The Secret to Success in Writing

This is what you've been waiting for. After 551 posts, we have reached the point where I offer the big reveal on how to find success as a writer. I have poured over 275,000 words into this blog, which is like three books-worth of talking about how to avoid the passive voice and way too much about poetry, but it feels like the right time to talk about successful writing. And I will preface this with three profound claims. First, this applies toward everyone. Second, it is in fact very difficult to achieve. Third and most important, the answer will leave you wildly disappointed.

You see, for all that it's worth, successful writing is sort of a Shaggy Dog story. Your journey to becoming a successful writer at one point or another will go in a lot of directions, take you to plenty of places both useful and useless, and get you to do things that may or may not improve your skills. This journey, however, is the entire point. Each step brings with it its own lessons, be they how to improve yourself or a warning about what not to do. Quite often, however, you will have no clue what the lesson means at any given moment, and often they will seem useless at the time you are experiencing them.

There's an art-school exercise that talented students often have to go through, which is something like this: Get out your pencil and sketch pad, and practice drawing circles. Not ovals, not roundish, egg-shaped spheroids, but circles that are just as geometrically accurate as can be. Big ones, small ones, you draw them to the point of perfection. If there's one exercise that will drive the young, energetic, creative-types utterly mad, it's the circle exercise. They want to churn out portraits, placing their burning passions onto to pad, on easels and across canvasses, and not sit there drawing a bunch of damn circles. And yet that's the point. The budding artist learns the motions to portray exactly what is needed, to skillfully translate an image to paper. Once they have control, those things they want to sketch and paint become that much easier because now there's discipline behind the translation of their passion.

When I first learned about writing in school, I learned about the importance of description, and we wrote descriptive paragraphs where we would take the most simple object and write everything we could about it. Every sensory detail about, say, an apple, got thrown into these paragraphs. Did any of this writing amount to anything? No. Would any of these paragraphs be useful? Only for getting a grade. I wondered why we did these things. It didn't make sense. After all, when we read great literature, they never described the fruit, so why were we doing that? Many years later, I realized it was not just practice in thinking of things descriptively, but learning when and how to really fill a page with just a few perfect words. I no longer needed a paragraph to describe an apple because I now knew the one part worth describing - or when to not worry about it.

Now, lastly comes the part of reaching your goal of success. I was asked recently, "What do I need to become a successful writer?" My answer was simple. "You need to know what you consider success to be, then do everything you need to get yourself there. If your idea of success is writing down your life story, then start writing. If you want to sell a million copies of something to consider yourself successful, then start learning technique, style, and read everything any famous author has ever written about writing - then apply it. If you want to be a success, define what will make you happily successful then fill in the blanks that will get you there."

Yes, the person was wildly disappointed. However, they checked out Stephen King's On Writing from the library and started reading, so they are on their way.