Robert Moskowitz

Daily Scheduling

One of the keys to professional writing is to crank out a lot of good work. And to do that, you’ll need to put in a good deal of time.

The best way to guarantee that you’ll have the time available to accomplish a lot of good work is to develop and follow a daily schedule.

There are several elements involved in creating and adhering to a daily schedule. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

Identify Your Best and Worst Times of Day

In the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, there was an ancient idea revived and developed by Wilhelm Fliess that proposed a person’s physical and emotional states fluctuated around 23- and 28-day cycles, respectively, starting on the day you were born. Later, a psychologist named Hermann Swoboda and an engineer named Alfred Teltscher expanded on this idea to include a 33-day cycle of intellectual or mental capabilities.

These biorhythms were thought by many to be so important and powerful that anyone should be able to predict days when a person would be particularly strong, happy, or smart and other days when a person would feel weak, down hearted, or befuddled simply by counting the number of days since birth and calculating where that person would be on the cycle of their relevant biorhythm.

There may be some truth to this notion, but that’s not the main point here. What’s undisputed is that you almost certainly do have periods of time when you can perform at a higher level and other times where the best you can do is not quite as good as that.

This is the main point: you can and should take advantage of your natural ups and downs by tracking them, noting on your calendar, for example, the times when you feel your best and the times when you feel your worst. Once you see the pattern, you can begin trying to use your periods of higher performance to do your best writing.

Whether biorhythms work or not for you, the cyclical nature of high and low performance often breaks down to something as simple as:

Being a morning person or an evening person
Feeling better writing in bed before you go to sleep or in the afternoon after taking a nap
Waking up early and getting in some solid hours of creativity or staying up late to record whatever wonderful thoughts you have been accumulating during the day.

Identify Your Most Productive Patterns

Another aspect of this timing technique involves recognizing and exploiting the length of time at a stretch you prefer to work. I have found that I do better working three, four, even five hours at one sitting—the longer I go, the better my writing becomes. Other writers I know like to dash off a few paragraphs as soon as they come to mind, then do something more routine until another flash of inspiration hits them.

There’s no right or wrong here, no absolute better or worse. All I’m suggesting is that you discover the times of day, and days of the week, when you are at your best and do at least some of your writing during those periods.

Break Down a Project into Separate, Simple Tasks

Once you know the best times to work on your writing, take the next step and figure out what you ought to be working on.

One of the best ways to do this is to have a plan for what you’re going to write, whether it’s a novel, a play, a poem, or anything else. At a minimum, it’ll have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It might have five acts. You might envision 20 or 30 scenes, seven key images, or 10 important moments.

No matter how you have conceived the project at hand, if you know each of the parts you want to include in it, you can have the next part in mind as you sit down to work, and even before.

Knowing what comes next is helpful because not only it eliminates the blank-page problem that so many writers dislike, but also it allows your subconscious mind to be working on the project during the interval between your last writing session and your next one.

Develop a Productive Working Routine

One way that has helped me be a productive writer over the years is to reserve certain times for writing, and nothing else. During my self-scheduled writing hours, I don’t allow myself to straighten my desk, sharpen pencils, answer the telephone, read, doodle, or anything else. I’m there to write. If I feel stuck or can’t muster the energy to work, my only alternative is to sit idly until I can start working on my project.

I have found that sitting idly during these intended writing times is so unpleasant and boring that I quickly start my writing engine and begin putting words on paper.

Another trick that many writers use is to stop writing in the middle of a passage that’s coming easily and feeling great. The idea is that later, when you come back to the project, you’ll find it relatively easy to pick up where you left off and start producing good material right away. The corresponding fear is that if you finish that great passage and then stop writing, when you come back to the project later on you’ll face a difficult time getting started again.

Either of these ideas may or may not be true for you, but there’s no doubt that if you regularly sit down to write during your high-performance periods, you’ll produce better work than if you work at random times or—worse—when your performance level is on the downswing.

Follow Your Schedule

Any or all of this may seem great, but I can assure you that it’s helpful only to the extent you actually put it into practice.

If you don’t have enough self-discipline to follow your self-imposed schedule, understand that becoming a professional writer requires more of it.

Stay Flexible

Having said all this, I want you to remember that creativity should never be a chore, never a drag on your time or energy, never a task to get through so you can do something else that’s more fun. Creativity should be your most enjoyable activity.

That’s why it’s important that your working schedule—no matter how carefully laid out and how many great techniques and ideas it incorporates—should be more of a guideline than an implacable routine.

Robert Moskowitz is an award-winning independent professional writer who has written and sold millions of words in just about every format over five decades. He instinctively sees the big pictures, breaks each one down into coherent slices, meaningfully prioritizes and sequences those slices, and then executes the tasks inherent in each slice in very productive ways. Put more simply, Robert knows how to succeed as an independent writer, covering all the bases from soliciting assignments to delivering polished work, from pricing jobs to budgeting and managing personal finances, from organizing a conducive office environment to establishing and following sensible guidelines regarding life, work, and productivity. Having done all this, and having paid attention to how he did it, Robert is now in a position to pass along what he knows to others.

Developing a Business Plan

Friday, February Post a comment

If you want to be a professional writer, then you should seriously consider treating your work as a business. And that means developing a business plan.

As a newbie to the professional writing industry, you probably won’t need a complex plan; you may even be able to scratch out a totally adequate business plan on the back of an envelope. But if you’ve got some experience under your belt, or you have major ambitions, you’ll benefit from a more robust, comprehensive, and heavily detailed plan.

