Change The World With Words

Christina Katz is still writing about the 52 qualities of prosperous writers in The Prosperous Writer newsletter, and I’m still joining in. This week we’re discussing flexibility.

Being flexible in your writing really will help you to keep writing assignments pouring in, but it’s also important not to be too flexible.

So when should you bend to the editor’s wishes? And when should you stand firm and refuse to flex?

Be flexible about edits.

Also known as” the editor knows best”.

This is a particularly tough one for new writers. You slave away at your first article, story or book, get it completely perfect, expressing every thought just as it formed in your mind, presenting characters on the page exactly as they look inside your head, and then an editor announces that she wants to publish it (Oh joy) and mangle edit it (uh-oh).

Flexibility here is vital. As Maeve Binchy puts it in The Maeve Binchy Writers’ Club:

“Editors are amazing people. They don’t usually write books themselves but they know what’s right and wrong with your writing. They should be listened to with great attention.”

Editors rarely suggest or make edits on a whim. If they are telling you something needs to be cut, changed or strengthened, they probably have a good reason. It may be to do with structural issues in a book length project, or something as pragmatic as Search Engine Optimization in an online piece. It is incredibly difficult to see your own writing with complete objectivity. It’s generally advisable to trust the editor.

Edits are open to discussion, of course, and it can be helpful to ask the editor why he thinks they’re necessary (as I’ve already stressed, he will likely have a good reason). But sometimes you just have to let it go and accept that few pieces will ever appear in print exactly as you wrote them.

How will this help you to keep assignments pouring in?

Editors love to work with writers who are flexible about edits. They just don’t have time to argue about every little change they want or need to make. When it comes to handing out the next assignment, or accepting the next piece you send them on spec, they’ll be happier to work with you if they know you’re not too precious about your work.

If an editor is thinking about commissioning a writer and he has two writers of equal quality but knows one is easy to work with and one isn’t, guess which one will get the commission.

Be flexible about the type of writing you’re willing to try.

Also known as “don’t get stuck in a rut”.

There’s nothing wrong with specializing in a certain genre, topic or style of writing, but there’s also nothing wrong with diversifying. This can be a great antidote to writers’ block (working on a completely different assignment can free up that block in minutes) and can provide you with a more efficient writing routine (enabling you to work on fillers and blog posts between long articles, or short stories and poems between novels).

How will this help you to keep assignments pouring in?

Diversifying with the types of writing you do will lead to a greater overall number of assignments, and short pieces can keep the cash coming in while you work on longer pieces.

There’s another reason why diversification can be helpful. Editors and publishers like this type of flexibility because of the promotional opportunities attached. Writing a short story for a magazine or anthology can help promote a new novel. An authoritative article on a specialist topic can do wonders for sales of a non-fiction book by the same writer. I’ve just been reading the annual fiction supplement to The Atlantic. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that most of the short fiction published in there is by authors with a new novel or collection of short stories to sell.

A publisher will be more inclined to accept or commission a project from you, if she feels you have the flexibility to promote it with other forms of writing.

Don’t be flexible about your principles.

Or as Christina put it in her newsletter, “the truth isn’t flexible”.

Always write with integrity. Compromising your principles or exhibiting any kind of dishonesty in your writing won’t work in your favour.

It’s not always easy to produce truthful writing. Some of the best writing, both fiction and non-fiction, touches on uncomfortable truths. To really bare your soul in your writing is a risky thing, but that’s often when writers hit on universal truths that resonate with readers at a profound level.

I remember hearing a stand-up comedian talking about how risky it is to write jokes about really personal stuff. Sexuality, insecurity, your own personal thoughts and prejudices, what you really do when you know for sure no one else is looking. He says that these jokes tend to get the biggest laughs because of the universal truths they touch on, but they’re always the scariest to perform, especially for the first time. There’s always the risk that the joke will fall flat and the audience will be thinking. “No, never done that. It’s just you. Man you’re weird!”

Writing for publication is like that. You have to take a risk to expose your innermost thoughts and quirks, and you have to hope that your truths are universal and others will relate to them.

Writing true is not for the faint hearted, but being brave in your writing can pay big dividends. Don’t be flexible with the truth.

How will this help you to keep assignments pouring in?

