For the Aspiring Authors Out There

More often than not, the piece of advice successful writers give to aspiring writers is this: write more.

That's the gist of it. Write more. Keep writing. Write until you have no more ideas left in your head, find some more, and write again.

The purpose of this exercise is to help you become more aware of the words you use, and to develop your "voice" as an author. It helps you build upon your writing skills, no matter how poor or strong they are. But what about the people who've been doing this for ten years?

I have another piece of advice: drop the "aspiring" part of your title.

Stop dreaming, and start making things happen. I don't necessarily mean publish a book by yourself right away, or submit a book to a publisher. Start with something smaller. Try submitting a short story, or a poem, to a literary agent. Pitch an article to a magazine or newspaper. Do something to get your name out there, and edit your online bios.

Why?

Let's look at it this way - you look a lot more professional if you say, for example, "Mum of three, working on my first novel" than "Mum of three, aspiring author". One says you're doing something, the other says you're thinking of doing something. Similarly, "Aspiring author, 16, student" says a lot less about you than "Young author, working on a book, 16, student".

Do you see the difference, yet?

If you want people to take you seriously, start presenting yourself seriously. The amount of people who want to support young authors and writing mums is astonishing. Yes, you need to keep writing. However, by living your dream instead of just wishing for it, you're much more likely to do something you can be proud of.

When I dropped the word "aspiring", I found the courage to set up a website and apply for a writing job (which I got.) A year later, I published my first book, and wrote an article for a magazine about it. It's all mindset and confidence. I improved as a writer by that simple act of identifying as one now.

A Writer For the First Time

Identity is a big thing, and it turns out that leaving all of your friends to go to a new school is an excellent way of realising that your identity needs to be a little more established than "in the same class as..." or "friends with..."

The one constant in my life since secondary school started - and we're talking almost eleven years ago, here - has been writing. You would think, then, that I considered myself a writer from an early age. Nope.

It wasn't even when I finished my first book. I was just a guy who wrote a book. I was calling myself an "aspiring author", whatever the heck that's actually supposed to mean. Aspiring, from Google's definition, means "directing one's hopes or ambitions towards becoming a specified type of person." Wikipedia defines author as follows:

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work and can also be described as a writer.

There's nothing specific about being an author, except that an author writes something. It took a while, but eventually, I did something that would change the way I looked at myself: I dropped the phrase "aspiring author", and called myself a writer.

Why? It's simple: I felt like an author only wrote novels, and I felt like it was about time I stopped dreaming of doing that. I decided that I would actually just write the books I wanted to, and to write the stories and poems that I felt I was doing quite a poor job at.

It was only a few years ago that my Twitter bio reflected this unspoken change in me. A friend of mine encouraged any writers she knew to stop it with the whole "aspiring author" business, and I found things so much easier after that. I set up my own writer website, and I made the decision to start publishing my books.

I went eight years or more dreaming. Since then, I've been living that dream. It's not glamorous, but it's what I wanted as a kid. I was a writer for the first time in my life, in no uncertain terms.

Aspiring?

A friend of mine has a wonderful habit of asking people if they are "aspiring authors", and encouraged me a long time ago to drop the "aspiring". An author's identity is often prescribed by how they identify themselves. To aspire is to dream, to reach out for something in the future, to yearn.

And you absolutely should. No doubt about it. You should definitely aspire, you should definitely have dreams and reach out for something in the future, and you should definitely apply such dreaming to your writing.

But, and this is the important part, you shouldn't let dreaming be the most significant thing you do as an author.

An author creates. An author writes stories and poems and songs and books and plays and films. An author makes people out of thin air, and plants them in a world of their own imagination. An author changes all the rules. An author inspires desire into their creations, dreams into their readers, and magic into the world.

But dreaming? Where does that come in?

One definition of an aspiring author is one who seeks publication through a traditional publisher. I can see a few things wrong with this, and one thing right, that the dream is specific. That was the easy part. But what about the things that are wrong with this definition?

