If you’re a writer—particularly if you’re a fiction writer, or a poet (you poor thing)—you know how it feels to work your creativity to the bone for little reward.
You can change all that. All you need is a little self-deception.
The trouble with many of us writers is we set challenging and often unrealistic goals, expectations and standards with regard to our work and our financial gains related to it. We all aim to create books of Cormac McCarthy-type quality and rake in J.K. Rowling-type sales figures. And when we inevitably end up falling ridiculously short, we brood, question our talent, and seriously consider pawning our laptop and thesaurus.
There’s no need for us writers to be so hard on ourselves. Leave that to literary agents and publishers, and to readers who comment on our Amazon page after we self-publish. What we need are a few easy wins, a couple of small accomplishments, to help inspire us to keep fighting the good fight and writing the good (or at least mediocre) write.
What we need is to lower the bar a bit.
With that in mind, following are some slightly less lofty goals, expectations and standards to shoot for going forward:
Write one hundred words a day. Stop being so ridiculously ambitious with your one thousand or two thousand words-a-day goal. All that does is leave you burnt out and disappointed. Now, a hundred words a day … that’s something you could do in your sleep, leaving you with a lot more time during the day to get drunk in celebration of your achievement.
Receive personalized rejection notices. Enough with your pipe dream of having a literary agent tell you she/he is interested in your novel. Just be happy when you get a rejection notice that actually includes your full name and the title of your book that will never get representation. Most agents these days either completely ignore queries or reject them with a form letter, so yeah, you’d better be proud when you get personally spurned. It means you’ve almost come close to making it.
No more than one typo… per page. With all the distractions of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Tinder, nobody can expect a writer to write totally clean copy, or even to catch their grammatical and spelling errors during the editing process. If you can keep your typos down to just one per manuscript page, you deserve a pat on the back and have earned the right to continue wasting valuable time on social media and dating apps.
Sell more than one copy the first week. All your friends and relatives and people you corner at gatherings and the grocery store will express tremendous interest in your novel, but only .001 percent of them will actually buy it. Knowing this going in will save you lots of disappointment and self-harm. Now, certainly your own mother or father (though probably not both) will buy your book immediately after it becomes available, so selling one copy the first week is nothing to cheer about. However, if another human being (and no, you don’t count) purchases your book the first week, you’re allowed to pretend to be proud. If five or more people buy your book the first week, you’re allowed to actually be proud.
Get two legitimate reviews on Amazon. Too many authors—especially newbies—eagerly check their Amazon page for rave reviews every few hours after releasing a book. First off, it’s difficult to garner a ton of reviews when only three people have read your book. Secondly, most people hate to take the time to write anything, aside from Facebook posts about their kid or how upset they are about the season finale of their favorite TV show. So waiting for a bunch of reviews to pour in is an exercise in futility. Set the bar at two reviews on Amazon (over the life of your book), and there’s a fair chance you’ll achieve your goal. Just don’t expect either of the reviews to be more than three stars. Remember, you’ve got to aim low to guarantee the illusion of success.
Win an award … of your own making. Forget about the PEN/Faulkner Award or the Man Booker Prize—those are for masters like Philip Roth and Don DeLillo or writers you’ve never heard of but who got their MFA at Brown. It’s easy to feel like a failure if you shoot only for the elite book awards. Still, winning at least some type of book award is essential to tricking yourself into thinking you’re a successful writer. That’s why I recommend vying for awards that have a minimal number of entrants, such as awards you yourself create. You’re a fiction writer, so there’s nothing wrong with winning a fictional award. Before I was lucky enough to win an Independent Publishers Award (“IPPY”) in 2015 for my novel The Exit Man, I was the proud recipient of such awards as “Best Dark Comedy About a Party Supply Store Owner Who Lives a Double Life as a Euthanasia Specialist” and “The Greg Levin Lifetime Achievement Award For Literary Brilliance.” Not to brag.
Feel free to leave a comment below. My goal used to be to get ten comments per blog post; now I’m following my own advice and shooting for one.
It’s no secret I love dark humor. I read it. I watch it. I write it. I live it. Well, we ALL live it. I mean, what’s darker and funnier than being the only animals totally conscious of the fact they are definitely going to die one day? Hilarious.
