The Authorship Game

Over coffee this morning, I met a very charming woman who wants to write a memoir about synchronicity  (causally unrelated events that have occurred together in a meaningful way in her life) and advised her, as I do everyone who wants to try her hand at the game, to do the following:

1. Write at the same time every day, seven days a week. This is not to bolster your strength of will as Natalie Goldberg suggests, but to train your subconscious, which is where your work lives before you transcribe it to the page.
2. Use a good word processing program, like Framemaker, so that you can easily convert your text to pdf’s. Microsoft Word is awful, because it assumes too much and goes off adding formatting behind the scenes. Some people only learn this the hard way, as I did.
3. Choose the most evocative and emotionally touching scene to start with. There is no need to start at the beginning. Besides, you’re going to revise your piece a thousand times before you’re finished.
4. When you’re ready to show your work, get a second opinion from someone objective whom you trust. Relatives, spouses, and friends make very bad critics, because they almost always like what you’ve done or don’t have the stomach to tell you the truth.
5. Make contacts and network, network, network with other writers, editors, and anyone in the literary scene.  I don’t bother doing this myself, but you should!
6. If agents hate your work (and most of them will), you can always publish your work on your own. Simply go to BookMobile or some place similar. (This is why good pdf’s are necessary.)
7. In Minnesota, be sure to submit your work to the Minnesota Book Awards. Like the agents, they will probably hate your work, but you never know. Perhaps you’ll run into an enlightened group of reviewers.
8. Finally, read everything you can get your hands on. A writer who doesn’t read is dead from the start.

And there you have it. Your path to success (or oblivion, if the gods are against you).