The response to really ‘true’ writing can be monumental. It can be the difference between one letter to the editor and hundreds of letters to the editor. It can be the difference between a few comments on an online article and a few thousand comments. True writing can clog the editor’s inbox and overload the website’s server, but editors love reader response.

If you want to get involved with Christina’s regular blog prompts, sign up for her newsletter here. If you want to follow what I have to say about her future topics (and many others) subscribe by email or RSS, or sign up for my monthly newsletter (all options available at the top right of this blog).

Christina Katz recently wrote in her Prosperous Writer ezine about a dismaying experience she had at a recent writers’ conference. She asked a roomful of writers (about 200) whether they considered their writing a business. Only 20% of them raised their hands.

This is shocking to me at this stage in my writing career, but only a few short years ago I might not have been among that 20%. For some reason we, as writers, see ourselves as artists rather than business people. Now I firmly believe we can be both (which is why the tag line of this site is “Make art. Make money. Make a difference.”), but I haven’t always felt like that.

Like most writers my freelance writing business grew out of the writing I did as a hobby. For some people a hobby becomes a business when they make some kind of transition. Buy business premises or hire an employee, for example. But many freelance writers spend their whole careers working from home and being the sole employee of their business. So how do we make that transition and see ourselves as being “in business”?

I have a few suggestions:

Call it what it is.

Even after I started making money from my writing I would say things like “I’m a full-time mom, and I do a bit of freelance writing”. It was a long time before I felt comfortable saying “I’m a freelance writer” and even longer before I heard myself refer to my ‘freelance writing business”.

Talking about the business side of being a freelance writer can be very revealing. It was only when it came up in conversation that I had spent my morning doing some boring business tasks (sending out invoices, updating income and expenses records, promoting my blog) that I realised that friends had no idea that was part of what I did. I think they thought I just sat there “creating’ all day, and most people don’t associate creativity with business (though I’d argue that creativity is an essential part of any business enterprise).

Invest in your business.

If you were starting any other type of enterprise you’d expect to invest in it. Not just money, but time and effort as well. A freelance writing business is like any other business. It takes time to grow and the best ones grow organically, starting small, with little monetary investment, but a lot of time and work.

As long as you are only putting a small amount of time and effort (and money) into your writing you will always feel like you are “dabbling”. Carve out substantial chunks of time to write. Consider investing in a conference or writing retreat. You’ll feel more like a professional writer if you treat your writing like a business that needs and deserves investment.

Learn business skills.

Spend some time learning how to keep financial records, how to market your writing, or how to set up a website. Once you accept that being a freelance writer is about more than writing (and start learning the skills you need in order to run a successful freelance writing business) you will have more of a sense of being ‘in business’.

Recognize that art can be business.

Accept that “creating art” and “being in business” are compatible. Top fashion designers and film directors undoubtedly consider themselves artists, yet no-one has a problem with seeing the organisations at the top of the film and fashion industries as business enterprises.

Do you consider yourself a business or an artist? Are you “in business” or pursuing a hobby? Would you have been in the 20% at Christina’s conference? Please share your answers in the comments.

This week Christina Katz is writing about ethical writers in her freelance writing ezine The Prosperous Writer. If you’d like to blog along check out her blog and subscribe to her free writing newsletter.

The freelance writing  industry may not seem like a hotbed of corruption, but dig a little deeper and you will come across a range of unethical practices, from deceptive copy writing, to keyword stuffed articles, from vanity publishing houses to money grabbing content mills, from undisclosed pay per post blogging to tabloids that print lies so ridiculous that their victims rarely even bother to sue them.

I’m sure no reader of Change The World With Words wants to get caught up in all these unethical practices, so here are my top tips for ethical writers.

Be honest with what you write.

Write from the heart about what matters to you. There are hundreds of different ways to do this, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, serious articles or a humorous opinion piece. Just make sure your piece doesn’t deceive your readers or sell them short.

Be honest about why you write.

I struggled with the title of this site for a while, thinking it might mislead people into thinking that changing the world was my only motivation for writing. So I came up with the tag line – Make art. Make money. Make a difference. Those are the three main motives behind my writing and I believe we, as writers, should be able to do all three at the same time.

Before you submit or publish anything, be sure that you wouldn’t be ashamed to have your name on it.