And since we’re all definitely going to die one day, I won’t waste any more of your time on a long intro. Following are my favorite lines from my favorite authors who take their comedy black with no cream or sugar:
Chuck Palahniuk
“At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.” (Fight Club)
“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” (Fight Club)
“Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.” (Fight Club)
“I don't want to die without any scars.” (Fight Club)
“It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.” (Survivor)
“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.” (Survivor)
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” (Invisible Monsters)
“In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.” (Rant)
“What if reality is nothing but some disease?” (Rant)
Kurt Vonnegut
“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.” (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.” (Breakfast of Champions)
“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.”
(Breakfast of Champions)
"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything." (Cat's Cradle)
"All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental." (Timequake)
Bret Easton Ellis
“I'm into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends.” (American Psycho)
“Disintegration – I'm taking it in stride.” (American Psycho)
“There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.” (American Psycho)
“I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about.” (Less Than Zero)
“And as the elevator descends, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even farther down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst.” (Less Than Zero)
“I only had sex with her because I'm in love with you.” (The Rules of Attraction)
Vladimir Nabokov
“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” (Lolita)
“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.” (Lolita)
“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece” (Lolita)
“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.” (Pale Fire)
“I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.” (Pale Fire)
“Some people – and I am one of them – hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.” (Pnin)
Joseph Heller
“Be glad you're even alive. Be furious you're going to die.” (Catch-22)
“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.” (Catch-22)
“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.” (Catch-22)
“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.” (Catch-22)
“I frequently feel I'm being taken advantage of merely because I'm asked to do the work I'm paid to do.” (Something Happened)
“I know at last what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up I want to be a little boy.” (Something Happened)
And sorry folks, I just couldn’t resist the opportunity for a little self-promotion…
Greg Levin
"Suicide should come with a warning label: 'Do not try this alone.'" (The Exit Man)
“One week I’m helping to end a life, the next I’m stepping in to save one. Seemingly dichotomous acts, but actually one in the same.” (The Exit Man)
“She had become an integral part of my life – just not the part with all the death.” (The Exit Man)
“It’s best to discuss mass murder behind closed doors, and Jenna lived the closest.” (Sick to Death – available soon!)
“Learning he might not be dying really threw a wrench into Gage’s plans. He didn’t see how he could go on killing if there was a chance he’d go on living.” (Sick to Death)
“He never praised me whenever I’d hit a home run in little league, but I kill a few people and all of the sudden I’m his idol.” (Sick to Death)
Feel free to join in on the fun and post one or two of YOUR favorite lines from a book of dark and/or comedic fiction. Or hell, ANY kind of book. (Super-extra bonus points if it’s from one of MY books.)
As a writer, nothing scares me more than being unoriginal. Death comes in a close second. So you can imagine how frightened I am of dying an unoriginal death.
I try not to think too much about death – unless I’m awake. When I do, I like to fantasize about the most honorable and worthwhile ways for a writer to go out. I’m dying to share them with you:
Getting trampled by obsessed fans at a book signing. Painful and possibly bloody, yes, but what a way to finish – knowing you were violently adored by your readers. Ideally, the writer would be in their eighties or nineties when the trampling occurs. That way there would be less suffering not only for the writer (due to their already diminished physical condition), but also for the fans, who could take solace in the fact they didn’t cut short a brilliant and burgeoning career. For example, it would be sort of cool if Tom Wolfe (85 years old next week) got trampled by fans during a book signing, but rather lamentable if Gillian Flynn (45 years old) did.
Suffering a heart attack from the excitement of having just written the final line of a great (or even just a good) novel. Can you say “guaranteed best seller?” That’s what a writer who perished in this manner would have on their cold, dead hands. Sure, as the recently deceased writer, it would suck to not be able to experience the hype and hoopla surrounding the book, but then there wouldn’t be said hype and hoopla without the aforementioned dying. In order to achieve the level of fame we’re talking about here, a perfectly timed death is just something the writer would have to live with.
Spontaneously combusting during a bout of excessive creativity. There’s nothing like being in the “writing zone,” where all your synapses are firing and every sentence pouring onto the page is a diamond. The trouble is it’s impossible to remain in the zone for more than a few hours, and the fall from such dizzying artistic heights is painful. What writer wouldn’t love to suddenly burst into a ball of flames before such a plummet could occur? To literally blow up from the blistering heat of their own words and imagination. I’m not saying I’ve ever approached 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s cremation hot) while writing, but I have purchased a fire-retardant laptop just in case. I mean, what a shame it would be to lose whatever I was working on at the time of combustion.
