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 |  Novel Writing Tools & Tips #6 |
"Having the phone taken out was our one pitiful act of defiance that year. It was quitting before the Credit Department fired us. Tabby juggled the bills with the competent but scary expertise of a circus clown juggling tennis rackets; the transmission on our senile 1965 Buick Special began to whine, then to groan, then to clug and hitch...To top off everything, I was in the middle of a dry spell." ~Stephen King, Secret Windows I think in part because of how I grew up, the whole process of how someone can become successful has always been interesting to me. Our society tends to put more focus on the end results--fame, money, influence, etc.--but without deeper research it can seem like a successful and famous person just got there by luck or at the very least had a set of circumstances a normal person could never have. Before looking into this, I never knew that Stephen King was once a high school teacher and before that worked in a laundromat while getting his writing career off the ground. After receiving over 30 rejections for Carrie, he threw it in the garbage. His wife later fished it out and encouraged him to try again. J.K. Rowling finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone while on welfare. It was rejected 12 times before narrowly being published. She is now the world's richest author with a net worth of $1 Billion as of March 2011. Unable to afford college, Ray Bradbury sold newspapers and spent as much time as he could at the public library to develop his education. He wrote at night. Ernest Hemingway was an ambulance driver. Charles Dickens worked in a shoe polish factory. Agatha Cristie was a pharmacy assistant. Henry David Thoreau worked in his family's pencil business. Many famous authors also had to endure rejection--sometimes a lot of it. Jack London was rejected over 600 times before his first story sold. John Grisham's A Time to Kill was rejected 16 times. Even Lord of the Flies (required reading when I was in high school) was rejected 20 times before it was published. If you're taking the traditional route, it's helpful to know that rejection is part of the process and that everyone goes through it. You can see a full list of 50 authors you'll likely recognize by clicking here  . Persistence matters along with talent.When I was in college, I got the opportunity to run a broadcast camera for several large business conferences in stadiums of about 30,000+ people. In the moments when I wasn't getting instructions from the director, I was able to listen and learn with the rest of the crowd. One of the things I walked away with from the experience was that the small business owners that were successful and grew made decisions like owners long before the material results appeared. A lot of them worked day jobs, too--working on their dream whenever they could. There were patterns across the board--persistence, making the right choices on a daily basis, continued education (self-directed reading and keeping up in their fields), and just pure and simple work. There is a joy in earning something and overcoming circumstances--and it lifts the people around you up, too. When I decided to seriously pursue being an author, I made it my priority. At the time, I was working 44 hours a week making delivery calls for oxygen patients. With everything else going on in my life, I probably had about 5 hours a week to write. Still, I was an author with a day job--not an employee with a hobby. There was a major mental and heart shift. I was eventually able to quit that job (honestly a little sooner than I probably should have) and now make more income between writing and working part-time than any full-time job I've ever had. That took me three years. When my husband and I reach the point of being completely debt-free, I'll be able to travel more without worry and ease into the next stage of the process. If you have similar goals, I'd encourage you to look into Dave Ramsey and Dan Miller's books for financial and general career development advice. No matter where you are in life right now, you have the potential to grow and learn to be the kind of author you want to be. It comes down to a decision and then the willingness to not quit when most people do. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sci-fi novelist Patricia Gilliam is the author of the Hannaria Series: Out of the Gray (April 2009), Legacy (Nov 2009), and No Good Deed Goes Unpunished (June 2010). Beginning her career as an online content writer, she has written over 1,000 non-fiction articles and 40 fiction short stories since 2006. She has been a preferred author on Writing.com since 2007, offering free help and resources to the site's community. Outside of writing, she and her husband Cory are broadcast camera operators for the Christian television show Power of the Word in the Knoxville, TN area. In 2009, they adopted a rescue greyhound (racing name Lucius Malfoy) and are active volunteers for the local adoption group. Book 4 of the Hannaria Series, Something Like the Truth, is in progress with an expected release in early 2012. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Novel Writing Tools & Tips is a free column on Gather.com and featured on the site's "Today on Gather" newsletter once a week. Purchase of the following writing guides and resources is optional, and using the following links also benefits Writing.com: By Patricia Gilliam: Mentioned in this article:
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