Many writers write under pen names and there are lots of  legitimate reasons to do so, but the fact that you are ashamed of your writing because you‘ve been dishonest with your readers is not one of them.  I always write under my own name, and have sometimes wished I hadn’t. It’s not ideal that an editor can come across an early piece I wrote for a content mill before I knew any better. I’ve learned a lot since then and my writing has improved. But even those early pieces were written with the intention of openly and honestly informing my readers.

Disclose.

Two writers can follow the same practices in almost the exact same way, but one with integrity and one without. The most important thing is to disclose any information if you think by keeping it secret you may deceive the reader.

As a travel writer I sometimes enjoy free or discounted travel, or free tickets to an attraction. As a blogger I may accept free books for review.  I love these perks of the job, but I also disclose them to editors when I pitch a story, and to readers on my own blog when I publish my own reviews. I also accept any offers on the basis that I will give my honest opinion and not be influenced in any way by the fact that I have accepted a freebie. Every reputable company I have dealt with has been 100% accepting of that.

Each writer has to decide what they will do in the (totally legitimate) quest to make money. Some decide, for example, to accept ‘pay per post’ in return for writing blog posts promoting a product. I’m not comfortable with that and wouldn’t do it. But if other bloggers choose to do it, and clearly disclose that this is part of their income stream, I accept that they are at least being honest with their readers.

Unfortunately, not every writer and publisher follows the unwritten ethics of writing. If you’re not too far into your writing career now is probably as good a time as any to warn you that you will probably come across scams within the writing and publishing arena just as you would in other areas of life. I’ll soon be writing a post about writing-related scams to avoid – subscribe for free over in the right sidebar if you don’t want to miss it.

How do you balance making money from your writing and blogging with behaving in an ethical manner? Ever been faced with any moral dilemmas others can learn from? Please share in the comments.

You may have heard the story about the guy who stood in a Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007, playing his violin. In the 45 minutes that he played over 1000 people passed by. Few people looked at him or stopped to listen. About 20 people absent-mindedly donated a dollar or two.  A few children stopped to listen and were immediately hurried on by their parents.

If you have heard this story before you’ll know that the guy was Joshua Bell, a professional violinist widely acknowledged as one of the greatest musicians in the world. On that cold January morning, he played one of the most intricate pieces of music ever written, using a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, he’d sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

Joshua Bell was the same person in the subway, as he was at his concert two days earlier. He played the same music on the same instrument.  The only thing that was different was the perception of the people who heard him play. One group perceived him as a professional, and possibly a genius. The other as an amateur who was, almost by definition, unlikely to be worth paying attention to.

How you present yourself as a writer will determine how you are perceived, and you don’t have to be a best selling author to present yourself professionally.

There are just a few simple steps to becoming a professional writer:

Write for money. 

Anyone who writes well can say I’m a good writer, just as anyone who cooks well can say I’m a good cook. But until she cooks her first meal in a restaurant, or caters her first event, and receives money for it, she’s not a professional cook. Until you sell your first piece of writing, you’re not a professional writer, but as soon as you do, you are. Whatever your day job, or your family responsibilities, however many other roles you have in life, when you are paid to write you are a professional writer. If you’re writing for money, you’re already there. If you’re not, try and make this the year that you take that step.

Own it.

Professional writers do not hang their head and mumble about doing a bit of writing in their spare time. If you’re writing for money, don’t try to pretend it’s a hobby or even a sideline. Simply say,” I am a freelance writer”. If you’re also a full-time mom, or accountant or waitress you can tell people this too if you wish to, and then add “and a part-time freelance writer”.  Practise claiming to be a writer. State it on your blog or website, your online profile, your business cards. The more you tell people you are a writer the more you’ll feel like one, and the more motivated you’ll be to keep earning money from your writing.

Act like a professional.

Professional writers have a business plan. They set goals, write regularly, meet deadlines, and keep records. They communicate with editors, publishers and other writers in a professional way. They join professional associations, attend writing events, and commit to ongoing training. They network. They don’t take rejection (too) personally.  In short, they see their writing as a business.

