(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

A Few Disclaimers:

1- Vari­a­tions: they may occur in your mileage.

I’ll try to hit the nuance when there is some. (Like the ten­sion between the ableism of pre­scrib­ing writ­ing dai­ly but the unlike­li­hood that one could be a work­ing writer with­out doing exact­ly that.) But some­times I’m answer­ing the ques­tion that is right in front of me and not account­ing for every per­son­’s very spe­cial (if absolute­ly legit­i­mate) cir­cum­stances. Some­times people––who maybe had a very legit­i­mate and trau­mat­ic high school expe­ri­ence in a cook­ie cut­ter pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem in need of sys­tem­at­ic and sys­temic indict­ment, and maybe even had a shit­ty teacher or eight––are not the peo­ple with the exper­tise to know HOW to teach or why lit­er­a­ture ped­a­gogy is what it is. And for fuck­’s sake almost every­one ever who insists that writ­ing every day does­n’t help have nev­er actu­al­ly tried it.

I’m THRILLED that there are a few MFA pro­grams out there who’ve incor­po­rat­ed spec­u­la­tive fic­tion or that some­one pub­lished their NaNo nov­el, and don’t be afraid to chime in. But please remem­ber that I’ve been doing this for DECADES, it is my DAY JOB, half my friends are work­ing writ­ers, and the pres­ence of a few out­lier cas­es does not under­mine the broad­er points. 

I’m not say­ing you’re wrong, but I usu­al­ly know what I’m talk­ing about.

2- I’m not very careful about images.

It’s hard to watch every oth­er blog in the uni­verse be cav­a­lier about movie screen­shots and copy­right­ed images (some­times even going viral with movie gifs) and then use a pic­ture of an old flip flop for your great Avengers quote because that’s what Googled turned up as cre­ative com­mons.

I’ve got a few places I check first, like the Cre­ative Com­mon Licence Flikr page or the “free to use (even com­mer­cial­ly)” image search on Google. Some images seem to be allowed to be pro­lif­er­at­ed if prop­er­ly cit­ed on a non-prof­it blog. But I’m not as care­ful as I would be if I were host­ing ads and mak­ing mil­lions. Unless they are a pic­ture OF me (or some­thing around me), they are absolute­ly not mine, and I will nev­er ever claim that they are. I put copy­right info when I post com­mer­cial images and/or any time I can tell where they’re from. I try my best, but the inter­net is a tan­gled thick­et and not every image is water­marked (WHICH I WILL NEVER USE) and things are stolen and restolen so many times that it is some­times impos­si­ble to know where they’re from.

So if I’m using an image that is yours (or your clien­t’s), please just tell me how you’d like me to han­dle it. (I’ll take it down. Give you cred­it. Make it a link back to your page. Apol­o­gize for my impu­dence. Write a post about how awe­some you are for not mak­ing a fed­er­al case of it. What­ev­er*.)

Just don’t expect me to fall for the licenc­ing scam. This is not my first rodeo. I’ve got too many blog­ger friends at this point; I know that it’s JUST a scam wear­ing a suit. (Amaz­ing what you can find out with a quick search of the BBB.) You go ahead and take me to court and have fun try­ing to prove beyond a rea­son­able doubt to a judge how much of my pover­ty-wage crowd­fund­ed income from writ­ing is due to your ONE image on the ONE post rather than my writ­ing (or con­verse­ly that where I got your image from was clear­ly labeled as requir­ing a licence fee). I’m absolute­ly sure that will be worth it for you. Oh and by the way I’ll be invoic­ing every hour I spend deal­ing with you at my top tier free­lance rate for a counter-suit. Won’t this be fun!

I real­ly do try to avoid any image with a big flam­ing “Don’t use my shit with­out per­mis­sion” sign on the web page or a clear copy­right water­mark, or from com­pa­nies I know don’t give a crap if you give them prop­er cred­it, but some­times I end up with such image through an inter­me­di­ary with less regard. If I’ve used a image that I did­n’t know was stolen, I will do what it takes to make amends. And I will nev­er pass off work that isn’t mine as my own.

3‑There will (probably) never be ads, but I might remind you of the tip jar and my Patreon once or twice a month-ish.

Writ­ing About Writ­ing is and will always be free. And these days we don’t even have any ads. (Although tech­ni­cal­ly I might put one up for a prod­uct I actu­al­ly endorse.) But I’m a pre­ten­tious artisté and I dream of writ­ing pay­ing for a small space to call my own. Twice every month-ish (once as a blog post and once as a post direct­ly to social media), I’ll write a post remind­ing peo­ple that if they want to sup­port us, or if they want to get more and bet­ter con­tent, we need to cov­er the bills with­out a 20–30 hour-a-week side gig. Through the gen­eros­i­ty of read­ers, I’ve been able to quit teach­ing, stop dri­ving all over the Bay Area to pet sit, and have some bound­aries about how much I will nan­ny small chil­dren, but I’m still behold­en to more hours of side gig­gery that could be spent mak­ing with the clack­i­ty clack. And beyond that, I would love to make improve­ments like pro­fes­sion­al design and admin help. As lit­tle as a sin­gle dol­lar a month (just $12 a year) through Patre­on helps me to write more and gets you in on some pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions about future projects.

4‑In this blog, I mostly talk about creative writing, specifically fiction.

