Most publishers pay considerably more — and it can rise quickly as you establish your audience, whereas short stories won’t net you all that much more even if you become a bestseller (slightly more, sure, but not nearly as much an increase you’ll get with your novels).  Plus you have to remember that this doesn’t include royalties, foreign sales, movie rights, and a myriad of other ways that novels make money beyond the initial advance.  Yes, you can’t count on those, but they’re much more likely with novels than with short stories.

 So if you’re a writer with young children and a day job — which translates into a limited amount of time for your fiction — then you have a choice to make.  Even writing novels exclusively, it’s tough to make a living doing it, and if you write short stories exclusively, it’s pretty much impossible in the present day. 

Does this mean a writer who wants to make a living at his craft should forgo short stories completely?  Not hardly.  Of course, there’s the sheer love of them, but there are other reasons, too.  A reader might buy an anthology for a magazine because it has his favorite author in it, then read your story and get interested in finding books by you as well.  Plus if you do build up an audience for your novels, you can release your short stories in a collection and make more money that way.  And a popular short story can be resold many times, too, appearing in Best of the Year collections and the like.

So there are great reasons — even beyond a love of the form — for writing short stories.   But if you want to make a living from your fiction, you really have no choice but to write novels.  The good news is that squeezing in some short stories now and then is good from a publishing career point of view as well. 

My sister tipped me off to a great article on why novel publishing can be so slow — sometimes taking several years, from when an agent sells a manuscript, before a book sees print.  Well worth the read:  “Waiting for It,” at the NY Times.

With the Hollywood strike going on, I thought you might enjoy this Harlan Ellison rant about paying writers.

Should I be paying him for this?

Well, I can say that response to The First Book blog has been tremendous, especially considering that I’ve barely started promoting it.  I plan to do one interview a week, releasing them on Mondays.  Maybe more down the road, but we’ll have to see. 

Someone asked me why I wanted to do it.  First, I truly do want to help new writers.  A lot of writers have helped me along the way, so anything I can do it pay it forward is a good thing.  With a full-time day job, a working spouse, two young children, and the writing on top of it, it’s hard for me to find time to do a lot.  But because my day job has me online almost constantly, it’s not difficult to use my lunch hour or break times to do something like a blog. 

But . . . I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I hoped I’d get some publicity myself.  Now that I’ve sold a book, I realize that it’s going to be my name in those computerized inventory tracking systems on the line when it’s published, which is a lot different than sharing the responsibility in an anthology of short stories.  This is a golden age for first time novelists, because publishers are constantly looking for The Next Big Thing, but it’s also a time when publishers are reluctant to take the time to build an author over the course of many books.  You’ve got to start strong right out of the gate, with good sales, or it’s unlikely you’ll find publishers willing to sign you up for more books.  (You can start fresh under a new name, yes, but that’s something most of us want to avoid.  Every time you start with a new name, you’ve got to build your audience from scratch.)

What does this mean?  Well, of course you’ve got to write a strong book.  That’s a given.  You don’t have a strong book, no amount of self-promotion will help.  But unless you’re one of those rare authors a publisher is really going to get behind, your first book probably won’t get a lot of exposure.  Self-promotion becomes a necessary evil.  You can have a great agent, and a fantastic publisher (I think I have both), but still, no one will take responsibility for your career the way you will.

So then the question becomes, what kind of self-promtion is worthwhile?  Taking a cost/benefit approach — meaning, what is the cost in time and money versus the benefit in exposure a particular type of promotion gives you? – helps a great deal.  Doing book tours and attending genre conventions (think RWA or SFWA) may give your book exposure, but they also have a high cost.  If you enjoy them, or you do them for other reasons (going to conventions is great for networking and learning), that’s another matter, but you should do so being fully aware that getting exposure for your book is secondary.

That brings us to the Internet.  It has an extremly low cost (you can do a blog/website for free and even have your own domain for less than a hundred bucks a year), and it has the potential for extremely high exposure.  The key word here is potential.  While I do think there’s no excuse for a professional writer not to have a website, it’s also true that most of them aren’t going to get a lot of traffic without some effort.

Okay, so then how do you create Web traffic?  That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?  Opinions vary, but I think the key is you create value.  What can you do that gives value to others?  Putting up information about your book does give some value.  It educates potential readers on why they should buy your book.  Doing a blog that lets your readers learn a little more about you helps, too, because it helps your readers feel like they have a stronger connection to you.  That’s a start, but in a way, these things are self-focused.  If you focus on others, on how you can give value to them, then it’s far more likely your site traffic will increase dramatically — from what I’ve seen, anyway.

That’s how I came up with The First Book blog.  I asked myself, how could I give value to others?  What could I do?  Well, if I turn the question around, what would I hope someone would do for me?  Having recently sold a book, the answer was obvious — I hoped people would help me spread the word on my book when the time came.  Was there a website out there focused on first time novelists?  Not exclusively, no.  If I created one, what would the response be?  So far, the response has been terrific, which bodes well for the future. 