Either way, having a business plan gives you a road map for what to focus on, what to do next, what to expect in the future, how to handle the unexpected, and how to assess the progress you are making toward your goal of becoming a successful professional writer.

What Will You Do?

The first part of your business plan should contain a simple but complete, high-level statement of your planned professional activities:

What products and services will you offer?
To whom will you offer them?
How will you make yourself known to these potential buyers?
What performance milestones will you aim for?

Do some clear thinking as you write this part of your plan, but be ready to come back to it with refinements after you figure out the details in the sections to follow.

Products and Services

In this section, try to describe the work you expect to be doing in more detail.

Start by naming and characterizing each of your products and services: scripts, novels, booklets, plays, speeches, etc. Then specify the relevant details, such as word lengths, audiences, and formats.

While you’re at it, try to identify the benefits of your products and services. What’s special about you and your offerings? Why would someone want to hire you or buy from you? What differentiates your products and services from those of your competitors?

Incidentally, if you think you don’t have any competitors, you’re almost certainly wrong. You probably haven’t found them because you haven’t done enough research into the market(s) you plan to enter.

Sales and Marketing

In this section of your business plan, try to include all the important details about how you will obtain paying clients.

How much will you charge for each product or service?
Will you advertise? Where? How often?
Will you participate in trade shows or display at conventions? Which ones?
Will you mail or email sales and marketing materials? To whom? Saying what?
Will you make personal connections within your network? Where? When? How?
Will you pay for sales and marketing help from an agent? A publisher? A collaborator?
Will you develop a web presence? How? With what sales and marketing messages?

Try to list, describe, and specify enough details so that you could—if you wish—simply hand off this information to a sales and marketing agency and afterward feel confident that they will implement your plans as you intended.

Practical Matters

When starting a business, it may be beneficial to work through several practical matters that will effectively translate your dreams and rough ideas into a tangible business entity. Such matters as:

Where and when will you work?
Who will do your billing? Accounting? Taxes?
What will be the name of your business?
How will it be organized: as a sole proprietorship, a limited liability company, or a corporation. And what state will it be registered in?
Who will own the business?
How will you ensure compliance with applicable laws and get answers to the inevitable legal questions?
Are you a party to contracts or agreements (non-disclosure, non-compete) that limit your ability to do what you are planning? If so, how will you handle these limitations?
Where will you obtain start-up capital?

Management and Decision-Making

Who will run your business? You alone, or you with others, or just these others? What authority will management have, and not have, to impact your everyday work and your ability to make deals (and other business arrangements)?

Will you have any advisers, partners, or collaborators? What influence will these people have on your work, deal-making, and business activities?

Growth

What’s your plan for growing this new business? Will it always be just you, or will you bring in others as contractors, employees, partners, coaches, or people in other roles to help you grow your business?

How will you measure your business’s growth? In terms of income? Number of people doing the work? Number of items sold? Some other way? Remember to measure what is important to the future of your professional writing business.

Include goals in your business plan that emphasize the success you’d like to achieve as a professional writer.

Finances

In the financial section, project the amount of money you will need to operate your business. These will be yearly projections for the first five years.

Once you’ve calculated these expense figures, add up the money you expect to earn as a professional writer. Take into account the prices you will charge and the quantity of products or services you expect to sell each year. Since you can’t nail this down to the exact dollar, work with a range of likely minimum to likely maximum income for the first five years you’ll be in business. Also list cash on hand, loans, investor capital, and equity.

Now compare your anticipated income against your anticipated expenditures. How long will it take until you break even? How long after that until you recoup the money you spent and make a profit and also save for retirement?

Be cognizant that your new business might accumulate significant value as it grows. For example, any assets it owns might become valuable, including its contracts, its relationships with solid customers, its inventory and unspent earnings, its real estate or other property, and so forth.

All this work to develop a business plan can be fun, as you run through all the possible scenarios and contemplate your potential success as a professional writer, as well as meaningful.

If you don’t get the business plan right, you’ll be depending on luck for your success. And it’s highly unlikely you’ll be the one in a million writer who lucks into success as a professional. If you do get your business plan right, though, your chances of success take an immediate leap into the realm of the possible, the do-able, and even the likely.

One Final Thought

Many people make the mistake of thinking that just by stating a goal, or writing it up as part of a business plan, that you must achieve it. Totally untrue. Any goals you state—and intend to achieve—are simply distant milestones to help guide your direction. To achieve them, you must actually do the necessary hard work and do it as well as you can.

Pricing Your Work

Saturday, January Post a comment

One of the most difficult questions you’ll ever be asked about your work is: “What’s it worth?”

Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, the road to becoming a professional writer involves navigating the intricacies and trade-offs of this difficult question and coming up with answers that lead to advancement toward that goal, rather than retreat.

The intricacies of that difficult question involve issues that are practical, economic, competitive, and emotional. Let’s take a look at each of those issues:

Practical Issues

The first set of issues you encounter when setting prices for your work involves practical matters:

How much money do you have on hand?

How much do you spend each month or each year?

How much money is coming in?

The bottom line of all this is simple: How long can you stay in the writing game before you run out of money and must quit writing to put that time and energy toward other means of earning a living?

Pricing is one way to directly change that bottom-line result. If you can adjust your pricing to increase the amount of money coming in, you can stretch out the time remaining in your career as a professional writer. If you can increase the amount of money coming in substantially enough, you can keep writing professionally for the rest of your life.

Most times, to increase your writing income you’ll need to raise your prices. But this calculation can lead you to lower your prices, too. The point is to maximize the income you generate from the combination of two factors: the amount of work you sell and the price you earn from each sale.