Dying of shock after receiving an acceptance notice from a literary agent. It’s getting harder and harder to land a lit agent these days, so getting an acceptance notice from one is a huge deal worthy of celebration and cardiac arrest. For most writers, everything that comes after finding an agent is anticlimactic – a lackluster publishing deal, disappointing sales, a forgotten book – so they shouldn’t feel bad at all if they die right after finding out they’ve found representation. It’s going out on a high note.
Getting murdered by a fan furious over the fact you killed off one of their favorite characters. This may not seem like the most original one on the list due to Stephen King’s Misery, but Misery was just fiction (not to mention the writer in the story was able to avoid being killed). In real life, if your writing is so infectious it compels a reader to go all Kathy Bates on you, it means you have achieved the status of master storyteller, and your death will be the envy of all authors. (Or it may just mean your books attract complete whackjobs, which is still pretty cool.)
Getting murdered by a famous author jealous of your sudden emergence. As a writer, the only thing better than getting killed by a fan is getting killed by one of your favorite authors. It means you’ve made it. Famous writers like to act supportive of newbies, but if they see a talented up-and-comer blast onto the scene and threaten their stronghold on the bestseller list, there will be blood. Or at least there should be. Cold-blooded competition and murder would make the literary world a lot more interesting to the general public. It would also be a great way for emerging writers to meet famous authors. Right now Chuck Palahniuk won’t even respond to my Facebook messages, but I bet once my Amazon ranking starts to creep up on his, he’ll be challenging me to a death match in an underground fight club somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. And that’s just the kind of demise I need to REALLY kick my career into high gear.
What do YOU think is a great way for a writer to die? Or if that makes you uncomfortable, what do you think is an AWFUL way for a writer to die? Remember, there is no wrong answer.
We writers love to get together and complain – either in person, online, or in our dreams while napping. In our defense, there’s a lot to complain about if you’re a writer. It’s the main reason I got into the writing biz to begin with. “I get to work in my underwear AND whine and whinge incessantly? I’m in!”
Nevertheless, all complaining and no play makes Jack a dull boy. That’s why I’ve decided to share some unique solutions to common author problems and issues. If you are a writer and don’t like my solutions, feel free to complain. I’d expect nothing less.
Finding time to write. So you have a full-time job and kids to take care of, and you rarely get more than a couple of hours a week to work on your manuscript. What should you do? Simple – quit your job and hire a nanny. I know what you’re thinking, “How can I afford a nanny if I don’t have a job?” I have no idea – that’s for you to figure out. You’ll need to get creative, which should be easy if you truly are a writer. You might consider winning the lottery or becoming the head of a crystal meth empire.
Now, if quitting your job simply isn’t a real option for you, you could try keeping your job and pretending to work in your cubicle while secretly typing away at your novel. I did it for years. The same goes for the nanny thing. If getting one isn’t feasible, you could try keeping your kids and pretending to look after them while secretly writing your novel.
Other solid options for finding time to write include:
Abusing amphetamines so that you can create wildly imaginative prose every night while everyone else is sleeping.
Behaving like a total a-hole so that colleagues, family members and friends leave you the hell alone with your manuscript.
Moving to Croatia and getting pregnant right after securing a job. (You’ll get one full year of maternity leave while earning 100-percent of your salary.)
Overcoming writer’s block. Charles Bukowski said the best way to overcome writer’s block is to write about it. But Bukowski was a drunk of mythical proportions and was talking out of his ass when he said that. I, on the other hand, am a drunk of mere ordinary proportions, so you’re better off listening to me. And I say the best way to overcome writer’s block is to get incarcerated. The only things to do in prison are lift weights, observe colorful/dangerous characters, and write. Once you do a few months at County, you’ll learn how to do all three of the aforementioned activities at once.
The trouble is, to get into prison you have to commit a crime. Be sure to pick one that’s not so bad that you get locked up for years with murderers. Granted, real-life murderers are great for basing characters off of, but a long sentence will hinder your ability to tweet about your book once it’s out. By the same token, you don’t want your crime to be so light that you get locked up for mere weeks with corporate executives. Boring, and not enough time to produce a decent manuscript.