Helping other writers does many wonderful things.  It’s good for the soul, first of all.  Never underestimate the power of creating a sense of goodwill among others.  It also helps me make new friends in this crazy business — and that, even more than the Web traffic, makes it all worthwhile. 

There’s some great things brewing on the publishing front.  Nothing I can announce officially yet, but it’s looking very good, so hopefully a Big Announcement will be coming soon.  

When it comes to the actual writing, still working on the Latest Novel, progress is slow but steady (I’m in that dreaded muddle in the middle), and I wish I could talk about this one because I’m very excited about its potential.  Alas, I’ve learned the hard way that I’m one of those writers whose enthusiasm can be easily dampened by early criticism, especially when an idea is still in the molding and shaping stage, so it’s best just to finish the thing and then talk about it.  Once it’s on paper, I’m fine with getting feedback, and in fact find it quite helpful, but then I’ve got something finished and I’ve (at least partially) divested myself emotionally from it. 

On another topic, somebody the other day referred to me as “young writer,” as in, “this young writer here has had some great success so far.”  Now I suppose, in a pure chronolocial sense, you could refer to a 34-year-old as young, but I think I’m getting dangerously close to the point where that adjective can no longer apply.  To me, a young writer would a teenager, maybe, or somebody in their early twenties.  But I guess that’s the point, isn’t it?  It’s all relative. 

Except, when it comes to writing, the term young writer means something quite different.  When people in publishing refer to someone as young, they generally mean new, as in new to the scene of publishing.  And that’s fair enough — except why not just say new?  Well, perhaps because calling someone a new writer implies that they haven’t been writing long, when in fact most writers toil in unpublished anonymity for many years before any of their words see print.  And that’s exactly how I’ve heard that term used — to describe people who are just now getting serious about the craft.  

Of course, I do think there comes a point when a newly published author can’t be referred to as young, no matter the meaning.  I’m trying to imagine a 90-year-old first time novelist being called “a young writer” and I doubt it would fly.  It’s really quite fascinating.  If I was a professional basketball player, at 34 I’d be considered a creaky veteran nearing retirement.  I’d also probably be insanely rich.  This is besides the point, but I felt it worth saying.   

No real point to any of this except the obvious:  words can mean different things depending on the context, and that’s always interesting to a writer.  Even when they refer to the writer himself.   

Recommended Reading:  

Every now and then I’ll pick up a book on writing.  There’s hundreds of them out there, many of them written by writers who’ve really had very little success in publishing, so I do think a serious writer should be careful and err toward how-to books written by writers who’ve either been bestsellers or at least made a good solid living at their craft.  Lawrence Block is one such writer, and I just finished his Spider, Spin Me a Web:  A Handbook for Fiction Writers. 

It’s a collection of many of his best columns from when he was writing regularly for Writer’s Digest magazine, and it’s a fantastic read.  It’s not so much about the nuts and bolts of the craft, though there’s plenty sprinkled throughout; it reads more like a Dear Abby column, covering a little of this and a little of that, Block going wherever his whim takes him.  This may not sound good, but in the end it’s a book that seems to fill in all missing links that other writers miss in more structured books. 

It’s been a couple months since I’ve last posted.  First off, Happy New Year.  Last year was an up and down year for me personally, for various reasons, but by no means a bad year.  But I go into 2008 full of vigor and optimism that great things are in store.  My writing productivity was signficantly up over last year, by about a 100,000 words (which probably says more about 2007 than 2008), plus I finished a new book which I’m quite excited about and which my agent has just gone to market with, published a number of short stories in some great places, and got started on another book which really has me stoked.  I don’t like to talk about works in progress, for fear that talking about them will let the wind out of my sails, but let’s just say it’s a book that pushes all the right buttons for me. 

And if I’ve learned anything at all from my years at working at my storytelling craft, it’s to write what you feel passionate about.  Because at the end of the day, regardless of how your story or novel is received, whether it’s published to great acclaim or languishes in a drawer, you want to be able to say you pleased at least one reader — you.  That’s really the only reader you can hope to please anyway, because it’s the only reader a writer truly knows.  And if you write something you like, well, there’s a great chance others will like it as well. 

So as odd as it may sound, that’s my main goal for the year — to write more books and stories I like.  To remember to have fun tellling stories, because if I’m not having fun, then why do it?  And to focus most on what I can control best, which is just putting one word on the page after another.

Following up on my last post, “Pages Before Play,” I thought I’d share another two P’s that are a big part of the way I see my writing: Production and Process.

I lump everything related to writing into these two categories to help me stay focused on the right things. Production is really just one thing: writing. However, it’s not just any writing, but specifically fiction. Blog entries, nonfiction, emails — those all might be an integral part of my life as a writer, but none of that falls under the Production side of things. Only fiction. It’s where the vast amount of my effort, energy, and mental focus must go.