For example, suppose you’re now selling ten pieces of writing per month at $100 per piece. That’s $1,000 income per month. If raising your price will not lose too many sales, you might be able to sell eight pieces at month $150 per piece. That would earn you $1,200 per month total income.

On the other hand, if lowering your price will result in extra sales, you might be able to sell 15 pieces per month at $90 per piece. That would bring you $1,350 per month.

A great many factors go into determining the most lucrative price point for each item you sell. Sometimes, you won’t know the best price point until you experiment. But the basic fact is that changing your prices is the first, and often most practical, way to increase your income as a professional writer.

Economic Issues

If you lived in a vacuum, or in a static world, you could raise and lower your prices however you wish and expect to receive a mathematically calculated result. But you live in an economy that has its own ups and downs independent of you and your wishes.

That’s one reason professional writing can often be a case of “feast or famine.” During good economic times, you might sell all the work you can produce at prices you enjoy. During bad economic times, you might struggle to sell any of your work and have no choice but to accept prices you wish were higher.

Your pricing decisions should, therefore, recognize and take into account the current economic climate in which you are operating. You should be alert not only to current economic conditions, but also to upcoming changes in the economic climate. Looking ahead, you can strive to position yourself—by means of pricing changes (and perhaps other ways, as well)—to take maximum advantage of the economic hand you will soon be dealt.

Competitive Issues

Just as you live in an economic climate, you also live in a competitive climate. If you’re the only one capable of writing a particular piece of work—say a Katy Perry song or a best-seller on White House intrigue—you can pretty much write your own ticket as far as income from that work is concerned.

However, if you are cranking out the same kind of boiler plate that’s available from ten thousand other writers, it’s hard to price your work outside of the competitive range the market has established for such work.

This has two implications for professional writers:

Don’t expect to earn more from highly competitive work than the vast majority of your competitors are earning. Your prices and to some extent your income will be tightly constrained by the market.

There are major advantages to stepping out of the competitive rat race and into some niche where competition is relatively scarce and where your natural talents help you become a leader—or even a “one of a kind.” There are lots of genres and markets out there. Which one fits you better and offers you a greater chance to earn the living you want as a professional writer?

Emotional Issues

So far, we’ve covered three practical, objective, external issues that tend to influence how much you can earn from your work. But the most important issues are internal:

If you don’t feel worthy of big bucks for your work, you won’t ask for them. And if the market nevertheless insists on offering you those big bucks, psychology tells us you’ll find ways to screw up, or even to lose hold of those big bucks very quickly after they are forced on you.

If you don’t work at improving your pricing, you’ll set your prices at less than optimum levels. The result: you’ll leave money on the table, money that could have been yours.

If you don’t build up the psychological strength to withstand the inevitable stresses, losses, and—yes—even failures you will experience not only on the road to becoming a professional writer, but more generally in life, you will burn out, quit, or otherwise settle for less. Without sufficient inner resilience, you’ll be far less likely to last long enough to accomplish any of your most important goals.

The road to becoming a professional writer is much easier to travel when you realize that however large and unyielding the external barriers to success may seem, the barriers that are most difficult to surmount are the internal ones.

Having said all this, I recognize and understand that you may not make the same choices on pricing as I make. But I still challenge you to price your work as close as you can to its full value. It’s a difficult challenge to meet, and a continuing one. Yet optimum pricing is a central aspect of becoming a professional writer, and also a key element in earning a good living from your skills and your craft.

How to Harness the Power of Your Dreams

Friday, December Post a comment

Aside from the actual craft of writing, one of the best ways to improve your work (and generate more personal satisfaction and income as a result) is to harness the power of your dreams.

In this context, let’s use the word “dreams” to include those stories you tell yourself while you’re sleeping, of course, and also your waking daydreams, your fantasies about how life could or should or would be, plus those many “what if” scenarios you dream up in response to real-life situations that strangers helpfully play out in front of you.

All of these ideas, scenes, set pieces, snippets, and snapshots may be sparked by external reality. But they nearly always feed off some of your innermost feelings, drives, and desires. As such, they are normally connected to strong emotions that, when woven into your writings, will tend to attract and captivate others much more powerfully than the relatively dry stuff that spills out from your comparatively cerebral creative processes.

It has often been said that if you are not crying while you are writing, you’re not doing it right. Starting with material from your dreams will make crying—and other high emotions—a more commonplace part of your writing process.

Here are some tips to help you harness the power of your dreams:

Keep Track of Your Dreams

The first step in harnessing the power of your dreams is to capture as much of this raw material as you can. This requires you to keep a “dream journal” in which, every morning on first awakening, you immediately note what you can remember of any dreams you’ve had during the night. At first, you might remember just a few disconnected snippets of your dreams. But as you continue with this practice, you’ll get better and better at remembering the details of what you dreamt the night before.

But don’t stop with nighttime dreams. Carry some kind of note-taking mechanism with you—scrap paper and pencil, a bound journal, your smart phone, a tape recorder, or anything else you can comfortably tote all the time—and use it frequently. Record random thoughts, complete ideas, simple stories you make up during the day, human interactions you witness, and any other fodder for writing that you encounter as you go about your daily business.

Don’t try to vet these items for quality, relevance, or any other virtue. Capture them all as they come to you. Later, you can decide whether a particular note has enough merit or potential to warrant further work.

Brainstorm on Your Dreams

You can think of dreams that pop into your head as “first generation” material, because it comes unbidden to your mind. But equally valuable is the “second generation” material you intentionally manufacture using your “first generation” material as starting points.

There are many rules to aid in brainstorming, the full range of which I won’t bother to discuss here. But I will cover just two: free writing and pyramiding.

