Just Write by James Scott Bell

Author:James Scott Bell [Bell, James Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2016-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

From Failure to Success in Writing

As a young man I found Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling helpful. It’s considered a classic of the sales-training genre. Lots of folks have given the book props for helping them get ahead in other professions, too.

The title is also apt because I definitely thought myself a failure as a writer when I was in my twenties. The stuff I wrote didn’t work the way I wanted it to, and I was told that’s because you have to be born a writer. You can’t learn how to do it.

For ten years or so I accepted that I would never make it in this business.

So I did some other things. I moved to New York to pursue an acting career. I started doing off Broadway, Shakespeare, avant-garde. But after a while I wondered why I wasn’t being offered a starring role in a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark (they gave it to some guy named Ford).

During a visit back to L.A., I met this gorgeous actress at a party. Knowing I’d be returning to New York soon, I only waited two-and-a-half weeks to ask her to marry me.

Shockingly, she said yes.

After we were married, I decided it might be a good idea for us to have one steady paycheck. Since Cindy was the more talented of the two of us, she continued with her stage work while I applied to law school.

In my third year at USC Law I interviewed with a big firm with offices in Beverly Hills.

Shockingly, they hired me.

Later on I opened my own office. I then found out I had to be a businessman, too. I had to learn entrepreneurial principles. So I started to read books on business, and one of these was Bettger’s.

A few years went by and the desire to write, which had burned in me since I read Tarzan of the Apes as a kid, came back to me. Bettger’s principles helped me along that path, too.

Frank Bettger was a former big-league ballplayer who went into the insurance game. After initial failures he started wondering if he really had what it took to be a good salesman. He decided to find out what others did. He began to apply a set of practices that helped get him to the top.

The first of these practices was enthusiasm. To sell successfully, you have to be enthusiastic about your product, your prospects, and life itself. You need to exude joy, because the alternative is gloom, and gloom doesn’t sell.

Bettger noticed that even if he didn’t feel enthusiastic, he could still act enthusiastic, and soon enough the feeling came tagging right along.

When I discovered you really can learn the craft, I got as excited as a man in the ocean who finds a plank to hang on to and then spots a lush island in the distance. It was enough to infuse joy and hope into my writing, and those two things alone started to improve it.

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