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How to become a writer

A visitor to this site, age 13, asked today how to get into writing (as others have asked in the past), wondering how somebody gets a column published. Here's how I answered:

Nobody gives you a column to write. You get one for yourself.

I find the best way to get published, or get involved in the industry, is to volunteer somewhere. I started with my high school annual and student newspaper, and moved on to similar publications at university. Eventually, after having done a lot of writing and editing for free, I managed to find a summer job doing it, and kept on that way until it's what I do today. At every stage I gained skills, and that helped me move on.

Another approach (and you can and should do both) is to volunteer as an intern at a local magazine, book publisher, or community newspaper. (I don't know where you live, but there must be something in your area.) They often need help with proofreading and fact checking, and while doing that doesn't get you published yourself, it helps you develop your editorial skills -- something every writer needs.

Take pride in your work.

You must learn to be merciless with yourself. Everyone makes mistakes in spelling, grammar, style, and punctuation, but if you manage to let one or more slip through when you submit something for publication, you should be embarrassed about it -- just as master woodworkers would be to see their cabinets in a store with scratches or a misaligned hinge. A writer is self-critical, and you must learn to find the mistakes in your drafts and eliminate them. It's a rare writer who is so stupendous that editors will forgive his or her sloppiness.

Learn to have an editor's eye for everything.

You should spell-check and read over everything you write, even e-mails. Strive to have even your least formal writing be the best it could be. The discipline will pay off down the road when you don't have to think about it intensively on the job.

Look at writing around you and see if you could improve it. How would you write a newspaper headline differently? Would a sign be easier to understand another way? Is there a spelling or usage mistake in an ad in a magazine you're reading? Notice how things are written: did you ever discover that newspaper articles are written so that you can chop off sentences or paragraphs from the bottom up to shorten them, and they still make sense? Magazine pieces don't tend to be that way. If you read the way a TV newscast was written on paper, it would be very different from a newspaper piece on the same subject. Why? What are the differences?

Read and write.

Read. Read read read. Find topics or areas or authors or styles you like, and try to understand why you like them. Learn to refine your writing, to re-read it and examine it with a fresh eye, to remove unnecessary words, and to make your meaning clear. The people who get published are those who write well. If you love to write, be good at it and you can find something to do with that skill.

Write. Write write write. No writing is ever wasted. If you've written two books, that's great, even if they never get published. Understand and accept that they probably never will, in fact -- how many of the world's most famous writers had anything published in their mid-teens? Or their first two tries as an adult? Not many. But that doesn't mean the work wasn't worth doing.

Everything you write teaches you to write better, especially if you look over it and improve it. If you write something and your computer crashes and you lose it, sure, scream and yell, but then try rewriting what you wrote. Chances are the second try will be better than the first one anyway.

Meet writers.

Join a local writers' organization. Try to find a writer you admire, who does what you'd like to do, and see if he or she will mentor you. Maybe learn something about another language (even badly), like Spanish, French, Russian, Latin, or Chinese. Discovering how other languages work helps you understand your own better.

Being a columnist is a sort of dream job for a writer: write about whatever you want, maybe do little or no research, and let the Letters to the Editor handle the complaints. But columnists don't get there by magic, and there are very few of them. Almost all the ones you see published have slogged their way through less glamorous writing assignments, sometimes for decades, first.

Write for real.

Find out if real writing that can get you a job -- the kind that requires research, discipline, the ability to hear and use criticism, and a willingness to write even about things you're not interested in -- is something you want to do. Could you write instructions for a microwave oven? A garden sprinkler? A kid's toy? More importantly, could you write the best ever instructions for a microwave oven? Would you be willing to try? People pay well for that.

To be a good writer, you need to love the process too. If you like words for their own sake, that will go a long way.

One more thing: I find that having a weblog is a great way to get writing out into the world every day, with minimal effort. I use Blogger and I find it to be a good service. The neat thing about weblogs is that if you write interesting, well researched, and original material, people tend to find and link to you. And there's no publisher to hassle with!

I hope I haven't been discouraging. If you can look at all the obstacles I've pointed out and say, "yeah, I'm up for that challenge," then you're looking at the right business.

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