Free writing is a simple exercise designed to uncover lots of ideas that your native internal editor would normally try to keep hidden. It consists of starting with an item of first-generation dream material and then writing whatever comes to mind, without stopping or thinking or editing, for 20 or 30 minutes at a time. If you have nothing to say, just write “I have nothing to say” over and over again until you do have something to say. The result of this free writing exercise is to “clear the pipes” and uncover subconscious material that often reveals additional thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas tied in with your strong emotions.

Pyramiding is a more conscious process in which you start with an item of first-generation dream material, then intentionally and logically build on it. Say you originally dreamt of an umbrella. You might pyramid on that idea by thinking of umbrella uses, such as shielding a person from rain or sun. You might think of other items that are reminiscent of or associated with umbrellas, such as awnings, tarps, tents, and porch roofs. If you start with an item of clothing, you might build to whole outfits or trending fashions. If you start with a snippet of human interaction, you might pyramid from there toward an entire play.

The discipline and practice of brainstorming applied to your first-generation dream material is helpful because it produces further raw material on the basis of which you may later write something wonderful.

Refine Your Dream Material

Although your first- and second-generation dream material provides the valuable ore containing hints of golden promise, you extract the most value from this raw material when you refine it into ingots of first-rate creative expression.

To do this, sift through your dream material in search of nuggets, grains, or even flecks of worthwhile story material. Look for elements like a great line of dialog or description, a powerful conflict, a memorable character, a captivating visual, an exciting journey, an enthralling plot, or something better.

Collect and organize these as the basis for the most “writerly” part of this process.

Edit Your Dream Material into Story Ideas

Here’s another place where we separate the “wannabes” from the professional writers. Anybody can think of a great line of dialog or an enthralling plot. It takes a professional to craft such elements into a complete idea for a story.

Take, for example, Proof of Life. It’s a compelling film based on a magazine article prompted by the actual practice of gaining freedom for hostages taken by terrorists. Lots of people knew about the practice; thousands more read the magazine article. The raw material was sitting out there in public view, just waiting for a professional writer to do the work necessary to wrangle the raw idea into a story.

Steps one through three, above, will regularly provide you with a treasure trove of raw dream material chocked full of powerful elements from your own life, mind, and unconscious.

From that point on, you will have endless opportunities to use your writing chops to crank out a great story. Or more than one.

Earn More While Working Less

Friday, December Post a comment

I don’t know about you, but while I greatly enjoy writing, and I love to re-read my finished work (plus I metaphorically glow every time I hear the occasional “you changed my life”), I have never forgotten that under the capitalist system there’s always the component of money.

As a result, I have spent a good deal of my professional time and effort thinking about, and finding ways to increase, my income from writing.

Here are some of the methods I have used to accomplish this important element of writing:

Raise Your Rates

This is fundamental to increasing your income. In part, I’ve always thought of this process as a simple scenario: Suppose you’re in a room or on the phone with a relative stranger, and you ask them to give you $10. Chances are, they’ll scoff and brush you off with a forceful “no.” That’s a natural reaction. But when you are in a room or on the phone with someone who is negotiating to buy your work, you can ask them for that same $10 (extra) with a much greater likelihood they’ll say “yes.”

That’s one big reason I’m routinely exploring how much more I can get for every word I write.

Asking for more is the basic tool for earning more. If I’m getting $1.00 a word from most of my clients, I’m likely to quote a slightly higher rate to my next prospective client. If she balks, I can always change my tune and offer the lower rate that I’m already getting from so many others.

Of course, you don’t want to appear avaricious, nor do you want to queer a deal by behaving too greedily or money-grubbing. But there’s nothing wrong with considering the total earnout from a piece of your work and trying to maximize it.

Aside from outright asking for more, there are a couple of other considerations to keep in mind when trying to raise your rates.

First, part of the process of kicking up your rates is to establish and maintain a minimum rate, under which you will not work. If you don’t have such a minimum, it’ll be extra difficult to resist the inevitable capitalist pressures on you to work cheaper and cheaper. Naturally, you’ll want to keep raising this floor as you cement your ability to get higher and higher rates for your work.

Second, calculate how much you “should” earn, and how much you “want to” earn by summing up your living expenses for the year and dividing by the number of hours you generally work. If you spend $100,000 a year and work 2,000 hours (40 hours times 50 weeks), you should earn $50 per hour to meet your expenses. If you want to earn $120,000 next year, you’ll have to find ways to get $60 per hour.

Since inflation eats away at the value of your dollars, this calculation contains a built-in incentive for you to keep raising your rates.

Of course, you can always work more hours or spend less money, but that’s for a different discussion.

Specialize and Become an Expert

Most writers should choose between specializing on a single field of knowledge or writing on a variety of topics.

Aside from any other considerations, however, choosing to specialize can bring you more income. This is because

you’ll tend to establish yourself as an expert
you’ll be writing on a topic that few others can cover as well as you
you’ll be writing for a narrower audience of people who may feel more willing to pay well for good information
you may uncover ancillary sources of income such as speaking, teaching, editing, researching, or something else.

Work More Efficiently

We’ve already touched on the number of hours you can work in a year and the amount you can earn each hour. Reading those ideas, you may have realized that another way to earn more is to produce more output per hour.

This brings you into the world of productivity and efficiency.

Back in 1980, I found a great way to increase my income by switching from an electric typewriter to a word processing computer. I not only cranked out more material on the computer, every line read better because I could craft it more meticulously.