When did you first feel like a professional writer? Or are you still becoming one? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

This post was inspired by Christina Katz and one of the writing prompts in her Prosperous Writer Newsletter. Every year she inspires amateur writers to become professionals through her books and writing classes. Her book Writer Mama was instrumental in helping me to start writing professionally. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank her.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

 “He did each single thing as if he did nothing else.”

-         Charles Dickens

Like most writers, and a lot of other people in the world, I have a long to-do list. Some of us write them down, some of us store them mentally, some of us prioritize, organize, digitize and color-code them. Most of us try to multi-task in order to get further down the to-do list quicker, but sooner or later we all have to take a deep breath and focus on just one thing at a time. We have to micro-focus.

In this week’s Prosperous Writer ezine Christina Katz writes that:

“What micro-focusing means is that everything else has to temporarily fade into the background so that the details of the matter at hand can be adequately addressed.”

Did you note that last adverb? Adequately. We can do a lot of things at once, but we WILL do a worse job of them than if we do them one at a time.

Leo Babuta of Zen Habits suggests we should all just pick 1-2 (really important) things to do today and do them well. Then repeat the process tomorrow. And again the next day. In theory if we could really surrender to this system, we could throw our to-do list away and still get everything (or at least all the really important stuff) done.

I’m not suggesting this would work for everyone. I suspect from reading his blog that Leo is a very special – and possibly unique – person. But there is a lot to be said for focussing on one thing at a time. Ultimately not only is this the most efficient way to get writing projects done, it’s probably the only way.

One of my favourite books about writing is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. The title comes from an anecdote in the book that discusses the best (and only) way to get a school project about birds written – bird by bird.

We can have a hundred things on our to-do list. We can juggle several different projects, do two things at once and think of two ideas simultaneously. We can have a new idea occur to us as we’re jotting down the last one, and jump from a blog post to a story to a chapter outline of the new book. But eventually if we are to do anything well, or even adequately, we have to slow down, mono-task and micro-focus.

It isn’t easy. Ironically enough, I’ve been interrupted by my children and had to switch focus twice whilst writing this post. But it can be done. So slow down, micro-focus, mono-task, get just one really important thing done. Then bask (briefly) in the smug glow of self-satisfaction and move on to the next task. Let me know how it’s working for you.

Read more about micro-focus at the Empowering Writers blog.

You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.

- Eldridge Cleaver

It’s been a while since I took up the weekly challenge posed by Christina Katz via her Prosperous Writer Ezine. Christina (author of Get Known Before the Book Deal and Writer Mama), highlights a different quality needed by prosperous writers each week, and invites other bloggers to join in the conversation with a post that covers the same theme. If you want to participate you can subscribe to The Prosperous Writer here. This week we’re blogging about trouble shooting.

We all need to trouble shoot, in our professional and personal lives, and how we do it largely comes down to the spin we put on things.  Troubleshooting is actually about whether we’re positive or negative, proactive or reactive, ready to take responsibility, or eager to apportion blame.

Christina suggests that:

“… you can’t be a troubleshooter unless you are already a person who takes 100% responsibility for your lot in life. But a lot of folks take responsibility in other areas of their life but neglect to carry that over into their writing careers.”

I think there’s a reason for this. If we’re going to produce high quality writing that resonates with other people we have to reach deep inside our psyches, bare our souls and come up with something that is unique. Add to that the fact that writing is, for the most part, a solitary activity – something we do alone to produce an end product that reflects our own ideas, experiences and perspective. It’s hardly surprising then, that a lot of writers find it harder to deal with problems in their writing careers than in other areas. They (understandably) tend to take things personally, instead of treating their writing as a business.

This can make many people ‘problem amplifiers’ instead of ‘problem solvers’ when it comes to their writing. That attitude will lead to different actions in the face of writing related problems. The following are all common reactions to writing problems. Recognize any?

Problem amplifier:

I got a rejection letter. That piece of writing must have been terrible. I’m a terrible writer. I think I’ll moan about my lack of talent, delete/throw out that piece of writing, then decide I do have talent and that editor is an idiot, and I’ll never contact her again.

Problem solver:

I got a rejection letter. Let’s look at why. Did I make a mistake sending that piece to that editor? Maybe I should research somewhere else it would fit better. Or I could re-write it/contact the editor with an alternative idea based on his/her comments.

