If You Want to Be a Successful Writer, Stop Focusing on Your Writing

Crafting strong sentences is only one part of being a successful writer

By Robert K. Starr

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Guest writer Robert K. Starr is a popular writer on Medium.com. In this story, he shows you how to make your writing more marketable without losing sight of your own voice and personality.

As a young writer, back in my late teens, I dreamed of writing things that nobody had ever seen before, breaking rules left and right and getting away with it. I had my artistic vision and chose every word carefully, making sure it was the most impressive one I could use.

I wrote an extremely personal screenplay and then another one after that. Somewhere in there, I wrote something complicated that transcended genre so much that I don’t think the instructor in my screenplay class ever figured out what it was I was trying to do.

Whether or not I succeeded, the fact is that nobody would want to buy those screenplays. It’s not because I hadn’t yet evolved as a writer — though I hadn’t — but that I hadn’t yet evolved as a person.

I was focused on the writing itself, which is extremely important, but unless you’re a writer on the level of, say, Charles Dickens, your writing alone isn’t going to get you paid.

In fact, getting paid often doesn’t require that you be an especially good writer at all. At most, it requires that you be a craftsman, but like most careers, you’ll do the bulk of your learning on the job from working with editors.

You’ll develop your style the more you write and, likely, that style will change over the course of your career.

However, the most important things you can do for your career have very little to do with the writing itself.

Here are the things you need to remember if you want to make it as a career writer, no matter how strong your style is.

Deadlines

Working with several editors on multiple ghostwriting projects, by far, the non-writing thing I’ve been praised most for is that I stick to deadlines. If I tell you that I’ll have something by midnight on the 30th, then I make damned sure that it’ll be there in your inbox by then, ready for you.

Everybody is under a time crunch in this industry, and when you mess up a deadline, you’re putting everybody down the line in a bad place, forcing them to explain to their superiors why they’re running behind schedule.

This can be difficult for us as writers because we want everything to be perfect, but, for me, I actually love deadlines. Deadlines force me to actually finish something instead of spending forever tinkering with it.

As Duke Ellington once said, “I don’t need time. I need a deadline.”

Deadlines are your friends, forcing you to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. You can spend a decade writing a book that’s near perfect, or, during that time, you can easily publish 20 books that are pretty good, with some bordering on great.

If you’re a true artist and don’t care about money, by all means, pursue your own project on your own time.

But if other people are counting on you, make sure you give them what they need when they need it. They’ll forgive a slightly underdeveloped character or an awkward line of dialogue so long as they’ve got a completed something in their hands.

That being said, sometimes things come up and you fall behind schedule. If you are stuck and realize you’re not going to make that deadline, let your editor know as soon as possible so she can adapt accordingly. You do not want a missed deadline to be a surprise.

Clean copy

Even as you speed through whatever project you’re working on, be it a short article or an entire novel, be mindful of things like spelling and grammar. Give everything at least one or two solid read-throughs in order to check for mistakes and typos.

Editors want to focus on big issues instead of minor ones. They’re not your personal grammar check and if they’re spending time trying to fix your subject-verb agreement, they’re not going to be able to effectively do their job.

But more than that, it just looks sloppy and unprofessional. Even The New York Times bestsellers have typos in them, but if you’ve got a slew of them in what you’re turning in, it’s not publishable until they’re fixed.

So please, be kind to your editors and make their lives easier by taking care of the simple things before you put something in front of their eyes.

Accept and implement criticism

I had an acting coach who gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard: “Never believe your own publicity.”

People will praise you in an effort to promote your work. Reviews on whatever you publish will be through the roof. Don’t let it get to your head.

You are mortal and you make mistakes. If somebody offers genuine criticism, whether or not you agree with it, treat it as a gift. Thank them for it.

Do not be the person who responds to every piece of criticism by getting defensive. They’ll likely learn to stop giving you criticism. And then they’ll stop wanting to work with you. It also has the potential to affect your reputation.

Don’t be a jerk

In a similar vein, try to be pleasant to as many people as you can. You don’t want them to remember you as a jerk, but as somebody who was fun to be around, easy to work with, and made them feel good.

This goes for life in general, too.

In about a week, I’ve got a meeting with a producer related to a screenplay I’ve written. I don’t know what’s going to come of it, but the way I got in touch with her was through a mutual friend.

Unfortunately, the creative world depends more on who you know than what you write, but as that’s the case, try not to burn any bridges by being a jerk to people.

Don’t limit yourself to one type of writing

When I was 18, I knew I wanted to be a screenwriter. And I wanted to write artsy, personal projects about young men like me.

Great!

I have literally not once gotten paid for doing that.

Since then, I’ve written science newspaper articles for a mainstream audience, reviews of DVDs, romance novels and outlines, weird roleplaying scripts for amorous couples looking to spice up their love life, and interactive death scenes in a board game.

These jobs may not have all been exactly what I wanted to do at any given point in my life, but they gave me a little bit of money to sustain myself as a writer until the next big job came along.

Embrace these jobs and experiences. And have fun with them. You don’t know who you’ll be working with that can give you a job later on.

Give them what they want

This might be the hardest note to take because it can be personal. One of the disagreements an editor and I had was with a particular joke in one of my novels. I can’t give the exact details because I signed an NDA, but let’s say she thought it was funnier with a zebra while I thought it would be funnier with a monkey.

I still think it would have been funnier with a monkey. I told her that and told her why. But she was the one paying me, and, as such, it was her book. She got her zebra.

When writing in M/M romances, the publishers insisted I work male pregnancy into the plot because that was a very popular trope. I don’t understand the appeal, but they asked for it and they got it. Even though I thought the book plots were crowded enough without the extra complication.

The trick of being a career writer is finding ways to express yourself and personalize your writing while still adhering to the limitations of whatever job you have at the time.

I enjoy writing romance novels, but if I had unlimited money and resources, I’d probably be writing something more cerebral and surreal. I have ideas for such books, but, for the moment, they’ll remain as only ideas that I keep in the back of my head. Maybe they’ll see the light of day at some point.

In the meantime, I’m writing where the money is and, rather than see it as an obstacle, I accept it as a challenge:

Can I give whoever’s paying me what they want while also producing something that I’m proud of? And, more importantly, can I have fun doing it?

In theory, writing is a fun job of playing make believe, creating universes, and sharing your vision with the world. In reality, it’s a low-paying job where you spend a lot of time staring at a blank page and struggling to make puzzle pieces stick together.

It can be frustrating, but it’ll be even more frustrating if you’re fighting against editors and other people around you whose jobs are to help bring your work to the light of day.

Because if you don’t take care of the “non-writing” things, your work is just going to stay locked away in a file on your computer, never to see the light of day.

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Robert K. Starr is not yet on Substack, but you can read his excellent stories on his Medium profile. He is a romance novelist and screenwriter. Formerly software engineer, physicist, and high school teacher. On his bio, he says, “I love my dog and also your dog.”