At this late date in the computer revolution, there are probably very few changes you can make that offer a comparable productivity advantage. But you might want to think about

speech-to-text software instead of typing
auto-correcting software to reduce the time needed to clean up your work
automatic formatting software to facilitate writing scripts and plays
mind mapping software to help you develop complex characters and plots.

You could also pull a “James Patterson” and simply supervise as others do your writing for you. But that’s a topic for another post.

Self-Publish Your Best Material

During the gold rush, it wasn’t the prospectors who tended to make a fortune. It was the prospectors buying equipment and supplies who made many shopkeepers rich.

Along the same lines, it isn’t the writers who tend to make most of the money available from crafting the written word. More often, it’s the publishers who do.

Fortunately, self-publishing has become much easier than ever before.

The techniques of self-publishing are topics for a different discussion, but there’s no shortage of information and advice on how to do it. In fact, by one reckoning, many of the most successful self-published books unabashedly cover the topic of how to self-publish.

Of course, that’s not the only topic that works as self-published material. Look into it. You’ll discover that when you are keeping 100% of the sales income, you don’t have to sell very much to earn more than what you might receive from a project that pays you only a small fraction of the total sales or, even worse, only a flat fee.

Negotiate for a Piece of the Action

One of the nice things about TV, film, and music is that the writer can reasonably expect to get paid not just an upfront fee, but a portion of all the revenue the work generates.

You can gain increased income from this simple principle by trying to write for industries that offer such ongoing payments.

I’m not telling you to abandon your principles and your passion to write pot-boilers for network television. I’m simply saying that if you’re looking to harvest apples, you’ll do better in an apple orchard than in a fallow field.

To a lesser extent, you can also try to gain more revenue by negotiating a piece of the action from the kind of writing you already do for other projects and purposes.

Stop Getting Screwed

Perhaps the most difficult, yet important, avenue for earning more income is to stop signing contracts or accepting assignments that allow others to take advantage of you. I’ve done lots of work for people that resulted in limited—even zero—income for me. I’m not proud of it. I don’t like to talk about it. It really galls me. But it motivates me to avoid making the same kinds of mistakes in the future.

I therefore suggest that you make one of your professional mottos the following: “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.”

Working to increase your income from writing is different from, but related to learning the craft of writing. Based on my own career, as well as those of people I have helped to succeed as professional writers, I can tell you that half a loaf is better than none, and being able to afford to buy a full loaf is even better than that.

What Are Your Writing Strengths and Weaknesses?

Friday, October Post a comment

No matter what the field, what the profession, what the skill set, everyone who strives to accomplish specific goals brings to the effort a variety of strengths and weaknesses. This is no less true in the field of professional writing than anything else.

But while it may be lamentable that you are not great at everything you try, this simple truth need not be a source of unhappiness nor a one-way ticket to failure.

One of the most important distinctions between a highly professional writer and a lesser one is that the former recognizes her strengths and weaknesses, while the latter is to some extent blind to them.

Here’s how you open your eyes to your strengths and weaknesses, and begin to incorporate them into your work:

1. Assess

First, the professional writer continually assesses his or her talents, skills, and capabilities. Each new effort, each new finished piece, stands as a milestone from which the professional writer can look back at his or her body of work and try to understand the patterns it contains.

For example, perhaps you can write a snappy poem, but your efforts to pen a political essay often fall short. Maybe you can craft a compelling short story about a young person coming of age, but that novel you’d love to write about an aging couple with regrets over past relationships eludes you. It’s possible you can describe an article of clothing in terms so soaring that you drive sales higher than the designer’s expectations. But that’s no guarantee you can write a meaningful review of the newest video game.

Strengths and weaknesses don’t manifest themselves simply in terms of whether a certain project is easy or hard for you to complete at a high level of proficiency. There are other factors, such as your willingness to work at honing a difficult passage, your satisfaction with your results, and – of course – how other people react to your output.

Most of us want to rely on our own judgments about our capabilities in various styles, genres, topic areas, purposes, audiences, and formats. Fine. Go ahead and make those personal assessments. But it’s helpful if you check your judgments against those of others, at least once in a while, to make sure you’re not just spinning fantasies about your abilities that won’t hold up in the world of impersonal market-based judgments.

2. Map

Consider both your strengths and weaknesses in terms of the kinds of material to which they relate. If you’re great at explaining actions in step-by-step fashion, that’ll be useful in writing “how to” articles and revealing what’s behind the scenes of complex current events. But it won’t be much help in writing dialog in a bodice-ripper.

On the other hand, if characters you imagine instantly come to life in your head and heart, then you’ll find it easier to tell intense personal stories that keep various audiences turning your pages. But you might not find it as easy to cover a news event or write a compelling press release.

By the same token, if you tend to lose track of where you’re going while writing procedural dramas, there’s little point in beating your head against the wall by trying to draft a spec script for “Law and Order.” Yet that deficiency says nothing about your ability to accomplish other writing objectives.

Take time to evaluate the talents, skills, and capabilities that normally go into creating any category of writing that interests you. Then carefully compare what you actually can do best against what you probably need to be able to do if you expect to excel in a specific kind of writing.

3. Execute

All this effort should result in a list of styles, genres, topic areas, purposes, audiences, and formats that feel very comfortable and interesting to you. These are the categories in which you will do best to concentrate not only your writing time, but your efforts to learn your craft.

Make it your top priority to work on the ones that best match the strengths and weaknesses you bring to the table. Those where you measure up less accurately you can relegate to a back burner or earmark for more concentration later, when you have more time or after you have grown as a writer.

If you’re like most of the writers I’ve known and mentored, you’ll find that the closer you stay to your wheelhouse, the easier and better your professional work will become.