1. Not every author writes books. The term "author" is sometimes used to include anyone who creates anything. Within this problem, we must also accept that not all authors write books or other works that are suitable for publication.
2. Not every author seeks publication through a traditional publisher, but many who don't consider themselves "aspiring authors". The problem? Suddenly they're not included in what has been a definition of "aspiring author" since I was a young boy. Other avenues didn't exist. Even the idea of publishing with a small publisher was alien, nevermind the concept of seeking publication through digital means.
3. Not every author seeks publication. Period. An aspiring author might be one who wishes to write a book to share with family and friends alone. That might be their aspiration. The notion that all aspiring authors should aspire for the same thing presumes that everyone knows exactly what they want. Some seek publication for the money (and many of those assume the money will be enough to live on). Some seek publication for fame (and many of those don't realise that fame is neither easy to acquire or as amiable as it seems). Some seek publication for publication's sake.

This is the problem with definitions, and it certainly raises trouble when it comes to aspirations and dreams. But here's the thing: I am still an aspiring author, but it's not how I would label myself. I consider myself an author. My aspirations aren't a definition of me as an author, but they're still important. What makes them matter is their specificity.

In much the same way as a New Year's Resolution is doomed to failure if it's not specific enough for someone to measure and keep up with, a dream is unattainable unless it is specific enough for someone to follow. This is where the dreaming comes in.

Think about what you want to achieve. For me, it comes down to some specific things, listed below, though not in a specific order.

1. A particular income level.
2. Making a living from writing.
3. Publishing my books.
4. Writing for national magazines and/or newspapers.

While I won't get into how much I actually want to earn (some things need to be personal), I can discuss number 3 in more detail. Those three words aren't specific enough for how I want to achieve my dreams. In reality, my books are divided into two categories: those I want to publish myself, and those I want to have published by a traditional publisher. The distinction comes down to this:

1. Novellas are typically too short for most publishers to consider. Those that do consider them don't publish the sort of stories I write at novella length.
2. Novels cost too much to produce a physical copy of. This is especially true if you don't have the same to store a bulk order (with higher discounts). The other option is Print On Demand, which means that either the price is so low it's difficult to make money from the books or the price is so high that no one can buy the book. A middle ground is difficult, and the paperwork involved in getting a book supplied is a lot of effort. Plus, there are costs to printing that I can't see myself affording in the near future.
3. There are certain stories I want in the hands of traditional publishers. Simple as that, really. I've written certain books that I want to see in a shop, published by a traditional publisher that I can trust with it, because that's how I've imagined those books since I finished writing them. Putting them online seems a strange idea for me with those particular books.

Specific dreams are easier to measure. I'm not suggesting you give up dreaming. What I am suggesting is that you figure out exactly what you mean when you call yourself an aspiring author, and then get rid of that title altogether. Your aspirations are yours, and yours alone. When you know what you want, and you're actually writing something, you can and should call yourself an author. Or capitalise it, call yourself an Author. How does it look? How does it sound? How does it feel?

It took me a long time to get to the point of not calling myself an aspiring author. When I set up my website, and the various social networking sites I set up to support it, I was still calling myself an aspiring author. That was less than two years ago. Last summer, I specified what I wanted in life. Yes, that has changed since then. My dreams have changed. That's okay. I'm still an author, I'm still writing, and I'm still aspiring. I'm not defined by what I want (or technically by what I do). Changing that doesn't change me, and it doesn't change the fact that I'm still doing something I love.

Is it scarier to think of myself as an author, instead of an aspiring author? It was. Definitely. Not anymore. I think I've gotten used to the idea. It's part of my identity, writing and actually making some money from it (much to my own surprise, I will admit). At the same time, though, it's liberating. I'm not bound to the same feeling of "If I do X can I still do Y", because I'm the one in control of what I want from my life. And here's the thing: if you want to be published by a traditional publisher, you can still publish your book yourself. The stigma around self-publishing stops applying if you can prove yourself.

There's a lot to being an author. There's a lot to defining yourself without the "aspiring" part. But it's a whole lot worse when someone else takes away the comfort of "aspiring". Make the choice yourself, get comfortable walking in those shoes, and when it comes to living up to your aspirations, you'll be more ready.