Problem amplifier:

My new ebook isn’t selling. People obviously don’t want it. It was a bad concept, and I wasted all that time, effort and money on producing it.

Problem solver:

My new ebook isn’t selling, but I did my research and I concluded there was a market for it. Why am I not reaching that market?  I need to draw up a new marketing plan to sell more copies.

Problem amplifier:  

My webite/blog isn’t getting many hits. Maybe I should give up and stop creating content that isn’t getting read. Maybe I should just hit delete and permanently remove the problem.

Problem solver: 

My website/blog isn’t getting many hits. Maybe I should create some more great content, promote it on social media, and write some high quality guest posts for other popular blogs. Perhaps I should makeover (or at least tidy up) the site to make it more attractive/valuable/readable.

This post is not meant as a criticism of problem amplifiers, or even in praise of problem solvers. I’ve been both in the course of my writing career, and I’d even suggest most new writers need to go through the problem amplifier stage.  As we slowly build our writing confidence and detachment we progress to the problem solver stage. So if you’re amplifying your writing-related problems right now, push on. Work at learning detachment. Stop taking problems personally. See your writing as a business and not as an extension of yourself. Learn to trouble shoot your writing problems with the same objectivity you might apply to other areas of your life.

Join me in my aim to evolve right through the problem solver stage and become a solution finder. That’s when you don’t even see the problem as such. You just focus on solutions to situations. I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it.

If you stop by here often you’ll know that I sometimes take up the weekly challenge posed by Christina Katz via her Prosperous Writer Ezine. Christina, author of such writing essentials as Get Known Before the Book Deal, writes about one of the 52 qualities of prosperous writers each week, and invites other bloggers to join the conversation. She provides links to the posts of participating bloggers in her ezine, and shares the posts on Twitter. If you want to participate you have to subscribe to The Prosperous Writer (the ezine posts aren’t duplicated on her blog), but it is completely free and would be cheap at twice the price

This week Christina is writing about empowerment, which happens to be one of the major themes here at Change The World With Words. You may have noticed my tag line: Make art. Make money. Make a difference. Let’s take a closer look at that.

Make art.

Creativity is empowering. Producing something from nothing, or something beautiful/useful from basic raw materials, brings with it an empowering sense of achievement. A powerful antidote to depression, despondency and powerlessness is to go and create something, but modern day consumerism and ‘affluenza’ has turned most of us into consumers rather than producers. 

There’s nothing wrong with buying expensive restaurant meals with flowers and candlelight, but you won’t get the same feeling that you get from growing your own flowers and food and making your own candles. Reading a book is wonderful, but writing a book will give you a completely different feeling. Making jewellery, gifts or cards is different from buying them.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to start insisting that we should all be fashioning home-made underwear out of dryer lint, but you get the picture. We can create stuff, or we can buy stuff, and one is more satisfying and empowering than the other.  Creating great writing (or even just a rough first draft of something that will maybe become great writing) is empowering.

Make money.

Financial freedom is empowering. Most of us will have at least a passing familiarity with the feeling of powerlessness associated with having to go to work (often for someone we don’t like, doing something we don’t agree with) just to pay the bills. For some people this feeling permeates their entire working lives. Others break free and set up their own businesses or freelance careers. Some go back and forth between the two. The most fortunate (and empowered) people, from what I’ve observed, manage to make money doing something they love.

Some people have expressed doubts that a site called Change The World With Words focuses (partially) on making money from writing. The way I look at it, you can spend 40 hours a week at a job that pays the bills and try to change the world with what little time and energy you have left, or you can use the time and energy you put into your work to produce writing, make a living, and have a positive impact at the same time. It’s a three-for-one deal. Am I the only one who finds that empowering?

Make a difference.

Changing the world is empowering. There are few things that contribute to a sense of powerlessness as much as a feeling of not being able to control your life, your surroundings, or the world you live in. None of us can really have control over these things, but we can have influence.

Writing about environmental issues doesn’t give you the power to control climate change. Writing about domestic abuse doesn’t give you the ability to control whether it happens or not. Writing about causes close to your heart doesn’t enable you to control how much money is donated to those causes. But you can have an influence. If even one person reads your piece and acts on it, you’ve changed the world. Now that’s empowering.