Some Issues with Contracts

Tuesday, July Post a comment

The better a professional writer you become, the bigger and more important will be the contracts people ask you to sign.

But tempting as those financial figures may be (with all those zeroes to the left of the decimal point), you’ll be foolish to sign without applying a little professional savvy to your contract evaluation process.

Here are some fundamental tips to guide you in contract evaluation:

“Sign This”

My most important contract advice derives from my very first book deal: I remember sitting in the publisher’s office and chatting amiably about how great was my book concept and how much money we were going to make.

Eventually, the conversation wound down and the publisher looked me square in the eyes. He reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “This is our standard contract,” he said with a warm, friendly smile. “Sign it.”

Instead, I started looking through the pages. Here was something I didn’t like. There was another questionable arrangement. After a few minutes of flipping pages and deconstructing legalese, I looked up and said: “There are some things in this contract I don’t like.”

Without missing a beat, the publisher reached into a different drawer of his desk and said with no trace of embarrassment: “This is our other standard contract. Sign this one.”

Watch Out for Claims

This warning may be just as important as the previous item: Most contracts for professional writing come with conventional language warning the writer not to plagiarize, infringe on any rights, defame, or violate any one of a great many laws governing creative work. They follow these injunctions with language in which you agree to indemnify and hold harmless (basically “reimburse”) the publisher for any liabilities arising from your breach of any of those laws and injunctions. So far, so good.

But the lawyers like to sneak another word in here that threatens your entire economic wellbeing. I’m talking about the word “claims”. Basically, most contracts require that you reimburse the publisher for payments made in response to claims that you breached one or more of those laws and injunctions.

Do you see the danger here?

Once you sign such a contract, anyone can make a claim that you violated certain rights, plagiarized, defamed, or did any of a number of bad things, and the publisher doesn’t have to be concerned about whether or not you actually did it. Under the contract, the publisher can simply pay the claimant to go away – and make this payment entirely with your money!

This actually happened to me, once, and I learned my lesson. I have never since signed a contract making me liable to pay for unsupported claims. Instead, I insist on language to the effect that I must reimburse the publisher only for claims “proven in a court of competent jurisdiction.”

Such language is no problem for me because I never plagiarize, defame, or do any of those other bad things.

Once or twice a publisher has been too bureaucratic or hidebound to accept my request for this new language, and so I wasn’t able to make those deals. But I have no regrets; the danger is too large and too real to put myself on the hook for that kind of scam, no matter how lucrative the contract might appear to be.

Obligations of the publisher

Contracts generally bind all parties to both rights and obligations. When looking them over, it’s easy and natural – and sensible – to devote most of your attention to your rights and your obligations. But it’s more professional to take a few minutes to consider the publisher’s rights and obligations, too.

For example, I once negotiated a book contract that gave me a wonderful share of revenues from the hardcover version, and less revenue from the paperback version. I signed it. But I didn’t realize until later that the contract did not obligate the publisher to bring out that hardcover edition. Years later, I’m still waiting to see that book in hardcover.

I have to admit I’ve made this kind of mistake twice, not just once. But you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t be making it a third time.

Play “What If”

Contracts tend to be written by people who are seemingly paid by the word. They rarely use one word when ten will do. As a result, contract language often gets very confusing and the whole point of what’s required can get lost.

That’s why it’s useful to play “what if” to an extreme, just to see what results from the language of the contract you’re preparing to sign.

Try some of these “what if” ideas, and any more that may appeal to you. What if:

The publisher goes out of business
The work sells millions of copies
The work sells almost no copies
You can’t complete the work on time
The publisher never publishes the work
Someone plagiarizes your work
Someone claims you plagiarized their work

The more extreme and wide-ranging the “what if” scenarios you test, the more clarity you’re likely to get regarding the contract.

NDA Hijinks

Non-disclosure agreements are increasingly common not only in contracts, but in stand-alone form that someone wants you to sign before you can even begin to learn about a project in which you might want to participate.

But the language here can get very tricky. One potential client asked me to sign a non-disclosure agreement that was so strict I discovered – by playing “what if” – that if I signed it I would be forbidden from revealing my own name!

Maybe these kinds of provisions wouldn’t hold up in court, but it’s easier, cheaper, and more practical not to sign such a sketchy contract in the first place.

Setting Up the Effective Writer’s Office

Saturday, June Post a comment

Whenever I have moved to a new house, I experience the same kind of organizational difficulties.

For example, if I am inspired to sit and write a story, but I can’t because my chair and desk are cluttered with moving boxes. I’d like to move the boxes, but I can’t put the boxes in the closet because the door to the closet is blocked by a large piece of furniture. I’d like to put the furniture where I want it, but I can’t because the floor in the room where I want it needs painting. I’d like to paint the floor, but I can’t because I don’t have the right color of paint. I’d like to go buy the paint, but I can’t because my car is in the shop.

And so forth.

As a result, I’m frustrated and I lose out on that particular swirl of inspiration to write that story.

Later, when everything in my new house is squared away and I am settled in, when I want to write a story, I’m in a great position to do so. I can immediately sit at my desk, grab whatever tools I need for writing, and get to work.

Over the years I’ve learned that one of the ways writers become professional is by surrounding themselves with the proper tools and the most comfortable systems they need to work more effectively.

In short, they create an effective writers’ office.

