How to Become A Selling Writer

Selling writers know that you can become a selling writer only by keeping at it. Keep writing. Keep sending queries. Keep submitting your work.

Call it what you will — persistence, stick-to-it-tiveness, doggedness, determination, just plain old sutbbornness — it’s the usual way to make that first sale and to follow up with more and more sales. It’’s how most of us get started in the writing business.

If you have that stubborn streak and if you keep writing, you eventually reach the place where you can claim to be a selling writer.

That point was brought home by Robert Dugoni, the New York Times bestselling author of “The Jury Master,” “Damage Control,” and “Wrongful Death,” in an Off The Cuff piece he wrote in the February 2010 issue of The Writer. Dugoni says he bridged the thin line between trying and succeeding by learning the three P’s — Patience, Perseverance and Persistence.

And he compares his writing efforts to that of his nine-year-old son learning to hit a baseball. In “Don’t be afraid of striking out,” he says that in writing as in baseball, you have to stick with it to hit one out of the park.

“As writers, we can’t become paralyzed at the thought of rejection. We can’t fear it, or seek to avoid it. Rather, we must confront it head on, charge into it with reckless abandon. We must look at rejection like a ball player looks at striking out, that thin line between trying and succeeding, a line we must cross as many times as necessary, knowing that on the other side exist our dreams and goals.”

Dugoni is a fiction writer, to be sure, but his advice can help nonfiction writers as well to become published writers. The entire article could be the motivation you need to succeed. I picked up my copy of The Writer at my local Barnes & Noble, but you probably can find the magazine at another bookstore or read it at your local library if you prefer. I think it’s one article you won’t want to miss.

Happy New Year to Everyone!

Happy New Year to all readers of this blog! Best wishes for a very successful new year. May your writing prosper!

I’ll be taking a break from this blog for a while (a very little while, I hope). A torn rotator cuff makes it too painful for me to spend time at the computer. I hope this injury will be of short duration.

Meanwhile, I hope you will continue to write and market your work. I wish you the best of luck in 2010. Please let me know about your successes! LD

What Kind of Writer Are You? What Kind of Writer Would You Like to Be?

What kind of writer are you? What kind of writer would you like to be? These deep thoughts came about, I think, because I’ve been without a computer for some weeks. (I bought a new computer but it had to go in for service the first week I had it. Now that it’s back in my office, I find it will have to go in back for more service this week!).

As a computer-less writer, I’ve had to content myself with reading about writers and writing. I finally reached thisconclusion: although I would aspire to be influenced by other noted writers, I think I’m addicted to the Pearl S. Buck method of writing she talked about here:

I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

So I’m a workhorse kind of writer — that’s what I do. That has been my modus operandi for more than 25 years and is responsible, I think,for my being able to produce so many articles and other writing projects. But writers like Mark Twain have also had an influence on me. Based on his advice, I’ve worked hard to make my writing lean, to take out every useless word. I am not always successful at that, even though
I always plan to write that way. I also plan to be the kind of writer that Twain spoke about here (although I’m not always successful at this either):

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjectiv habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

I think I’ve been a bit more successful in the choice of the words I use in my articles, but I still have a long way to go before reaching the level that Twain wrote about here:

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single
sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire
of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Nevertheless, as a down-to-earth writer, I’ve long had lofty aspirations. I’ve never succeeded and I doubt if I ever could, but I’d really like to do the kind of
writing that Lord Byron speaks of here:

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Now I ask you: What kind of writer are you? What kind of writer would you like to be? And who has influenced your writing?

Please leave a comment.

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