A response to Steve Salermo's "Welcome to the Real World: 10 Things College Writing Classes Don't Teach You about the Writing Life -- but Should"
I've been writing for well over ten years; more than half of my life. That does, of course, pale in comparison to some people's experience which may just be fifty or sixty years of writing. I've classified myself as a writer since the 5th grade and will classify myself as such until my I am long dead and long forgotten.
Having said that, I've done my fair share of research when it comes to writing. I've looked up how to break into the publishing business, how to properly format a query letter, and under what conditions does a mountain lion attack and eat a human being (it counts as writing, right?). The ten things Steve Salermo wrote about boiled down to what most advice columns on writing from professional in-the-business people have said: this is a business, and when you play the game of writing, you adapt or you die (or was that George R.R. Martin?). What Salermo said was that if you want to make a living and keep on living between four walls and a roof, you have to be able to swallow your creative spirit and adapt your writing to fit in with the publication's rules and specific style. Which is invaluable advice to journalists, column writers and those looking for magazine publication (like poets and short story writers).
And while some of his points scared me, they stopped being so threatening when I realized that they focused on the above mentioned careers. I don't plan on working for newspapers or magazines, except for maybe as a freelance editor or copyeditor. My main goal in life is to become a novelist, and a published one to boot. And throughout my years of taking writing classes that have fell below my expectations for them (i.e., to teach me how to write the Best Novel Ever Published and to teach me the Secret Method of Getting Published Within the Hour) I've learned to take what is taught and talked about in class and apply it to me, my goals and my work.
Much like the way a fortune teller's customer may bend their fortune and predictions to apply to their life in the single, most obscure way, I've bent lessons and pointers to apply to my writing. As a former theatre student (and a sometime actor) I've managed to take the lessons of emotion and subtly in specific dialogue to pump up my own character's conversations to make them ten times more meaningful. And that's what I plan to do with Salermo's advice: bend it to my will and my way, because not everything he talks about falls under my goals, but still heeding his advice.
Having said that, I've done my fair share of research when it comes to writing. I've looked up how to break into the publishing business, how to properly format a query letter, and under what conditions does a mountain lion attack and eat a human being (it counts as writing, right?). The ten things Steve Salermo wrote about boiled down to what most advice columns on writing from professional in-the-business people have said: this is a business, and when you play the game of writing, you adapt or you die (or was that George R.R. Martin?). What Salermo said was that if you want to make a living and keep on living between four walls and a roof, you have to be able to swallow your creative spirit and adapt your writing to fit in with the publication's rules and specific style. Which is invaluable advice to journalists, column writers and those looking for magazine publication (like poets and short story writers).
And while some of his points scared me, they stopped being so threatening when I realized that they focused on the above mentioned careers. I don't plan on working for newspapers or magazines, except for maybe as a freelance editor or copyeditor. My main goal in life is to become a novelist, and a published one to boot. And throughout my years of taking writing classes that have fell below my expectations for them (i.e., to teach me how to write the Best Novel Ever Published and to teach me the Secret Method of Getting Published Within the Hour) I've learned to take what is taught and talked about in class and apply it to me, my goals and my work.
Much like the way a fortune teller's customer may bend their fortune and predictions to apply to their life in the single, most obscure way, I've bent lessons and pointers to apply to my writing. As a former theatre student (and a sometime actor) I've managed to take the lessons of emotion and subtly in specific dialogue to pump up my own character's conversations to make them ten times more meaningful. And that's what I plan to do with Salermo's advice: bend it to my will and my way, because not everything he talks about falls under my goals, but still heeding his advice.