Generally, this entails:

A comfortable space in which to work, whether that’s a garret or a patio, a soft bed or a hard chair, a high tech hardscape or a Victorian drawing room.
The right tools, whether that’s a good pen and plenty of paper or a touch-screen laptop, or a lightweight laptop with Scrivener or Pages software, or a heavyweight desktop computer with Dragon or Speech Recogniser.
The right aural and visual environment, whether that’s dead quiet or heavy metal guitar shredding, a breathtaking view of a mountain lake or a bust of Hemingway at your elbow.
The right reference materials, whether that’s your own notes on preparatory thoughts or props that help you get in your characters’ frame of mind, an encyclopedia or an internet connection.
The right feeling, whether that’s a creative mood, a historic sense of writing well in that place, the takeaway after proven warmup exercises.

An effective office is as important a support of your best writing as an effective wardrobe is in helping you look and feel your best.

The time you spend setting up and maintaining your office will pay dividends over the years as you gain career momentum and add emotional power to your most important writing efforts.

I can recall many times that helping aspiring writers create solid platforms on which to work has led to the launch of far more satisfied and successful wordsmiths.

Setting up an effective writer’s office is different from, but akin to learning the proper footwork or other fundamentals of a sport. Not only my own experiences, but those of others I have helped, make clear that it’s so much easier to concentrate and produce compelling material that accurately reflects your thoughts and feelings when you don’t keep butting up against practical impediments and obstacles.

How to Get Your Next Assignment Easier Than Your Last, or Easier Than You Ever Imagined

Saturday, June Post a comment

If you are—or want to be—a working professional writer, then it’s time to realize (or remember) that being able to write a great piece is winning only half the battle.

The other half is being able to sell it.

As far as I can tell, there are only two ways to sell your work:

Find your own audience that is willing to pay to read your work.
Convince someone who already has a paying audience to provide your work to their audience.

I’m all in favor of finding your own audience. I’ve self-published several books, and I plan to do more. I’ve known or heard about people who’ve started their own publications, promoted their own blogs and websites, crowd-funded their books and other writing projects, and so forth. I’ve even met people who have sold their own poetry on street corners for as little as 25 cents a pop.

There are lots of ways to find your own audience, and I encourage you to try some or all of them en route to building your writing career. But it’s always helpful to take the easier route and piggyback your desire to be published on someone who already has access to a paying audience.

Again, I believe there are basically two ways to do this. First, you can write whatever you want and then hope to get someone to pay you for it, or second, you can find someone willing to pay you for writing something they assign to you, whether that’s a newspaper or magazine article, a book, a poem, a white paper, liner notes, a website, a blog post, or anything else.

Here’s how to make getting such an assignment even easier.

Try a lot of avenues to a wide range of outlets (and keep trying new ones)

Selling your work is something like a lottery: you can’t win if you don’t play, and the more entries you have working for you, the greater your chances of winning.

If you’re interested in writing magazine articles, make contact with a lot of publications and editors. If you want to write a book, talk to a lot of agents. If you’re interested in ghostwriting, beat the bushes for lots of different potential clients.

Accept that this is part of the business, and like any professional looking to make a sale, recognize that every rejection brings you one step closer to a “yes.”

Be flexible, professional, and easy to work with

Maybe if you’re the next Hemingway or Doris Lessing, you can afford to be grumpy. But if you’re not, or not yet, then make it pleasant and relaxing to work with you. Hold your complaints, say “yes” as much as you can, and try to find ways to work around the unpleasantries that come with almost every assignment.

I remember when I was young and reporting for a newspaper in Philadelphia, I would sum up the entire wisdom of the world—as it pertained to the topic at hand—in the last paragraph of every article I wrote. The editor would inevitable chop that last paragraph for reasons of space.

I could have gotten angry. Instead, I simply put that wisdom into the second to last paragraph.

Of course, if things get too terrible for you, you can always find a different outlet for your work. But don’t burn any bridges on your way out. You never know when you may have to re-cross that bridge on your way back.

Always have a “next” project to offer

Whenever you sell something, immediately implement the successful professional writer’s “two step”: First, deliver what you promised on time and as terrific as you can make it. Second, start setting the stage to sell to this outlet more of your work.

For the professional writer, a sale is not the end of the process, but the beginning.

Go back to the best wells again and again

Although following these directions will eventually net you a variety of places to sell your work, some will inevitably be better than others: more interesting, challenging, lucrative, friendly, easy, or whatever.

Don’t be shy; keep going back to these outlets with better and better ideas, as well as better and better work. What I am saying is if you have found two peach trees, and one produces better peaches, isn’t that the one where you should do most of your picking?

Keep adding new arrows to your quiver

As a professional, part of your job is to keep improving and delivering better and better work in a wide variety of genres, styles, and formats. You’ll find that trying to sell to new outlets is far easier if you have more skills, abilities, and offerings to show them.

Sell the same prep-work over and over

You may have noticed that successful professional writers often touch on the same topics, revisit the same information, and appeal to the same audiences over and over again. Of course, you want to grow as a professional, but if you spend a lot of time and effort digging into and mastering a certain topic, why not get the most from your investment? You’ll find it’s easier to sell the second and third items resulting from that work than it was to sell the first.

Piggyback on your best ideas

One of the techniques of brainstorming is to piggyback on others’ ideas. For example, I might suggest “let’s paint it red,” and then you might piggyback on that by suggesting “let’s offer it in seven different colors.”

But you don’t need others’ ideas for piggybacking to work. Whatever idea you’re working on, you can probably use that idea as a jumping off point and find some other idea(s) that will also yield good material you can sell.

I have consistently used these techniques to maximize the results of pitching my work to publishers, editors, writing partners, and clients. They may have little to do with the craft of writing, but they have a great deal to do with keeping me in the writing game when other “writers” have dropped out of the creative world in order to keep food on the table.