Self-medicating without diminishing your craft. For centuries writers have strived to achieve the right balance of intoxication and readability. Too much drinking and drugs, and you run the risk of writing something as unreadable as Finnegan’s Wake. Too little drinking and drugs, and you run the risk of dealing with rejection notifications while sober.
I recommend following Hemingway’s oft-cited advice, “Write drunk, edit sober.” (But first get rid of any shotguns that may be lying around.) You’ll know you’ve had just enough to drink (or taken just the right dosage) when you feel a slight sense of euphoria and power and are able to melt into your story and feel your characters. In contrast, you’ll know you’ve overdone it a bit when you find yourself naked in a bus stop bathroom insisting you are one of your characters. It may take some trial and error until you get it just right.
Finding an agent. Don’t waste any more time cold-querying literary agents in hopes of gaining representation. Experts agree the best way to land an agent is to be referred to one by one of their existing clients.
So it’s time for you to start sleeping around with successful authors.
Don’t worry, this is easier done than said. All you need to do is go to a lot of book signings and, when it’s your turn to have the author sign your copy, tell him or her they are the reason you write, that you feel they rank up there with the finest literary minds in history, and that you are a master of tantric sex.
If you happen to have a spouse or significant other who frowns against such ploys, then maybe you need to leave them for someone a little more supportive of your writing career.
Getting people (who aren’t related to you) to buy your book. There are authors who say they are not concerned with book sales. These writers are true artists. Bullshit artists. Everyone with a book wants it to sell and will try nearly anything to make that happen.
The following tactics have done wonders for getting people outside of my immediate family to buy my books:
Hiring a sign-spinner to stand outside of Barnes & Noble dressed as my front cover.
Announcing on social media that I’m holding a puppy hostage until five thousand copies of my novel have sold.
Paying a publicist $20,000 to ensure I sell at least half that amount in books.
Posting a Photoshopped picture of Oprah holding a copy of my novel.
Writing a book that doesn’t totally suck. (Though evidence has shown that writing one that DOES totally suck might be even better for sales.)
If you have an author problem you’d like me to address, feel free to share it in the Comments section below. If I am your author problem, kindly keep that to yourself.
After spending ten months with my main characters – living inside their heads (and they inside mine), experiencing their fear and excitement and joy and sorrow – it’s over. The last page has been written. All I can do is look back and remember.
Okay, and edit.
Still, going through my manuscript and making tweaks here and there isn’t the same as hanging out with my characters in real time. It’s like going to visit a former lover soon after a breakup. You can take back some things you said, and you can say some things you should have said the first time around, and it definitely helps, but deep down you already know your magic time together is over.
I miss how my protagonist used to wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me something vital. I miss sitting down with him and figuring out how the hell we were going to get him where he needed to go. Do what he needed to do. Overcome what he needed to overcome.
I miss putting him through hell in order to save him.
And I miss his friends. His enemies, too. I miss the whole story. Creating it, living it.
They say the best way to get over a lost love is to find a new one. And I have. I’ve already started working on my next novel. In fact, I’d started fooling around with it even before I finished my last one. So I guess you could say I was unfaithful. But in my defense, I’ve always had an unspoken open relationship with my novels. That said, it is a bit one-sided; I’m allowed to see other stories, but my stories aren’t allowed to see other authors.
Even though I have met another manuscript, the pain of having finished my last one still lingers. I keep seeing the faces and hearing the voices of the characters I’ve come to know so well. Sometimes I even call out their names when I’m getting busy with my new novel, which is awkward for everyone involved.
I realize that, in time, I will come to love my new characters as much as I do my older, more fully developed ones. And that helps to take some of the pain away. But I also know one day in the not-too-distant future I’ll have to say goodbye to those new characters, too. And then I’ll be right back where I am now. Missing my beloved imaginary friends. Wondering what they’re up to. Hoping they’ll somehow be able to move on without me. And I without them.
NOTE: I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on when the novel I recently finished writing is actually available, which should be sometime between Spring/Summer 2016 and the winter of my discontent. Of course, you could always kill the time by picking up a copy of my LAST novel. Just saying.
