In the world of writ­ers, we want a lot of things—book deals, mon­ey, a few more min­utes of Wi-Fi and pow­er out­let rid­ing before the barista demands we buy anoth­er cup of cof­fee… maybe a spot on Oprah. But there are things no one can ever give us, things no one ever WILL give us, and things the world may even do its lev­el best to take away from us if we let it. We writ­ers always and for­ev­er have to find these things, make these things, cre­ate these things from sheer force of will, for­age for these things in the blis­ter­ing fires of our own deter­mi­na­tion, and hunt down these things, wound them, track them until they col­lapse from exhaus­tion, pounce on them, and bury our teeth in their jugu­lar, wor­ry­ing them until they… uh…

Um… we all under­stand this is a metaphor, right?

So here are a few things that no one is ever going to give you.

Per­mis­sion

No one is going to give you per­mis­sion to be a writer, to write, to declare your­self a writer, to give up your day job and go for it, even if you need fifty-three side gigs to keep the elec­tric­i­ty on. No one is ever going to say, “Lo, [insert your name here], thou art now a writer.” There is no cabal that you will stand in the mid­dle of, and they will use force light­ning to sear your flesh with The Mark of the Writer™.

No teacher. No men­tor. No par­ent. No oth­er writer. No Face­book page. No Burgess Mered­ith men­tor char­ac­ter. No sen­tient Pop-Tart. A mil­lion peo­ple could give you encour­age­ment, but no one will ever give you per­mis­sion. You have to take it for your­self.

Yeah, you might have to check in on your­self with some bru­tal hon­esty and make sure you’re not try­ing to fake-it-until-you-make it in a self-decep­tive way if you’re try­ing to BE a writer more than you actu­al­ly write, but even that is between you and you. You are nev­er going to find any­one else who will decide that you have done enough and ush­er you into the VIP lounge. A

Val­i­da­tion

You can get val­i­da­tion, but let me let you in on a lit­tle secret: it’ll nev­er be enough. Not if it’s com­ing from oth­er peo­ple. Espe­cial­ly if it’s com­ing from somoene who wants you to put your tongue on their naughty bits.

You must forge cliché One-Ring-to-Rule-Them-All-Style val­i­da­tion and just decide for your­self that you are a majes­tic, pret­ty pony and rock rock on as the mag­nif­i­cent Cheat Com­man­do you real­ly are. Most writ­ers deal with imposter syn­drome at some point, and many deal with it a lot. It doesn’t mat­ter if they scrib­ble furi­ous­ly in jour­nals that they sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly burn when full, if they just tossed off their first anony­mous fan­f­ic, or if they are New York Times best-sell­ers.

Even at the oth­er end of the scale, where you have those arro­gant snots who strut around and say, “genius can’t be taught,” and who are real­ly just inse­cure and express­ing it in a dif­fer­ent way. The tru­ly self-con­fi­dent have (per­haps tem­porar­i­ly) found the way to val­i­date them­selves. No one can do it for them.

Time

Peo­ple will only do one thing when it comes to your time.

Take it.

No mat­ter how much they love you. No mat­ter how sup­port­ive they are. No mat­ter how much they relate to your artis­tic eccen­tric­i­ties. Don’t wor­ry. It’s not their fault. That’s the way the uni­verse unfolds accord­ing to the laws of physics. It’s Newton’s fifth law: “For every minute that a writer has to write, there will be ten­fold demands on that minute.” (Look it up, choads. Your uncle Chris would­n’t lie to you.) You will nev­er walk away from an encounter with anoth­er human hav­ing GAINED time. Unless they flit through your life like a shade, they can only ever take your time. So you must pro­tect it.

Though the rare benev­o­lent angel might find ways to free up some time com­mit­ment on a writer’s plate—and if you should find some­one like this, grab them and nev­er let them go—all will take some­how from some­where.