Yes, there is a book called The Joy of Writing, and it’s definitely worth a read (and yes, I’m pretty sure the similarity of the title to another well-known book is intentional). However today’s post is not inspired by the book, it’s inspired by Christina Katz, writer of the Prosperous Writer newsletter and books such as Writer Mama and Get Known Before The Book Deal. I love the Prosperous Writer. There’s something about prosperity that is so much more attractive than wealth. Prosperity implies that you are not just doing well financially, but emotionally and spiritually as well, which brings us to what this post is actually about – finding joy in your writing.

Throughout 2010 Christina Katz, via The Prosperous Writer newsletter, is highlighting the 52 Qualities of Prosperous Writers, and this week, coming in at 26, is joy.

Most people would agree that a life devoid of joy is a tragedy, but people often seem to forget that they spend a huge percentage of their life working, so if you want joy in your life you need joy in your work.

Here are ten experiences in my writing life that have brought me joy:

My first acceptance from an editor.

An editor who accepted my work with the words ‘I would love to publish your excellent article”.

An email from an editor I’ve worked with regularly that said ‘I love all your work’.

The feeling of finishing editing a piece of writing and knowing that I’ve said exactly what I wanted to say.

Coming from a non-technical background but managing to get ChangeThe World With Words up and running with only minor recurring glitches.

Receiving wonderful, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious comments from readers of my blog and other articles.

Writing about stuff I love.

Losing myself in my art.

Receiving an award for a short story I wrote.

My 9-year-old son saying (about above story) “Your story was really good, Mom. Not boring at all.” (I’m sure the judges will be relieved to get this very important confirmation of their taste in literature!)

 Some of these things are not ones I would have expected to make the list, and some of my “bigger” achievements are conspicuous by their absence.

Maybe that’s what Christina meant when she suggested:

Perhaps it’s worth writing or blogging about [joy] because the answers may not be on the surface. You might need to write your way deeper until you hit joy-dirt.

Does your work bring you joy? Or is joy something you save for when you’ve finished your work? If you do, consider the following quote:

Don’t postpone joy until you have learned all of your lessons. Joy is your lesson.

-          Alan Cohen

Did your work bring you joy today?

“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life… Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.” – Viktor Frankl

Today’s post is inspired by Christina Katz (author of Writer Mama and Get Known Before The Book Deal) and her Prosperous Writer ezine (highly recommended: if you don’t already subscribe to it you can check out her blog and sign up here). Recently she wrote about vision, and how important it is for writers to have a clear vision of what they want to achieve, what they are offering their readers, and why it’s valuable to them.

It’s vitally important to have a strong vision regarding your writing goals, your business and your life, but it’s also important to have a strong vision of exactly what it is you want to communicate and how. If you want to produce writing that changes people’s lives, you need to have a clear vision of how you will do this.

It’s easy to copy other people, and with the amount of information out there in cyberspace right now, it’s safe to say there is very little that you can write about that has never been covered before, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be original, and visionary, in the way you present your ideas.

Visionaries may or may not have a unique view of the world, but what they do have (and what they strive to find) is a unique and powerful way of communicating their ideas, a visionary way of calling people to action, a way of not only grabbing attention, and putting their message across, but also empowering people to act on it.

In one of my favourite books about writing, Writing to Change the World, author Mary Pipher writes about ‘what you alone can say’. It may seem arrogant, or even ridiculous to claim that your writing can be completely original and unique, and maybe it can’t, but you are the only person who has lived your life, had your exact experiences, dealt with your exact problems and found your exact solutions. As Mary puts it:

“You have something to say that no one else can say. Your history, your unique sensibilities, your sense of place and your language bestow upon you a singular authority.”

Writers with vision use their experiences to frame an old issue in a new way, or to present well-known facts in a context that gives them meaning, or impact. They use a conversation they had, or an event they witnessed, to demonstrate what it is they want to communicate.

I recently picked up the book, What’s Age Got to Do with It?: Living Your Healthiest and Happiest Life by Robin McGraw, wife of the ubiquitous Dr Phil. Now, as a hard-working, dedicated, non-celebrity writer, there’s only one aspect of the publishing industry that riles me more than celebrities who get a book published purely because of who they are, and that’s people who get a book published because of who they are married to. I might have put the book down straight away but in the opening chapter this sentence caught my attention:

“… thanks to my husband’s world wide television show… I have the privilege of being able to talk to women all over the world about the issues I feel passionate about.”