Of course, it’s important you maintain your primary focus on writing rather than on getting your next assignment. But if you lose sight of selling, there’s a chance you’ll fairly soon be writing for an audience of one.

Make Yourself a More Professional Writer

Saturday, April Post a comment

It’s a bright, sunny day. Your horse or lottery ticket just came in. Your significant other is happy and loving. You had a great breakfast and you’re feeling fine. Of course you’re in the zone where you can crank out a great story, possibly in record time, and feel just wonderful not only while you’re doing it, but also afterward.

But that’s not such an amazing triumph. Millions of people can do that.

It’s when the weather is crappy, your horse or lottery ticket came in last, your significant other is feeling difficult and dissatisfied, you burned your eggs and dropped your toast on the floor (butter side down!), and you ache all over that it takes true professionalism to crank out that same great story and feel proud of yourself for having done it, though perhaps not in record time.

Professionalism isn’t always about overcoming a mountain of obstacles, of course, but it does tend to distinguish the best writers from the rest of the pack. It also promotes a high level of self-confidence and satisfaction with your efforts and your results.

Here are some hallmarks of professional writers and how to move closer, if not all the way in, to their ranks.

Setting Up an Office

I’ve written on my NAIWE blog about this subject. Lots of other people have written on the same topic. Through all of these writings, the basic guidelines encourage you to do the following:

Assemble the right tools

Put them into an environment that’s comfortable for you

Spend a lot of time there.

Until someone comes up with a robot that does your writing for you (and does it as well as you), there simply is no substitute for putting in many hours of concentrated time. And that’s far easier to do in an environment conducive to your work. This shows why establishing a great working space brings a tremendous boost to your professionalism.

Choosing Specialization vs. General Writing

Professional writers can go either way on this one: choosing to be a specialist or a generalist. Some people find their writing more valuable because they have become experts in some particular field of information that’s valuable to the audiences of a certain set of publishers. Others find their work more valuable because they have special points of view or insights (think George Carlin or Rebecca Solnit) they can apply to a wide range of subjects.

Construct and manage your professional writing trajectory to capitalize on your native talents and gifts. This way, what you tend to do naturally produces the output you can sell most easily.

But don’t feel pressured to go just one way or the other. Some people can succeed on both paths for a long while and may never need to relinquish one for the other.

Building Relationships with Editors

By “editors,” in this context, we mean anyone with the power (and/or money) to buy some of your work, or anyone with the responsibility to improve your work after someone else has bought it.

These are the key people you want to cultivate, befriend, and welcome into your professional world. Treat these relationships almost like you would a dating relationship with someone you think is really great. You’re looking for a close working relationship that can last a long time.

Getting More Writing Assignments

As you become more successful and well known, it’s easier to develop your own audience and have them transfer some of their money to you for nearly everything you write. But until you get there, professional writing involves finding publishers to pay you for completing assignments.

To simplify and speed up the process of finding publishers and winning paid assignments from them, you want to establish a system that helps you do the following:

Identify publishers who are already interested in the kind of writing you want to do. You can find them through your own reading, through research into the literary marketplace, by word of mouth from friends and colleagues, even randomly by noticing who is publishing what people around you are reading.

Make yourself known to such publishers, and encourage them to dialog with you. This begins with developing and regularly updating an introductory package about yourself that includes a brief rundown of your skills, professional experience, and qualifications, plus samples of your work. Have this ready in appropriate formats, and fire it off whenever you identify a publisher who might be interested in your work.

Keep track of your professional contacts, including everyone you meet who might be interested in your work, everyone you’re currently working with, everyone with whom you’re dialoguing about work, and everyone you’ve pitched for new work. It should include the date of your last contact with each one, the nature and content of that contact, and a projected date when you want to contact them again (if they don’t contact you first). Regularly review this list and keep it current.

Re-Writing Your Text

Good writing requires re-writing. The more you go over your text to re-read it, re-think it, and re-write it as necessary, the better it will become. At a minimum, putting in extra time to revisit your work will improve your chances of finding typos, misspellings, bad punctuation, and other errors.

Beyond that, the more often you re-write, the better your chances of finding just the right thought, just the right phrase, even just the right word to elevate your writing to the highest level of which you are capable.

According to Mark Twain: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

In each piece you create, take time to include as much lightning as you can. Your writing will be more professional for it.

Planning for Retirement

Making money is one matter. Retaining the maximum amount of that money for when you’re done working requires entirely different skills.

While there are many nuances and bits of knowledge involved, it boils down to this:

Spend less than you make.

Retain the extra money.

Find financial vehicles (e.g., savings accounts, certificates of deposit, stocks, bonds, options, and mutual funds) to help your savings grow.

Do all this for as many years as you can.

Perseverance is critical. The earlier you start saving and earning compound interest, the more you’ll accumulate for retirement. For example, if you earn 1% per year on a savings of $100 per month for 10 years or $12,000, you’ll wind up with $12,615.99. Do the same thing for 20 years and you will have saved $24,000, and you’ll wind up with $26,556.12. Do it for 30 years, you will have saved a total of $36,000, and you’ll retire with $41,962.82. As you might expect, when you collect higher than 1% returns, this kind of long-term compounding generates even greater benefits.

So do this, and start right now.

In fact, do all of these, and let me know how significantly your professionalism improves.

Daily Scheduling

Developing a Business Plan

Pricing Your Work

How to Harness the Power of Your Dreams

Earn More While Working Less

What Are Your Writing Strengths and Weaknesses?

Some Issues with Contracts

Setting Up the Effective Writer’s Office

How to Get Your Next Assignment Easier Than Your Last, or Easier Than You Ever Imagined

Make Yourself a More Professional Writer

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