The real shit sun­dae of it is that most are not so kind. They take with­out con­sid­er­a­tion. The blunt and odi­ous may say shit­ty things such as “But you don’t have a real job,” or “Oh you’re just writ­ing,” as they demand your help with air­port rides or want to chat right in the mid­dle of your writ­ing time, but even the best-inten­tioned will like­ly won­der if writ­ing can’t be moved around. They will act as if because your sched­ule is flex­i­ble, your time isn’t impor­tant.

(“Chris. Call your moth­er. You don’t have any­thing going on today. All you’re doing is writ­ing.”) 

It gets even shi­tac­u­lar­er-er! The true demon here is not anoth­er per­son. It lives in the beat­ing hearts of writ­ers them­selves and fills their days with activ­i­ties that push their writ­ing to incon­ve­nient or implau­si­ble times, assur­ing folks that it’s no big deal and they can take a few min­utes (or a few hours) to do some­thing “just this once.” Sure­ly I can do five hours of writ­ing from 8 pm until 1 am (even though I go to bed at 11 and my brain checks out for any task more involved than watch­ing Sev­er­ance after 9).

No one will give a writer time. Writ­ers have to take it. They have to hoard it. And they have to guard it with the feroc­i­ty oft reserved for Black Fri­day sales. Which is why you have to go out and look for that shit in the back­woods like the world’s most moti­vat­ed truf­fle pig, gath­er it into tight bun­dles, put on woad paint, hold a bunch of sticks up around it, bare your teeth, and set up Aliens-style motion sen­sor auto-fir­ing machine gun tur­rets at any­one who comes close. It might just be enough.

Time may very well be a writer’s sin­gle most pre­cious resource, and the one most peo­ple feel most enti­tled to take in bits they think are no big deal. No one can give you time. It march­es on no mat­ter what you do. So fight for it.

The Advice That Will MAKE You Write

No one can give you this because it doesn’t exist.

It. Does. Not. Exist.

Writ­ers quest for this advice as if it is the Holy Grail. Some go on great expe­di­tions, seek­ing the knowl­edge of the writ­ers who have come before. That some­where, some writer, some moti­va­tion­al speak­er, some cre­ative will have that one gem of insight that will blow away all the excus­es, all the ratio­nales, all the dis­trac­tions, and the angels will sing out in a resound­ing cho­rus, and sit­ting down to write will nev­er be hard again.

They nod sage­ly when every sin­gle Writer Who Has “Made It”™ says some vari­ant of “Put your ass in a chair and write dai­ly.” And then the acolytes go to find the next writer and ask THEM for the secret knowl­edge. (Who says some­thing sim­i­lar and the process con­tin­ues… as if for some­where out there, the answer is going to stop being “hard fuck­ing work” and become “a kale and açai smooth­ie ene­ma while lis­ten­ing to 555 Hz cat yowls.”)

There IS no advice that will make you write. You have to treat it like a job (and you may have to do this for years before it actu­al­ly is a job). You get up. You write. You get bet­ter at it. You keep going.

A Detailed Roadmap

I’m afraid no one’s going to be able to tell you exact­ly what to do. No mat­ter how much you want them to. And they’re not just being dill­holes.

They can’t.

Even if they want­ed to, they couldn’t.

Not their per­son­al blue­print, their per­son­al style, their per­son­al process, their per­son­al cir­cum­stances, espe­cial­ly not their per­son­al mag­ic is going to work for any­one but them. It won’t work for you. 

They’re a night owl. You’re an ear­ly bird. They write a page a day. You write for three hours. You have to fig­ure out what works for you.

You might be able to extrap­o­late some use­ful infor­ma­tion (“Based on care­ful study, and the wis­dom of ages, and por­ing through five hun­dred books all called “On Writ­ing,” I have begun to sus­pect that it might be pos­si­ble that maybe there is a chance a key ingre­di­ent for a suc­cess­ful writ­ing career is… actu­al­ly writ­ing! Per­chance. Fur­ther research need­ed.” 

