Thinking Outside The Box (With Your Writing Career)

January 23, 2009

My oldest son currently wants to be a high school band director and music teacher. And why not? He plays guitar, bassoon and saxophone and it's his favorite subject.

That said, a while back he said writer. And I have no problem seeing him as a writer either. In fact, in some ways, I can see him better as a writer than a musician because just about every day he hits the computer and writes--on his own! He's a bit less self-motivated as a musician.

Yesterday he spent some time with his high school counselor working through a rough schedule of the next three years (he's a freshman). I looked at it and asked him about the class on film editing and writing. He said it sounded interesting and he still had film making and scriptwriting at the back of his mind.

I suggested to him that someone with a writing, music and film and sound editing background might have a very interesting selection of careers available to him, things he might never have thought of before--film editing, film and sound editing, music editing, videogame design, etc. I commented that not everybody interested in film making was going to be Stephen Spielberg and it might be an interesting job to link graphics and sound and music and image at your local TV station or for TV shows or movies or video games or for advertisements for TV of the Internet.

Now, what's my point about writing? Isn't it obvious?

I started out writing and it was all about the novels. COMPLETELY. It was novels or nothing. Once I tried writing a screenplay (it sucked).

It wasn't until later that I did some nonfiction and it was typically because someone would say, "Such and such an organization needs a piece about this, you like to write. Why don't you write it?" So I did and it got published. 

Eventually, because I can be rather slow, I noticed that my nonfiction was actually getting published and I was actually, like, you know, getting checks for it, and like, I could cash them and use the money to buy things.

Still, a writer writes novels, I thought. I didn't like that journalism, what fun was that?

Now, years later, writing for a living, I agree that writing novels is more fun than nonfiction, usually (although the marketing of fiction is not much fun). But the thought processes and the skills involved are nearly (probably not necessarily 100%) identical.

Somewhere a couple years before I left working at the hospital to write full time I read a book, "The Well-Fed Writer" by Peter Bowerman. Bowerman's pretty much a disciple of Robert Bly, who's the guru of "direct marketing" writing, ie., junk mail and copywriting. (And I've read at least one of Bly's books as well).

I don't actually do either of those (although I could, I just haven't pursued much of it). Two things really hit me hard when I read the Bowerman book. One is his attitude. His take on writing is that it has value and you should value it as well and therefore put a price on it that's concurrent with its value. In other words, if you think anybody can write as well as you can, then maybe you deserve to make minimum wage. If you think what you bring to the table is more than that, then you should charge accordingly and look for work that pays accordingly. I'm sorry, it sounds stupid, but that was a revelation to me. Society had convinced me that nobody paid writers well. Bowerman suggested I shouldn't listen to what society had to say on the subject and instead look for those businesses and publications that valued good writers.

The second revelation, more having to do with today's post, is that when most people think of writing, they think of novels, nonfiction books, magazine articles and newspapers. Right? Don't you?

Unfortunately, in most cases novels, magazine articles and newspapers are some of the worst forms of paid writing. There are exceptions, of course. There are novels that make a ton of money, magazine publishers that pay $1 a word or more (I've even known some to pay closer to $3 or $4 per word). Newspapers, well, even the best newspapers don't pay all that well, and most of them are ridiculously low.

No, if you want to make decent money as a writer you need to find the work that pays well, things like advertising copywriting, technical writing, direct writing, market research, corporate writing--press releases and annual reports, etc--and others.

For a society that's surrounded by writing--really, have you looked around you? How many brochures and ads do you get in the mail? How many newsletters from organizations? How many advertisements in the mail or online?--we sometimes forget that there's a writer somewhere cranking out all that verbiage. And in a lot of cases, getting paid pretty damn well for it.

For me, that was the real thinking outside the box. I still have to force myself to think that way sometimes too. Sometimes my best paying writing gigs are less writing and more research. Sometimes they resemble busy work.

My son--same one--got a gig from his old man recently. I'm the editor of a technical journal and I was asked by the last executive director if I would index the last 8 or 9 years of journals for their website. The answer was yes, but the problem was, I'm not actually paid to index the journals. I'm paid to get the issues out. I do extra things for this client--it's called value-added--when I can, but indexing was a boring chore and time-consuming and it kept getting shifted to the bottom of my to-do list.

So I finally told Oldest Son that I would pay him $100 to index the things up to 10 hours. In other words, $10 an hour. For a 15-year-old with no work history, this is a great paying gig. He's not done yet and there's no hurry, but he made a comment once about how boring it was. To which I commented that attitude was important, a lot of things in his work life would be boring, and that $10 an hour was pretty damned good money for his age, so stop complaining (I'm sure I sounded exactly like a Dad was supposed to sound).

I understand that the majority of readers of this blog are aspiring novelists. But I wonder if you're aware that you're inside a box and suggest you might think about what's outside that box. Or perhaps, just make the box a little bigger. No one says you have to stop writing fiction just because you're writing other things as well.

Cheers,

Mark Terry