Please put your hands together for awesome author Leod Fitz--he's one of the coolest writers I know. Meeting him in person from our IWSG In-Person Writing Group is a wonderful experience.
Leod, take it away!
I’ve been a writer pretty much my whole life. I actually remember the very first time that it occurred to me to write a story. Technically speaking, it was a fanfic; it was a story I wrote about my favorite He-Man character. The story, in its entirety, was about a paragraph long, and it was missing little things, like character development, plot, themes, motifs… pretty much everything that one tries to fit into a story.
But it was my introduction to writing, and as awful as it
was, that was all that I needed to become a full on addict.
I love writing. I
adore the process of building a world, constructing a story, designing
characters and watching them grow and change.
Unfortunately, my journey as a writer was somewhat hindered by the fact
that I had absolutely no idea what I needed to do to learn how to become a good
writer. Looking back, I suspect that all
I had to do was spend a bit of time in the library looking for ‘books on
writing,’ but I’m embarrassed to say that, at the time, that didn’t even occur
to me.
No, my writing journey consisted almost entirely of reading
books, coming up with ideas for stories that were embarrassingly similar to
what I’d just read, and trying to write obvious knockoffs. Terrible, terrible
knockoffs. Actually even that description
is a bit too generous: the truth is, I wrote the first couple chapters of
terrible, terrible knockoffs, then realized that they were awful, and started a
new terrible, terrible knockoff.
In fact, when I look back over my progress as a writer, I
think that the best description of it would be that I was a blind bull trying
to learn how to navigate his way through a China shop. I spent the better part of two decades making
every conceivable mistake that a writer could make, usually several dozen times,
before I eventually figured out how to get from point A to point B without
destroying absolutely everything.
After years and years of writing terrible, derivative works,
I reached the point one fine day when I decided that I had created a manuscript
that was worthy of being published. I
was, of course, completely wrong. But
that’s another story. The important
thing to this story is that, having decided that I was a good enough writer to
be worthy of publication, I headed to the internet (which had just made its way
into my household and was quite new to me) to find out who I was supposed to
contact about turning the manuscript into a book. After a bit of poking around, I found the
website of a publishing company which informed me that the first thing I needed
to do was write a query letter.
I had no idea what a query letter was. I knew what a query was, and I knew what a
letter was, but I’d never heard of a query letter. A bit more research and I discovered that,
for some reason, I needed to write to the publisher and ask them if they wanted
to see my manuscript. This confused me a
great deal. They were a publisher. Turning manuscripts into books was what they
did. Of course they wanted to see what
I’d written, that was their job!
After years of dedicating myself to mastering the art of
writing, I found, quite to my surprise, that in order to get that writing
published, I needed to learn a completely new set of skills. In order to get published, one needed to
write query letters and plot summaries.
One needed to contact agents and editors, beta readers and
copywriters. And there were so many
pitfalls, too: I had to learn the difference between traditional publishing and
print on demand, how to distinguish between vanity presses and straight-up
scams. There was a world of resources
out there, but peppered in them were predators looking to take any money you
had to spend and give you back nothing in return.
I’m embarrassed to say that I did just about as poorly
learning the art of publication as I had done in learning to write. My method of discovering how to get a book
into print involved me doing just about everything wrong that a person could
do. In fact, years later, after moving
to Colorado, I met a man who had run a small press for a while, and in the
course of one of our many conversations, he brought up one of the worst query
letters he had ever received. The letter
he described was one I had sent to him.
But perseverance can be as valuable a tool as brilliance,
and after years and years of sabotaging my own progress, the day finally came
when I received a letter from a publisher who was interested in publishing one
of my books.
Of course, they wanted to make sure that I had a plan for
how to promote it once they did.
This was the day that I discovered that a writer who wants a
successful career must, in fact, have three completely separate skill
sets. They must be able to write a
manuscript worth reading, they must be able to put that book out into the world
where potential readers can find it, and they must convince those readers to
take the time to give their writing a shot.
I have spent the last several years of my life trying to
sort out this third skill. Sadly, I
haven’t learned much from my previous efforts and it seems that I must, once
more, figure out this skill by slamming my head into every brick wall I can
find, repeatedly, to figure out what not to do.
What’s the point of my rather depressing story?
I don’t know what struggles you’re having as a writer. I don’t know what you’ve learned, what you
still need to figure out. I don’t know
what you need to do to become successful.
But I can tell you one thing that I’ve learned the hard way, over and over
and over again: The only way to
guarantee failure as a writer is to quit. No matter what you come up against, no matter
how many rejections or failures you encounter, you haven’t failed until you
fail to get back up and try again.
Leod Fitz, author of The Corpse-Eater Saga, lives in Texas,
on the family farm, where he burns to a crisp in the summer, and freezes in the
winter. He also writes. His blog is at www.leodfitz.wordpress.com
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