Process is everything else that’s necessary in being a professional fiction writer. Market research. Story research. Mailing manuscripts. Reading. Studying other writers. Going to conferences or workshops to further my learning and career. I lump it all together as Process, because they are part of the process you must follow if you hope to take your writing career as far as it will go. Calling it Process also helps me remember not to worry or stress about things I have no or limited control over; I just follow the process, knowing that if I do, things will work out for me in the long run. It’s too easy to obsess about minutiae that don’t matter, to pin your hopes on details that don’t pan out. Marketing short stories is a perfect example. I print a story. I come up with a market list. I mail it to the best market, in my opinion, for that story. If it comes back, I mail it to the next one on the list. In between, I try not to think about it at all. Hard to do sometimes? Sure, but I’ve gotten better at it over the years.

The fact of the matter is that nothing in the Process category matters all that much if you aren’t producing. And if you want to do one thing that helps you find success more quickly, then you should produce more. Write another page a day. Or five. Or ten. Most aspiring professional writers don’t write nearly enough, a lot of them falling prey to the thinking that landing a great agent or making that contact at a conference is the key to success. If you go to a conference, sure, try to make contacts. And when you’re actually mailing your work, put some time in to thinking about the best places to send it. But most of the time, you shouldn’t be thinking or worrying about those things at all.

Whenever I find myself worrying about things outside my control, I tell myself to just produce and let everything else be part of the process I follow. Not only has this helped me become more efficient with my energy and time, it’s made me happier, too.

Recommended Reads

• The Undercover Economist by Tom Harford. Great book on applying economics to every life and the bigger world picture.
• Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner. Stirring, multi-viewpoint book about a number of women all dealing with different aspects of pregnancy and being new mothers. Her writing was highly accessible, and she brought all of her characters to life. I loved the structure of the book, too.
• The Lonely Silver Rain by John D. MacDonald. I’ve read five or six of the Travis McGee series, and I’ve loved them all. This was the twenty-first book, the last one published before MacDonald died, and though I don’t think it was written as the capstone of the series, it was a fitting end to it. He’s the kind of writer that makes me want to be a better writer, too.

It’s said that most writers like to have written more than they like to actually write. I wouldn’t say this is totally true for me, because I love writing — you know, the actual process of putting words on the page and molding them into something that resembles a story — but I can relate to the challenges of actually getting the butt in the chair. I don’t know why this is. You’d think that when you love something, you’d look for every opportunity to do it, but I suspect it has something to do with writing being hard. It may be fun, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

For years, I tried everything in the book to get myself to write more. Nothing worked well until I realized that any rule had to be tied not to time or place, but to a specific number of words or pages. In other words, I couldn’t say to myself, “I will write for an hour each night from 6:30 to 7:30,” but instead, “I will write 1000 words every day.” Or 500. Or 100. It didn’t matter how small, so long as it was specific and achievable. Because if you tell yourself you will write for an hour, well, you may write, but you may write only a few sentences. If your goals are time-based, rather than production-based, then you’re creating the wrong mindset. You want to condition yourself that when you sit, you write, and not that sitting for any set amount of time satisfies your goal.

If I know I’m not letting myself up out of that chair until I’ve written my five pages, you better believe I’ll get cranking fairly quickly. I don’t want to be sitting there until one in the morning when I know my kids will have me up shortly after the crack of dawn.

Ah, but that brings me to the other critical adjustment I made that helped me go from being a dilettante to a doer: withholding rewards until the work is done.

Or, when it comes to writing specifically, what I call pages before play.

There has to be either punishment or reward tied directly to your goal. Since I’m not really into the whips and chains and the fifty pushups with the face in the mud, I prefer to go with the rewards. What type of rewards are best? Well, that’s for each person to decide, but usually they’re what you’re doing when you know you should be writing. For me, that’s a couple things: 1) reading, of course, which is the big one, 2) movies and television, and 3) Internet and email.

So what I did is lump all of those into the “play category,” and I don’t let myself do any of them until the daily quota is met. No checking email to see if I heard back from so-and-so editor at such-and-such magazine. No reading that John D. MacDonald I find so addictive. No watching that documentary that was getting all the buzz lately. All of that waits until the pages are done.

And this works. It works very, very well, in fact. You have to have the self-discipline not to cheat, but usually the guilt will prevent you from doing that. Because not only do you create incentives to get your butt in the chair (gosh, you really would like to see that romantic comedy you brought home from Blockbuster the other night), you also eliminate most of the easiest distractions.

Pages before play. The trick, of course, is really doing it. But then that’s what separates the wannabes from the achievers — not just in writing, but any pursuit in life that takes discipline and dedication.

Apropos of yesterday’s post, I got bitten by the curiosity bug and had to do it. Here’s the word counts of the Harry Potter books (based on Scholastic’s published information):

I - 76,944
II - 85,141
III - 107,253
IV - 190,637
V -257,045
VI -168,923

Total: 885,943 words

If we assume that all monies related to the books (movies, toys, etc.) all directly flow from the books themselves (which we should, since none of those things would have happened without the books), then a billion dollars in income translates into the following word rate:

$1,000,000,000 / 885,943 words = $1128.74 per word

All I can say is . . . wow. Most writers would be happy with a word rate starting to the right of the decimal point.