Wright’s Writing Corner: John C. Wright’s Insights On Writing

For my first ever Wright’s Writing Corner entry (I realize it should be Lamplighter’s Writing Corner, but that doesn’t sound as good), I have a guest blog by my husband, John C. Wright, in which he shares his insights on becoming a writer.

Most of you probably know, but John is the author of nine books and many short stories. More about his work can be found here.

Without furtherado:

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Since becoming an author, from time to time interested fans (or else people willing to make me feel better by playing along with the idea that I am real writer by pretending to be fans) will ask me to pass on my writing tips. This is one question I find easy to answer, because my advice is the same for any new writer, no matter his age or level of skill.

 

Here are John C. Wright’s patented and guaranteed Ten Commandments for How to be a Writer.

 

1. In order to be a writer, you must write.

 

 

2. In order to write, you must use proper spelling, punctuation, grammar; or, if you violate these rules, the violation must be deliberate, to create an artistic effect. Avoid politically correct jargon at all costs. Do not use ugly constructions like "he or she"; it will date your work, and the cool people will laugh at you.

 

3. In order to be a writer, you must sell what you write. No manuscript should spend a single night on your desk; the same day you get a rejection, put the manuscript in the mail to the next editor. Let the manuscripts spend their nights on the editor’s desk.

 

4. In order to sell what you write, read the editor’s guidelines for his magazine or publishing house and follow them. These guidelines are available in a reference book called Writer’s Market. Get the reference book for the current year. If the guidelines say double-spaced white paper single sided, and no samurai vampire stories, do not send him "Lightning Swords of the Nosferatu of Kyoto" printed on blood-red paper, single-spaced, double sided. Failure to follow the guidelines shows you are a dude, a tenderfoot, a punk, a novice, not someone meant to be treated with professional courtesy. Your story is your child: no mother would send her child out to look for a job without fixing his tie and shining his shoes.

 

5. Include a self-addressed stamped envelope with proper postage affixed, if you want the manuscript back.

 

6. You will receive on average ONE HUNDRED rejection slips before you make your first sale. This is an average. This means that if someone, say, Lester del Rey, makes his first sale on his first attempt without getting a rejection, that someone else, say, Ray Bradbury, will get two hundred rejection slips.

 

7. If your manuscript is good or bad, send out your manuscript again. Genius does not count. Only persistence counts. The world will not recognize your genius until after you are dead. But the world can recognize your persistence now.

 

8. If the manuscript is good, send out your manuscript again. The editor who rejected it last month or last year may have different needs or a different budget this month or this year.

 

9. If the manuscript is bad, send out your manuscript again. The worst thing you ever wrote will someday, somehow, be some schoolboy’s favorite story ever. Your readers are your employers. Respect and fear them. Do not approach this work with pride or selfishness or any of the other emotions to which men of fragile artistic spirits are inclined. It is a profession. Act professionally.

 

10. Selling writing means your manuscripts go out, and money comes back in. Money always goes toward the writer. Money never goes away from the writer. This means you do not hire a manuscript doctor, you do not pay a reading fee, you do not enter a contest which charges an entry fee. Those are scams. Agents are paid on commission, paid when and only when they sell your wares, whereupon the money comes from the publisher and goes toward you; You do not pay the agent a retainer.

 

To sum up: To be a writer, you write. You write by writing grammatically correct English, not Politically Correct Newspeak. You sell what you write. You sell what you write by following the editor’s submission guidelines. You include a self-addressed stamped envelope. You continue to submit stories whether they are good, bad or mediocre. You treat it like a job.

 

Do not wait to be inspired. So-called inspiration consists of sitting down at scheduled times for scheduled amounts of time and actually doing the work of writing. It is the same inspiration used by a cobbler to make a shoe, or a carpenter to make a chair.

 

Writing is not accomplished by inspiration. It is accomplished by not making excuses to not accomplish it.

 

Let me add one more rule to my list of ten rules. This is the Eleventh Commandment, the unwritten rule:

 

11. When you get a rejection slip, be thankful.

 

Yes, you heard me. Not only are you NOT to take it personally, you are to have thanks and gratitude in your heart for getting rejected.

 

Rejection slips come in three grades: (1) impersonal form letters (2) form letters with specific reasons for rejection (3) personal notes from the editor explaining the rejection.

 

You are to be thankful for getting an impersonal form letter because it means one more rejection slip of the one hundred or two hundred you must collect before you make your first sale has been checked off. This means that your manuscript, which has been sitting on his desk for seven months, is now free to be submitted to another editor, perhaps even to that one special editor which God or Fate or Blind Chance or the Seldon Plan of History (take your pick) had intended from the first to be the place where your manuscript would find its home. It means a fresh chance, another turn of the Wheel of Fortune. 

 

You are to be thankful for getting form letters with specific rejection reasons because you can use this information to improve the story or improve your sales pitch, and because there is no other place in the universe you can get this information.

 

You are to be thankful for personal notes from the editor explaining the rejection, because this means you have graduated to the rank of being a real writer, even if you have yet to sell a single word of your art, because editors do not take the time to explain themselves to rank amateurs. It means you are good enough to make the sale, and you just so happen not to have made it this time. It is encouragement.

 

The main reason why you are to be thankful and grateful for rejection slips rather than bitter and insulted is that professionals are thankful. Above all, you are thankful Fate has allowed you even a slender chance at entering a profession made of wonder. You get to write down daydreams and people pay you money for it. A few blows to the ego are a small price to pay, and are probably good for improving your character anyway.

