More Girls Than Guys

More women than men:
-take creative-writing courses and workshops.
-belong to writing groups or circles.
-belong to writers' organizations or guilds.
-enter writing contests.
-go to writers' colonies.
-serve as volunteers for writers' organizations.
-win low-level writing prizes and awards.
-teach and tutor English composition.
-buy books.
-become part-time writers for some publication.
-spend time on list-servs, bulletin boards, and blogs.

More men than women:
-publish books.
-give readings.
-head literary magazines.
-head literary organizations.
-become writers-in-residence or professors of writing.
-become full-time writers for some publication.
-have agents.
-win prestigious prizes and fellowships.
-win Pulitzer prizes.
-are well-paid for their writing.

Both men and women:
-talk a lot about the books, especially the novels and memoirs, that they're going to write.
-self-publish at about the same levels.

Just noticing.

How to Kill Your Readers

Start with any of these to kill any reader's interest in your memoir:

• "My father..."
• "My mother..."
• "As a child, I..."
• "During my childhood..."
• "During my senior year in high school..."
• "I finally made the painful decision to..."
  
• "When Mother couldn't take care of herself any longer..."
• "A recurring dream I have is..."
• "My sister [brother] has always been..."
• "I have always wondered about my..."

It doesn't matter how beautifully written and moving it is or how hard you worked on it: If your memoir doesn't open with something more inclusive than yourself and your family -- readers won't read it.

I Feel a Draft Coming On

Two or three days of quietude, plus the reading of some poetry, stir me to compose drafts. It happened this past weekend for the first time in many months. I drafted 5 poems.

Per the book The Artist’s Way, I try to think of myself as a channel. Not a channel for poetry, but a channel for first drafts.

It’s the quiet and getting centered in it. It’s shutting off the ringer on the phone. It’s sleeping late enough to heal lingering tiredness, and poaching salmon and laying off the chocolate chips (straight from the bag). In short, it’s treating myself like someone whose well-being matters. It’s telling myself, when assailed by painful thoughts and distractions: “Be Kind To Your Mind.”

On second thought, I might have to credit the digital changeover on June 12, because my TV hasn’t worked since.

Writers Scare People!

Yes, we scare people! We know we're all gentle souls, and treat children kindly (you never know which of them will grow up to be a writer, and write about YOU), and you like to party & that -- but goll-lee, just let a household of non-writers know that a writer, like, a published writer, is in their midst and they will do one of two things:

1. Say Oh How Interesting and ask what kind of writing, and if it is not mystery novels or Christ-centered bestsellers like The Purpose-Drive Life, steer the conversation in another direction.
2. Feel Intimidated and say, Well, mumble, mumble, guess I will dig with my index finger through the antipasto.

Come on, people! Writers are JUST LIKE YOU. What we do is hard, like brain surgery and rocket science, yeah, but we want love just like everyone else on earth; please don't be scared of us.

Done Today

I've very little time lately between clients, work, and class prep to get to my own poems. But today I did. Finally I put a satisfactory closing line on a poem I wrote in 2006 (!) that has sat rotting unpublished because I couldn't capture that last line. Then I knocked off some changes (judicious trims) in a newer poem I've been hammering at for about four months, and now I think it's finished.

This didn't take but 45 minutes; however, I was focused. I feel good. Proud of myself.

Paging through the completed poems I saw that the best one was sent through 14 drafts; that the second-best went through 11 drafts, including one severe cutting job at draft #9, plus an extensive detailed workshop critique at draft #5. Who said writing isn't work?

What Your Skills are Worth

Copyediting: $26/hr
Manuscript evaluations: $46-$51/hr
Teaching/leading a workshop: $75/hr
Writing queries: $78/hr; $200 per project
Online research: $65/hr
"Generating content": $84/hr

Info is the "average" from the 2006 Writers' Market. You'd be making more today!

Go out and charge likewise!

What Are You Worth Per Hour?

Maybe you can’t make a living wage from your fiction or poems or essays. But you CAN make money using the array of skills you employ when you do creative writing. Here are some of your skills. Not everyone can say they have them! How good are you at each of these, and how experienced? Do you know what they are worth? Can you set a price on them? That’s the first step toward getting paid.

-copyediting $_____ per hour

-evaluation of manuscripts/critical feedback $____per hour

-teaching or leading a workshop $____ per hour

-writing queries, proposals, or synopses $____per hour

-researching potential publication venues $____per hour

-navigating and gathering information from websites helpful to writers, such as litmags.org or duotrope.com, and preparing to impart this information to those who want it $____per hour

-generating “content”: writing articles for publication or the web $____per hour

Those are just some of the skills you are probably undervaluing! More later, plus actual figures you SHOULD be charging.

Thanks to Becky Ellis of the blog cherrypiepress.blogspot.com for finding litmags.org.

Want to Read Books on Your I-Phone?

Very soon a million books will be available for download, at $9.95 each, through a new app for your I-Phone. Read about it in this article from Poets & Writers online. I don't have such a phone so I will find someone who has one and who uses this app, and see if they can actually have a pleasant reading experience on that little screen.