Still, you won’t be able to get the same results in exact­ly the same way, and you may not even want to. By the time you reach the first mile­stone, the entire land­scape will have changed. The way they got where they’re going can inform your jour­ney, but it can’t deter­mine it.

Of course, nowhere is this incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty more appar­ent than in the advice that writ­ers who estab­lished their careers 15–25 years ago are giv­ing mod­ern upstarts. While an ambi­tious start­ing writer can sub­mit short sto­ries to every venue until they have a cov­er let­ter impres­sive enough to snag an agent who will take a chance on their nov­el, and push inex­orably toward a book deal, that is actu­al­ly a far less like­ly path to a book deal these days, to say noth­ing of the path to pub­li­ca­tion, read­ers, fans, and enough income to be a work­ing writer. Today, one can estab­lish a six-fig­ure, pub­lished career with­out even once encoun­ter­ing a gate­keep­er. Frankly, these days, dis­cussing tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing as the only path is very nar­row, lim­it­ed, and bor­der­line shit­ty advice.

Now you have self-pub­lish­ing (that is not just van­i­ty press), print on demand, epub, apps, a bil­lion online venues, blogs, and ways to mon­e­tize it all, from Patre­on to Kick­starter to hor­ror shows like Kin­dle Unlim­it­ed. Social media works for name pro­lif­er­a­tion, but do you use one (if so, which one?) or do you use all of them a lit­tle? (Because if you try to use all of them a lot, you’re just going to end up being a full-time social media man­ag­er who bare­ly has a minute to actu­al­ly write.) Where is your audi­ence and how are you going to find them? And what will you do when (if? Oh who am I kid­ding WHEN) the social medi­um you like turns out to be moral­ly rep­re­hen­si­ble?

It would be great if some­one could just tell us exact­ly what to do next. Exact­ly how to make the mag­ic alche­my of suc­cess trans­mute effort into lit­er­ary reviews or fans or dol­lar signs (or what­ev­er it is we’re after). But no one can. And no one is hold­ing out on you if they know they can’t. The best thing they can do is point towards the hori­zon and say, “Read a lot. Write a lot. Don’t stop. Beware the grooooooooooove.”

Even with few­er dra­mat­ic dif­fer­ences than tra­di­tion­al vs. non-tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing, no one else can tell you exact­ly what to do to “make it.” (For exam­ple, I’m not going any­where near tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing for ide­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, and I’ll prob­a­bly avoid Kin­dle and Ama­zon if I can.) The indus­try is chang­ing faster than the between-the-walls dimen­sion in House of Leaves. The path I took in 2013 is already far less effec­tive, and you wouldn’t get the same trac­tion out of it today.

It’s not my fault. I’m not LYING to you. Face­book made changes that throt­tled the engage­ment of pages and build­ing a page with a mil­lion fol­low­ers is much much hard­er than it used to be. ALL social media is expe­ri­enc­ing huge tec­ton­ic upheavals because of its role in elec­tion­eer­ing, hate speech, and try­ing to com­ply with FOSTA-SESTA laws. Tum­blr traf­fic came close to halv­ing overnight when they banned cer­tain hash­tags relat­ed to sex­u­al­i­ty and porn—even though most of it was erot­ic fan fic­tion.

All the kids today think Face­book is a fos­sil. But Insta­gram doesn’t have much for the writ­ten word and can be a dif­fi­cult place to build a read­ing audi­ence unless you’re already famous or ready to put in a bazil­lion hours build­ing your “brand.” And if you do go tra­di­tion­al, how do you sep­a­rate your writ­ing time from your sub­mis­sion time? How many venues do you shop some­thing before you dra­mat­i­cal­ly revise it? What is your ratio of “safe” to “stretch” sub­mis­sions? Do you try to shop a nov­el with­out a port­fo­lio (it can be done, but it is much, much hard­er)? Do you work for years so that you get a great agent or just enough that some­one new to the busi­ness knows you’re seri­ous and will take a chance on you?

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 (Tomor­row)