 

If you take things personally, your professional life will be purgatory. 

 

Writers know writing is the best profession in the world, and they are grateful for all it, good and bad alike, rejections and sales alike. That is what makes them professionals.

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88 thoughts on “Wright’s Writing Corner: John C. Wright’s Insights On Writing

  1. Follow up Question

    Just to clarify a point. Someone asked me how seriously to take 7 and 9. Should he send out a truly bad first draft manuscript where the plot makes no sense rather than rewrite it?

    Like all rules, they apply only in certain cases. If your manuscript is truly bad or not finished it needs to be rewritten.

    My rules did not say when and how often you should rewrite. That is because there is and can be no general rule about this: it is a judgment call. (Heinlein suggested never rewriting; but he had a knack for writing a good first draft, and an approach that lent itself to loose-jointed plots. A writer with no such knack should rewrite several drafts, until everything is clean and polished.)

    I myself just lost about two years of writing time, since I had to throw away 500 pages of material I cannot use and had to reoutline my entire next trilogy.

    Rule 7 and 9 boil down to saying ‘don’t be a perfectionist’ — but what I should have also said, and did not, is don’t be a hack either.

    Don’t deliberately, or through lack of commitment, try to sell material that is not workmanlike. Be professional about it.

  2. Follow up Question

    Just to clarify a point. Someone asked me how seriously to take 7 and 9. Should he send out a truly bad first draft manuscript where the plot makes no sense rather than rewrite it?

    Like all rules, they apply only in certain cases. If your manuscript is truly bad or not finished it needs to be rewritten.

    My rules did not say when and how often you should rewrite. That is because there is and can be no general rule about this: it is a judgment call. (Heinlein suggested never rewriting; but he had a knack for writing a good first draft, and an approach that lent itself to loose-jointed plots. A writer with no such knack should rewrite several drafts, until everything is clean and polished.)

    I myself just lost about two years of writing time, since I had to throw away 500 pages of material I cannot use and had to reoutline my entire next trilogy.

    Rule 7 and 9 boil down to saying ‘don’t be a perfectionist’ — but what I should have also said, and did not, is don’t be a hack either.

    Don’t deliberately, or through lack of commitment, try to sell material that is not workmanlike. Be professional about it.

  3. English has a word for the indeterminate case — he

    “I would argue that using he or she interspersed throughout an article…”

    Except that this would be grammatically incorrect, as well as misleading. The word “he” (look in any good dictionary) is the pronoun for the indeterminate case. When the sex of the antecedent is indeterminate, you use “he.” The word “she” does not take that meaning.

    While this admits of some ambiguity, so do words like “fox” and “dog.” We use fox at times to mean either fox or vixen; we use dog at times to mean either dog or bitch. (Unlike “cat”, which has a specific male-only word “Tom”.)

    The one and only one time I saw someone deliberately using the female pronoun in the indeterminate case was, oddly enough, a set of rules for a roleplaying game.

    The player (regardless) was always called “he” and the umpire (regardless) was always called “she”: this allowed the writer to write sentences like “For spot checks, she rolls the dice but does not show him the result” — and the reader knew exactly who was doing what without having to spell it out.

    I thought it was a great idea, because it helped rather than hindered communication.

    I liked it, because it was, for once, not a case of politicizing or polluting the language.

    In all other cases, you have the problem that using the word “she” to mean “he or she” jars the reader out of the flow of words.

    It is jarring because only partisans of political correctness embrace this error, and only within the last few years. So it has the following strikes against it:

    1. It is a faddish. Whether it lasts or not, it will date your writing.

    2. It is partisan. It will offend those who are not devoted to a Progressive political party. It certainly offends me. If you are using bad grammar to avoid offending feminists, keep in mind you might offend grammarians.

    3. It is incorrect, or, at least, nonstandard. It will make educated people think you ain’t got no good English. It sounds bad to a properly-trained ear.

    4. It is controversial. I often put aside books that use PC phrases because such use signals that the writer is not willing to be polite, honest, and neutral: he is taking a sides, and, in my case, he takes the opposing side.

    5. It is manipulative. PC is based on the theory that words control minds. The theory is false, but even if true, I resent the pious insincerity involved. I resent the propagandist agenda. The reason why it is called “politically correct” is because it is factually incorrect. It is language used for a political purpose rather than a communication purpose.

    I would strongly recommend avoiding this neologism, unless you are writing only for a narrow audience, or unless you don’t give a hoot whom you offend.

  4. Re: Just to be safe, Jagi

    This is true–one only has to compare his LJ posts now with those of several years ago to see it.

    I did bury it for a reason, yet it made me laugh: Fair or not I still think of John as the O. Henry of SF&F

  5. how to be a writer

    Writers about to commit to John’s Ten Commandments might be interested in Narrative Magazine. It’s an on-line literary magazine committed to publishing worthwhile writing. They publish fiction, non-fiction, memoir, essays, also comics and graphic stories, from established as well as new authors. But more to the point, they have frequent writing contests open to all–their “spring” story contest currently is underway with a July 31 submission deadline. Take a look. http://www.narrativemagazine.com/

  6. how to be a writer

    Writers about to commit to John’s Ten Commandments might be interested in Narrative Magazine. It’s an on-line literary magazine committed to publishing worthwhile writing. They publish fiction, non-fiction, memoir, essays, also comics and graphic stories, from established as well as new authors. But more to the point, they have frequent writing contests open to all–their “spring” story contest currently is underway with a July 31 submission deadline. Take a look. http://www.narrativemagazine.com/

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