Guest Post, by Ian Mac an Ghaill: Words, Worlds, and Gaiman

Today, I've got the pleasure of hosting a guest blog by my terribly literate friend, Ian Mac an Ghaill. He's an aspiring author, something of a genius, and while you won't hear it here, he has one of the coolest voices in the world. He's currently working on his first novel.

I'll pass you over to Ian as he talks about words, worlds, and Gaiman.

***

I’ve been telling stories for longer than I remember.

That is a story in itself; told in the first person, present perfect continuous tense, establishing the embryo of a plot (protagonist tells stories) while giving some information about the character (given to reflecting on previous and current actions) and referring to the limits of the protagonist’s experience. It is not a very sophisticated story though. I could not fill 1000 pages with it (unless I wrote each word to be REALLY BIG). It’s also a true story, an autobiography.

When I was very young I decided to write a book. The book had 3 stories (3 that I remember, in any case). I wanted the story typed, like a real book. I think that I was writing by that stage but I can’t be sure and for many years my writing was largely illegible so this may have been common sense on my part. Anyway, I told my stories to a tape recorder and my Dad duly typed them up on a typewriter. Each story was about a paragraph long but the book contained several more pages of illustration (I may add that a face made up of a crude circle with dots for eyes and a line for a mouth was the pinnacle of aesthetics in these illustrations) and I was delighted with what lay between the cardboard covers.

This was my earliest independent attempt at writing a work of fiction. I believe that I have improved since then. I have at the very least written longer works with more complicated vocabulary, whether they are actually better or not is subjective. The longest piece I have ever written is just over 10,000 words and arose as a kind of ‘Marvel’s Spider-man/David Gemmel’s Drenai’ fanfic hybrid but most of what I write is between 1000 and 3000 words. Most of my story-writing has been for essays at school but I always harboured the desire to write an epic.

Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Rowling’s Harry Potter, Nix’s Old Kingdom, Colfer’s Artemis Fowl; these were the fictions I wanted to emulate. With one exception (noted above) attempts to do that tended to fizzle out, wasting away because I lacked the necessary craft and diligence to nourish them; my enthusiasm wasn’t enough to sustain them. I never gave up on my ambitions but I stopped trying to make novels appear through sheer force of will.

Then I discovered the stories of Neil Gaiman. I had been in the habit of only reading long fiction; the longer the better and the bigger the world, the more I wanted to know about it. I changed the way that I looked at reading and writing. That seems a grandiose and yet pointless statement; everything that I read or write changes how I read and write but Gaiman’s writing stands out to me as the catalyst for a new reaction to how I understood stories.

He used language in such interesting ways that I could not do other than notice. He even changed writing-styles within stories. Word-choice and sentence structure suddenly came into focus for me in a way that they had not before. For some reason the importance of language and style in writing had not quite clicked with me in the same way before.

There is a reason to choose the word ‘rob’ over the word ‘steal’ or ‘eldritch’ over ‘strange’. ‘Déja vu’ means ‘already seen’ yet English writers often use the French formulation. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy were both writers of fiction in 19th century Russia but they wrote very differently. Having said that, maybe Dostoyevsky writes exactly like Tolstoy and the exactitude is lost in my English translations.

I also started reading short fiction, which gave me a better idea of how to pace and structure narratives. I changed the way I approached my school essays (they were now short stories, not stories cut short) and writing short stories changed how I approached longer ones. I am in the process of writing a novel at the moment (not as far as I’d like to be, unfortunately) and I write each chapter as if it were a short story by itself. If nothing else, this makes each foray into writing seem more manageable.

That is the story of how I write stories and how I came to write them in the way in which I do. This may or may not be of any use to anyone and what works for me will most likely not work for anyone else in exactly the same way. I don’t know of any infallible rules for writing and I do strongly believe that there are none.

Joyce’s Ulysses proved that you don’t even need an easily intelligible language or much of a plot. I obsess over synonyms and the mechanics of wording. You don’t have to. You can just write the first words that come into your head. J.R.R. Tolkien was marking exams when he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” and he had no idea what he meant by writing it.

Write what you like or write what you feel compelled to write. Break whatever rules of writing seem necessary. Write.