I am now working on the content for writer’s retreats designed to both teach the art of writing and give information about the real-world dynamics of publishers, agents, social media, self-publication, and more.  Stay tuned.  If you’d like me to keep you informed, sign up for my newsletter (on the right side of this page).  In the meantime …

You want to be a writer.  The question to ask yourself, then, is what kind of writer would you like to be?  To succeed as either a fiction or a non-fiction writer, it takes courage, faith, a touch of megalomania, and a willingness to keep believing in yourself long after reasonable people have stopped doing so.  There are exceptions, yes.  Sometimes, people get lucky and they write a first book, and it takes off like hotcakes.

But that is not the norm, not by a long way.  The list of famous but largely commercially “failed” writers is a long one: Poe, Melville, Lovecraft, Joyce, Dickenson, and on and on.  And many successful writers endured dozens to hundreds of rejections before getting published: Cummings, Stein, London, Creasey, Pirsig, Seuss…

In other words, I’m boringly average when it comes to my road to publication.  I began at 20 years of age, and I got published for the first time when I was 35.  At that point, I had written a novel, a collection of short stories, a wedding guide book (and had, ironically gotten divorced), and a number of essays, and had succeeded in getting none of them published.  I saved all those rejection letters (totaling about 300), and tapped them to the wall behind me when I read from my first published book.  Then I burned them.  Immature?  Probably.  Cathartic?  Absolutely. A more reasonable person would have given up, would have read the writing on the wall, so to speak.  And that writing was all over the wall behind me.

So that’s my first rule: have an unreasonable belief in your own potential, and screw the naysayers.

The second rule: never stop writing, which if you love it isn’t much of a rule anyway.  If you’re struggling to write or need help in finding motivation there, the odds are stacked against you, I’m afraid.  Going to get your MFA?  Waste of time.  Take the money and the energy and find your own motivation to create, for it can never come from anywhere outside of you (and yes, I know there are a few notable exceptions, but those are exceptions).  Hedging your bets that you can teach and write likely means you’ll teach.  And sometimes write.  But writing is like jumping across a great chasm: it can’t be done in a few short leaps.  (more on my leap of faith here)

My burning those rejections was symbolic: I knew that what it took me to get published was not what it would take for me to continue to evolve and succeed.  In other words, what got me there could get me no further.

My first publisher gave me, in hindsight, a terrible contract that hugely favored them, but I didn’t know any better at the time.  I was so grateful to be given recognition that I probably would have given up 100% of the book profits just to see it in print.  Yet I learned an important lesson, and when it was time to get my second book published, I hired an attorney to help me with the contract.  What a huge difference in having someone else, who understood contracts, act as a middle woman.   I also took the time to pick a publisher who was a good fit for me, for the book, and for my target audience — another important point.

I can help you with some of these things, including ghostwriting, editing, and publication (in the Consulting section).