Becoming a Published Author by Evan Swensen

Author:Evan Swensen [Swensen, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781594333415
Google: dNuHAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Publication Consultants
Published: 2013-07-05T02:37:48+00:00

The Hardest Job You Ever Love

Steven C. Levi

Perhaps the most important thing to say about writing is that if you don’t love it, don’t start. It is a long and lonely road and you are not going to die a millionaire. But it will be the hardest job you will ever love.

Getting published is really a three-step process with the first one being the hardest. That first step is to have something to say. While this may seem obvious, a lot of writers seem to have missed that first step. Now, admittedly, sometimes it is on purpose. If you want to sell a mystery novel you’d better have a murder as close to the front of the book as possible. But then again, if you want to write genre all you have to do is know how to type. Quality books start with quality ideas. Personally, I believe that if I do not have something new or different to say I’m wasting my time as a writer. And I’m doing more than wasting the readers’ time. I’m discouraging them from looking at my other books. I want readers to know that every book I write is different from every other book on the market—and different from the last one of my books that they read.

As an example, my mysteries are impossible crimes. These are crimes where you cannot figure out how the bad guys did what they did. This gives my novels an extra dimension. Not only does the detective have to solve the crime, he has to do it while he is figuring out how the impossible crime occurred in the first place. In Heinz Noonan and the Empty Aircraft a plane leaves Seattle with 245 passengers and a crew of 12. When the plane lands in Anchorage it is empty–and the bad guys want $25 million in precious stones for the release of the passengers and crew. Now the detective has to deal with the payoff, figure out how 257 people can vanish into thin air and, at the same time, stop the bad guys from getting away with it.

The second part of the writing process is the most fun: the first draft. That’s the l-o-n-g moment of discovery. You will get into the book and it will begin to write itself. If you are working on a novel, the characters will generate their own conversations and while you may believe you have a plot line, don’t count on following it. Follow where your characters lead. The same is true in nonfiction except that you are following facts. I have yet to do a nonfiction book where I knew when I started where I was going to end up. I went where the facts led.

The last part of the writing process is what I call “the grind.” You have to edit and revise, edit and revise, edit and revise, edit and revise, edit and revise until you are sick to death of the book. You put it aside and, a few months later, you edit and revise, revise and edit, and edit and revise.

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