Once again I am participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which means I’m working on getting my own writing done in support of the current workshop participants.
If you want to donate to Clarion West in support of me, you can do it here on my fundraising page.
I do this every year in part as a way of donating to Clarion West — I always support myself and usually contribute in the name of a couple of other people — but I am not good at banging the drum for fundraising.
At the same time, I am well aware that in this capitalist society people have to do something to bring in money, and that includes nonprofits and artists. So I participate and mention it and hope some people get inspired to send them a few bucks.
There are many things I hope to get better at before I shuffle off this mortal coil, but fundraising isn’t on the list.
Writing better is, though, and the only way I know to get better at writing is to do more of it in a thoughtful way. So I am working on the sequel to my 2021 novel For the Good of the Realm and hope that the Write-a-thon process will help me do that.
Supporting Clarion West brings me to the issue of writing workshops, classes, and the like. Some people find these things incredibly useful; some do not. For me, Clarion West was exactly what I needed when I did it. It made me take my writing seriously in a way that I had never done before.
I’m very glad I did it, so I continue to support it because I know it will be useful to some other people as well. And I like the way Clarion West has evolved and continues to grow.
But the thing about being a writer is that there is no such thing as a school of writing. Yes, of course, you can get an MFA or other degree if you want to. It may even be the right choice for you.
But you don’t have to.
Even if your ultimate goal is fiction, you can get degrees in journalism or technical writing, which can be very useful along the way.
But you don’t have to.
Attending workshops like Clarion West that put you in a position where you focus exclusively on doing your writing and critiquing that of others for a period of time can be very valuable. (It was for me.)
But you don’t have to.
Various writing workshops, seminars, critique groups, retreats — there are all kinds out there — work well for some people. You can go to those.
But you don’t have to.
There is only one thing you must do to be a writer:
Write.
If you want to be a published writer, there’s one more thing: Put your work out there to be read — either submit it to publishers or publish it yourself.
That’s it. You don’t have to have a degree of any kind. You don’t even have to finish high school.
There are a few more things you need to do to be a good writer.
- Read a lot. Read the kind of books or stories or poems you want to write and read lots of other things.
- Develop some mastery over the language you’re writing in. This involves learning how it’s structured, which includes grammar but goes much further than that.
- Examine what you’ve written and think deeply about how you can make it better.
If you want to get published, there are a couple of other things you need to do.
- Submit your work.
- Don’t self-reject.
- Persevere.
I am not the person to ask about how to make a living out of your work, much less how to get rich. I ended up with a good day job as a legal journalist; my fiction has never paid any serious bills.
At this point, all I’m interested in is doing the best writing I possibly can and getting it out there for others to read. If it makes any money or wins any prizes, great, but I’m not focused on that.
I will admit to hoping that some of it outlives me.