Hello from Gary Wedlund

(Ed. Note: Today marks our first Write Tip. These recurring posts by Gary Wedlund will provide advice on the mechanics of writing. Welcome, Gary! –F. Van Horne)

I am offering my struggles toward becoming a writer as fodder for the first entry to this blog.

I’ve considered all the failures and bumps up to this moment when I think of myself as halfway to competence. It sticks out that my biggest failures come when I think I’m better than I am.

But then again, writers have to think they are better than they really are. You have to slap yourself on the back. After all, you are doing something productive that you probably couldn’t have done nearly as well a year ago.

Think of it this way: When your five year old paints a picture of a dog, you slap the barely discernible mutt up on the refrigerator and the kid is ecstatic. Why not? Success breeds success. Call it a success and boom, years later it is.

Writing, on the other hand, is a roller coaster ride. One moment you fantasize about being on Larry King, talking about your latest NYT best seller. The next you’re wondering why the last five sentences you just wrote started with the word She. “This crap is garbage! I can’t write. What was I thinking?”

Big problems come to play when one imagines ninety thousand barely edited words on paper equating to a publishable piece of work. Believe you are better than you are, but hold off on the notion that ten cents worth of work correlates to someone willing to pay fifteen dollars for it. I am often surprised by the small amount of input many give to what should be a major undertaking.

My first publishing experience is possibly the best example of this flaw. Somewhere around my umpteenth novel, I produced a book called Zombies in My Hometown. “This one’s great. I’m ready.”

I self published without anyone else looking at it.

As soon as I put my hands on a copy, I noticed the obvious typos. A couple years later, I started noticing all the POV breaks. Punctuation on the dialogue needed big help. I didn’t even like the cover. There was this two page part in the middle that seemed like a giant sermon.

“Oooooookay now.”

I wrote the company and had them take it off the market.

A few years later, a really nice author, Anthony Giangregorio, called me up and said, “Hey, that book is what inspired me to start writing. Now I have a publishing company. I see it’s off the market. Let me publish that for you.”

It was at least a decent story, so I agreed. I rewrote the hell out of it (I’m talking massively) and it’s out there today under the name Zombies in Our Hometown, sans the typos and big POV boo boos. It will never make the NYT bestseller list, but at least I can feel somewhat proud about something of mine making its way up onto someone’s refrigerator door.

The thing to think about isn’t if I’m a great writer, an average writer, or even a bad one. The thing that matters is I’m a better writer the second go around than I was the first go around.

After that, the right thing to ask is why.

We live under the umbrella of a thing called the Protestant Work Ethic. This American ethos says if you work your butt off you’ll get somewhere. Once again, I’m defining a dichotomy. During my college days a wise production management professor outlined that there is a huge difference between work and production. Work is when you’re doing lots of stuff. Production is when it has defined focus. One person can work half as much as the next person and get twice as much done.

Don’t misunderstand me. Good writers get there because they write a lot. I mean, every single day. This notion that you can do it a couple times a month and become a great writer is silly. Work is key. But, work without focus still gets you nowhere.

I know there are a few colleges that offer programs geared toward fiction writing, but noting that exception, I generally believe you can’t learn the meat of this craft through normal educational channels. In fact, most basic books on writing don’t help much either. (Not the same as saying, books written specifically about genre writing are bad, because they are often excellent).

This is more like a family business. You have to learn it from Ma and Pa. By that I mean the community teaches itself.

Put aside most of what you’ve been taught about writing. All that business school stuff is too formal. Never use a semicolon—really? How to give a speech class mostly doesn’t apply. I recall they taught me to layer on the metaphors. Don’t you dare! Grammar diagrams. Oh, God, I hate those anti-motivating things. And the one I really hate is the teacher telling me all the good writing was done before 1920. That teacher is so wrong she’s a hundred eighty degrees out of phase by a factor of a thousand. Oh, there’s another ugly one wandering around: “You have to have talent. Writing can’t be learned.”

I’m living proof that’s stupid. Or at least I think I am when my roller coaster is on the upswing of those hills.

It never is whether one has talent or can learn. It’s whether one thirsts for it. We’ve all seen both types. It isn’t a mystery. Some people are told the same things over and over again, and they just don’t want to hear it. Others say, “Oh, how can I apply that idea to something I’m doing?”

Here’s my philosophy. I used to go to the park and play a lot of basketball. Little kids sometimes came by, and I’d let them join in. Then a few years later they were way better, and they wouldn’t let me join in. That’s not nice, now is it? Before I started pouting, the main point was this: If you learn one thing at a time, pretty soon you’ve gotten somewhere. Once you’ve gotten a little ways, give back.

This leads to what my production professor was implying when he said there’s a difference between work and focused production.

So, we can teach each other stuff we might not be able to obtain anywhere outside the family. That’s why the blog.