While the con­cerns of oth­er gen­res of cre­ative writ­ing dove­tail with fic­tion some­what, and all writ­ing in gen­er­al has a few things in com­mon (like words and peri­ods and stuff), they are also quite dif­fer­ent in form, con­tent, style, and exe­cu­tion. Fic­tion is not jour­nal­ism, and nei­ther of those is tech­ni­cal writ­ing. So if you are mak­ing a pret­ty god­damned decent liv­ing grit­ting your teeth through the bore­dom while writ­ing instruc­tion man­u­als for dig­i­tal cam­eras and food proces­sors, and won­der what the hell I’m on about when I talk about the high pas­sion and low pay of a writ­ing career, it’s not because I think you’re not a “real” writer. (You absolute­ly are!)  It’s just because “Blog­ging about Fic­tion Writ­ing” isn’t as catchy of a title.

5‑I am not very good at computer stuff.

Actu­al­ly, that’s like say­ing I kind of like piz­za a lit­tle. I may have links that go nowhere or images that don’t load. I can usu­al­ly fix that stuff if you bring it to my atten­tion. There are some­times some weird for­mat­ting errors where it looks like some of the text is the wrong font or font size, and I can’t seem to fix it, no mat­ter what I do. I sup­pose there are peo­ple who know enough HTML that it would be no trou­ble for them, but I am not one of those peo­ple.

Some day when I’m mak­ing enough that I’m not side gig­ging to afford brand name peanut but­ter, I’m going to hire some­one to clean things up. 

6‑There might be some satire in here somewhere.  Maybe.

You should prob­a­bly take a satire class if you don’t know how to rec­og­nize it when you see it. The Onion offers some online cor­re­spon­dence cours­es that are top notch. I high­ly rec­om­mend them.

7- I try to keep to my update sched­ule but I also write in real time.

When I’m doing super awe­some, I have a cou­ple of arti­cles in the hop­per for days where I can’t real­ly get in front of the com­put­er for hours. (Just so we’re clear, of the crys­talline vari­ety, the last time that hap­pened was 2013.) The pan­dem­ic has me fur­ther behind than nor­mal, and a series of unfor­tu­nate events has befall­en me in the last 18 months or so, so I’m hang­ing on by a thread most weeks. Some days there is an emer­gency  or I get sick or I’m just get­ting my ass kicked by my child­care hours. It’s just me here and I still need a sec­ond job to pay all the bills. I’m doing the best I can. 

8- The Unforgiving Reality of “Making It” as a Writer

I write to a broad audi­ence. Cer­tain advice here at Writ­ing About Writ­ing (such as writ­ing every day) is a panacea to all of the most com­mon dif­fi­cul­ties for which peo­ple often request advice. While ques­tions about how to mon­e­tize a blog or pub­lish a short sto­ry might have spe­cif­ic answers, gen­er­al ques­tions like how to “make it” or how to “improve” [which I get mul­ti­ple times a day] all have the same basic answer. In fact, this ques­tion has the same basic answer in any of the arts (or any enter­tain­ment): prac­tice. Musi­cians, sculp­tors, painters, actors, and writers––they all practice…often for years before they go pub­lic. And while gains can be made in any dis­ci­pline with peri­od­ic or even spo­radic prac­tice, pro­fes­sion­al artists almost unswerv­ing try to prac­tice dai­ly (or very near­ly so). 

While I make every effort to acknowl­edge the ableism of pre­scrib­ing dai­ly writ­ing with­out caveat, the grind of cap­i­tal­ism to make find­ing time to work on one’s art dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble, or the absur­di­ty of arbi­trat­ing the title of “real writer” on any­one, I can­not alter the fun­da­men­tal real­i­ties of how demand­ing the jour­ney will be to get bet­ter at art. Cer­tain­ly not if the goal is to quit one’s day job and sur­vive cap­i­tal­ism by doing art, and absolute­ly not if one’s goal is to be well beloved by, in the case of writ­ing, the read­ing com­mu­ni­ty. No one in any career––athlete, sur­geon, chef, actor, or writer––will achieve the sta­tus of renowned in their field with­out a lot of long hours and prob­a­bly more than a few week­ends. Many house­hold name writ­ers write every day (or six days a week). [Just as many musi­cians prac­tice every day and many painters sketch con­stant­ly.] Call it harsh advice or a hard pill to swal­low or just a real­i­ty check. I can acknowl­edge that the obsta­cles, but I can’t change the world in which those are the peo­ple who have what many would-be writ­ers want. 

Please don’t assume that I think every­one should or even CAN give this much ded­i­ca­tion to their writ­ing. I just don’t know of any short­cuts to the things so often cit­ed as goals. (Com­fort­able careers as work­ing writ­ers or legions of fans.) Also, most writ­ers absolute­ly need to hear (over and over and over again) that their main prob­lem is that they’re NOT apply­ing their ass­es to a chair and they fur­ther need the splash of cold water that they’re not going to achieve those career-cal­iber dreams if they’re putting in week­end war­rior effort.

9- Comments are moderated. 

This is not the wild west. You are not enti­tled to say any­thing you want. Check my com­ment pol­i­cy for more info. Even though that’s tech­ni­cal­ly for Face­book, it should give you an idea of how to com­port your­self here.

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

If you’re enjoy­ing this blog, and would like to see more arti­cles like this one, the writer is a guy with rent and insur­ance to pay who would love to spend more time writ­ing. Please con­sid­er con­tribut­ing to my Patre­on. As lit­tle as $3/month (less-than-a-lat­te a month) will get you in on backchan­nel con­ver­sa­tions, patron-only polls, and my spe­cial ear when I ask for advice about future projects or blog changes.

Or if a one-time dona­tion (or some type of non-mon­e­tary dona­tion) is more your speed, I have a Tip Jar with all the ways to help.