On Writing. (To steal Stephen King's title...)

I've been doing quite a lot of reading lately. All of it fully and completely for my own utter amusement, even. It's a big change from college.

I have, also, been doing a proportionately large amount of writing, as well. The combination of these two well-matched pasttimes has led me to a lot of pondering and a lot of digression. A question I just now stumbled into, though, has caught my little fancy, so I thought I would use a public forum to attempt to suss out some sort of answer.

What makes a writer successful in the worldly sense? Further, what is the difference between someone who scrawls magnificence on a page and never gets published and someone who owns an entire shelf at Borders?

I have a few ideas, and so here they are.

Talent. While this may seem to be a given, there is something to be said for it. Granted, some completely talentless morons grace our sacred shelves, but they fall into the next category of people who have...

Connections. Sad, but true. Writing is part of the entertainment business, and like any field in the entertainment business, a good portion is networking and who you know. Thankfully, it isn't entirely necessary to know that all-star author to get a book deal with a good publishing house, but it helps. If someone has the clout, they can get even the biggest POS*** manuscript on the planet read at the very least.

Persistence. Yeah. Stephen King (who I quoted in my title) used to nail every single rejection slip he got on his wall. And yes, he really did get rejected. A lot. It's part of the process. If you want to get published and you have one or the other of the first two qualities, you still will need persistence. Keep on trucking.

Consistency. As I've been thinking about it, this little word--or medium sized word, rather--is absolutely vital for writers with any hope of getting their name in print. Some people have maybe one great effort in them. The best thing you can do to help yourself is to learn to write consistently. Plots that follow logically and rise and fall when they ought to. If you're writing a series, prove you can keep up the pace in multiple books with the same characters. If you write shorter things, prove you can write several very different short stories or articles and do it well. Most publishers want authors or writers who can make them money. If you can prove yourself able to draw in a consistent audience, you'll prove yourself valuable to them, and you'll make money, too.

Humor. Can you laugh at yourself? You sure as hell better. Writers face some of the toughest parts of emotional battles all the time. As humans, we naturally avoid both rejection and criticism. Why? Well, it just hurts so damn much. Writers have to force themselves to do the opposite of what our emotions lean toward. We have to take rejection and criticism in stride, using it to make our writing better and our selves stronger. In theory, it'll pay off in the end.

There are a lot of other things that go into being a sucessful writer, but really, those five are pretty central. If you have some modicum of talent, can network yourself into some good connections, can keep trying, if you can write well on a consistent basis, and if you can do it all with your tongue firmly placed in your cheek, you probably have a decent chance of getting yourself on the shelves or in the journals or magazines, albeit quite possibly with a lisp.

Keep it light. Keep it good. Just keep swimming. You can do it.

***POS: noun. Technical abbreviation--Piece Of Shit