There’s your vision. There’s your unique perception of the world and the issues you’re writing about. No one else has talked to the exact same set of women as this author has. No one else has had the same conversations, feedback and experiences. This one sentence encouraged me to continue reading, and, unlike many books by celebrity ‘authors’, this offering was not one hugely disappointing, ghost written mess (OK, there are some wonderful celebrity authors – they are invariably the ones who have used their talents and opportunities to create an amazing life and embrace a huge range of experiences, and then brought this to their writing).

Before you start your next piece of writing, think about what you alone can say, just because of who you are, how you think and what you’ve done. You may still end up writing on a topic that many others write about every day, but somehow, somewhere within that piece, will be your own unique take on the issue. Your own vision. Maybe you don’t even want to be a visionary, but I would argue you don’t really have a choice. Whether you choose to actively pursue it or not, you already are.

One of the joys of technology is that writers can connect more easily than ever, through Twitter, and Facebook, and blog networks, and simply through the interactivity of their own blogs and websites.

This has unlimited possibilities for networking, but a couple of disadvantages as well. It’s tempting for some writers to push the boundaries of polite communication when approaching other writers or publishing professionals, especially when promoting their own work, or trying to get a ‘gig’.

I’m only a few years into to my writing career, but I’m already subject to newer writers pushing my boundaries by expecting me to give give give (advice, contacts, editing skills, the exact url to a set of writers guidelines for a particular website, now) without expecting to receive anything in return.

I’m a Mom, so my default setting is give give give, but I didn’t give birth to these people, and occasionally, when they get their approach wrong,  they try my patience. I can only imagine what it is like for those writers much higher up the food chain than myself, so it doesn’t surprise me that Christina Katz, well-known and well-respected writer, author (of one of my favorite books Writer Mama) and teacher/mentor recently wrote about the importance of writers having strong boundaries.

There are a few ways that new writers (no, actually make that all writers) can respect others’ boundaries while still networking effectively.

Know your place.

By this I mean really know where you fit in the big picture. The role you play. Editors, publishers, and agents need writers, and writers need them, and we all need to work together to provide the really important people in this picture (readers/clients) with what they need.

 It’s your responsibility to produce the goods that the readers/clients want to buy, and it’s your responsibility to demonstrate that to any gatekeepers you have to get past. Not by saying to an editor or publisher, for example,’ this article/book is a great idea and I can’t believe you don’t see it’, but by putting together a professional pitch/book proposal that addresses the potential readers’ needs. Understand the publishing industry. Understand the web. Understand where the revenue actually comes from (and goes to) in the freelance writing industry.

Don’t get desperate.

Desperation causes people to push boundaries. I am a mass of contradictions, which is why I tell new writers to ‘follow their dream’ and in the next breath to ‘not give up their day job’. The most important take home piece of advice Richard Branson ever gave me (via his autobiography, I’ve never met the guy) was grow your business organically. Start small. Build a client base slowly. Have other options. Then you won’t risk pushing boundaries out of desperation.

Lower your expectations.

Overly high expectations can cause people to push at boundaries, out of a sense of entitlement. I will say this only once. There is no way to get rich quick by freelance writing. There is a way to get rich slow, and a way to get reasonably comfortable slow, and, if you’re lucky, you might just get reasonably comfortable quick.  If you don’t love writing stop doing it. Now. Please. Save yourself the trouble, and the rest of the world the trouble of dealing with you.

Next time you are about to ask for something from a more established writer than yourself (or anyone else in the writing or publishing industry), stop. Then proceed with caution. Ask nicely. Be prepared to wait for an answer. Be prepared to compromise. Be prepared to listen and learn and be respectful. Be prepared to offer something in return. And say thank you. (Yes, I do sound like I’m talking to my kids. Writing and parenting – there are definite similarities.)

This post was inspired by Christina Katz and her Prosperous Writer ezine. You can sign up for it at christinakatz.com, and if you happen to be reading this post the day it was written (14^th May 2010) Christina is hosting a “Proudest Moment” party over at her blog, celebrating the proudest writing achievements of 40 female writers (including me!) so click on over there and be inspired!