You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing John Scalzi
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You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing John Scalzi Subterranean Press © 2007 You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing Copyright © 2007 by John Scalzi. All rights reserved. First Edition ISBN 10: 1-59606-063-8 ISBN 13: 978-1-59606-063-8 Subterranean Press PO Box 190106 Burton, MI 48519 www.subterraneanpress.com Introductions and Caveat Emptors Hi there. This is a book about writing. But! It is not a book about how to write. God knows there are enough books on that particular subject, not to mention classes and workshops and Web sites and public television shows, and the thought of trying to cram another one of those books down the gullet of the public makes me want to jam my head into the nearest garbage disposal. I barely know how I write; trying to tell others how they should write seems fraught with peril. My only real advice to you in that regard is to find a nice, strenuous composition class so you don't get tripped up by the laughable mess that is English language grammar, and then write and write and write and write, and then write some more. That's what worked for me, so far as I can tell. So there: if you were looking for my advice on how to write, you're done! That was easy. Set this book down and go about your life. I look forward to reading your books. This is about everything else to do with writing, from the business of writing, to the stupid things writers do to sabotage themselves, to how writers interact with other writers, to various thoughts about the different sorts of writing out there. In short, it's about the writing life—or at the very least, my writing life, which is the one I am most qualified to discuss. The essays you'll read in this book are entries that I have written over a five year period (from 2001 to early 2006) on my personal Web site, the Whatever (http://scalzi.com/whatever). During this time I've written and/or published and/or signed contracts for ten books, wrote for newspapers and magazines, was paid to blog and write online, and wrote lots of anonymous but stupidly lucrative corporate work. It's been an interesting time in my writing life, and through all of it I've been posting my thoughts about writing (and my writing) online. Since these entries are tied in to my professional writing life to a greater or lesser extent, they tend to be practical-minded; not so much about the art of writing as the practice of it. As I say a number of places in the book, I love writing but I'm not especially romantic about it. It's groovy to talk about writing as this great thing, but my mortgage is due at the first of the month, and paying that is a great thing, too. This is off-putting to some folks; I totally understand that. This probably won't be your kind of book if these practical aspects of the writing life don't hold much interest to you. On the other hand, if you are interested in what it's like to be a full-time working writer here in the first slice of the twenty-first century, I think there'll be a lot for you here. I don't know about anyone else who writes for a living, but I've been having a hell of a lot of fun these last few years doing this job. It's a good and exciting time to be a writer, and I think that comes through. At the very least, I guarantee you that if I have managed to transmit half of what being a writer is like these days, you won't be bored reading this. * * * This book is organized very loosely into four chapters. The first chapter is actual writing advice, because even though this isn't a book on how to write, if you are writing, there's lots to say about it. The second chapter is about the writing life—I write a lot about money there. The third chapter is on writers, and mostly about writers doing stupid things. Think of this chapter largely as cautionary tales. The final chapter is about science fiction, the genre in which I wrote almost all of my fiction so far. Read it even if you don't read science fiction; a lot of what's written about there is applicable across genres. The entries in these chapters skip back and forth across time—they're arranged mostly for flow and for interest. Lots of topics will get explored but I suspect some topics will not always be explored to everyone's satisfaction—there's only so much space and so many things to cover. But I write at the Whatever on a close to daily basis—if there's something about writing you'd like to ask me, you can always drop me an e-mail ([email protected]) and maybe I'll write about it there. If I get enough questions, maybe I'll be able to crank out a sequel to this in 2010. Everyone wins. I hope you enjoy the book. Thanks for reading. —John Scalzi January 24, 2006. Dedicated to Laurence McMillin, who is not here to know; And to Daniel Mainz, who is. CHAPTER ONE: Writing Advice, or, Avoiding Real Work The John Scalzi Way I had the "I'm gonna be a writer" epiphany when I was in my first year in high school, and realized something important, which was that for me writing was easy while everything else was actual work. Someone else with more personal fortitude might have brushed aside his or her limitations and done something else with their life, but as for me I followed the path of least resistance and became a writer. Because, man, I've seen other people do real work, and I have to say: real work sucks. But now, 15 years into the whole "writing career" thing, I'm here to tell you that I was cruelly deceived by my own attempts at sloth: Turns out writing—if you actually want to make a living from it, and I do—really is actual work. Naturally when I discovered this I was appalled and dismayed, but since at the time I was too far into the writing hole to be qualified to do any other sort of work that didn't involve a price check or reading a telemarketing script (which is even more like real work than what I was doing), I had no choice but to continue . Fortunately, overall things have turned out pretty well for me so far with this writing thing I've got going. By the end of 2006 I'll have published eleven books, fiction and non-fiction both, and aside from that I'll have written just about every sort of commercial writing there is to write save for a movie script (that's a special sort of hellish endeavor I suspect I would need to start drinking in order to contemplate). So, if you're looking for advice on how to break into Hollywood: Sorry. Check with Robert McKee. I hear he's good. But as for the rest of it, here are my thoughts, in advice-like form—indeed, much of this chapter takes the form of numbered lists and bullet points, which is your assurance of quality advice. I suppose I could have gone whole hog and made this entire chapter a Powerpoint presentation. But then someone would have had to kill me. Besides, I'll save that for my series of lectures on writing at the Learning Annex. You'll come, won't you? Actually, here's a disclaimer that you won't get from the writing guy down at the Learning Annex: With this advice, your mileage may vary (I repeat this little tidbit in the entries themselves). There are in fact many, many ways to have a happy and successful writing career. This is how I did it and what I recommend others do. Some of it may work for you. Some of it may not. You're a smart person; you know what's going on in your life and your career. Take the stuff that's useful for you and use it. Kick the rest to the curb. Here we go. John Scalzi's Utterly Useless Writing Advice (October 2001, and updated since) People are always asking me for advice on how to become a writer, because they assume (ha!) that I am a successful writer. My psychological and egotistical needs being what they are, I won't argue this point. I am, in fact, a fairly successful writer, if you define success as "making a good living doing nothing but writing." I do make a good living; I don't do anything else for a living but write. (If you define success as "being Stephen King," of course, I'm a miserable freakin' failure. But let's not.) I've been a professional writer since June of 1990, when I got my first paid writing job as an intern for the San Diego Tribune, where I wrote music and concert reviews and other entertainment pieces. That was the summer before my senior year in college; when I got back to college, I wrote freelance entertainment articles for the Chicago Sun-Times.