The Ugly Truth About Making A Living From Writing
Three truths you must face to write anything worth reading
There’s this joke among writers. When we go to parties, we often get introduced to people with skill-intensive, clinical jobs that require years of schooling and certifications. For example, a surgeon. When we tell these people what we do for a living they often say, “oh, I’ve thought of writing a book.” We respond with, “I’ve thought of performing surgery.”
It’s funny because it’s true. People think writing is easy because they do it all the time in emails and work reports. But I’m sure the average surgeon’s writing looks about as good as her or his patient would look if they gave me the scalpel.
The process of writing isn’t just long and hard — requiring thousands of hours of work to see incremental improvements — but you’ll also do a lot of work for nothing. To make a decent career out of writing you have to write too much, too often, and be OK with an editor deleting thousands of your words at once. Most drafts can be half as long.
One hundred seventy-five thousand six hundred fifty-four words. That’s the length of the first draft of my new book, The Comfort Crisis. The contract with my publisher asked for 85,000 words. Watching my editor take untold hours of work out back and shoot…