Writing Advice: Chart Your Course
I spent the past weekend at FC talking to a lot of people, some of them writers, and I came away with this series of thoughts about what it means to different people to be a writer, and how setting yourself on a path to succeed means thinking about what success looks like to you.
When you think of “successful writer,” a few names come to mind: Stephen King, that transphobic lady, maybe Neil Gaiman, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, Agatha Christie, and others depending on your preferred genre. Maybe you think about Allie Brosh, whose webcomic Hyperbole And A Half has been published traditionally and continues to sell well. Or about Toivo Kaartinen, the creator of the popular comic “Foxes In Love.” Or even, maybe, about me.
There’s obviously a large gulf between Stephen King and Toivo Kaartinen, but that doesn’t mean that all the writers listed there, as well as hundreds of others, aren’t successful. There are external measures of success, sure: have you sold a book to a major publisher? Won an award? Been a #1 New York Times Bestseller? But the measures of success that matter most are subjective. They’re your measures.
Do you want to sell a book to a major publisher? There’s a path to that. Want to win an award? There’s a path to that, too. Want to be a New York Times Bestseller? It’s not easy, but there are ways you can increase your odds (and if you’re unethical, you can get a few thousand people to buy your book (NYT login-wall link, sorry) to help).
I’m not saying I’d turn down any of those things. But they’re not really what I’m pursuing in my writing. My goal for success is to write the stories that interest me, to have more furry fiction out in the world, and to be able to support myself with my writing. The first two are going well, the third is going okay (and we’re working on it!). But also, you know, the goals are kind of in that order. If I didn’t care so much about furry fiction, I’d be finding things I was interested in writing that might sell to a larger audience (though honestly, I would still find ways to make them furry, see The Price of Thorns). If I didn’t care about writing what interested me, I’d have written two sequels to Waterways by now (sorry! I just don’t have any stories about them to write).
One of the people I heard talk about their goals this weekend at a writer’s panel said that they write stories just for themself, and they never show them to anyone because it doesn’t matter what other people think. This person’s definition of success is, at least in part, creating stories that they enjoy, and it does not include “getting approval from others,” whether in person, in reviews, or in money. That’s a successful writer.
There are successful writers who post smutty fiction to SoFurry or FA for their friend groups, maybe a wider audience, who do not aspire to see a paper copy of their work. There are successful writers who have had one story published in their favorite ’zine. There are successful writers who have met their goals and set new ones and met those and set new ones again. Personally, the goal I think every writer should have is: love and be proud of every story you finish. That might not last more than a few days after finishing the story—not everything ages well in your eyes—but I am a lot happier as a writer for having that goal for my stories.
Most writers, when they’re starting out, set their eyes on the bestseller ranks, but there are possibly goals that could be more meaningful to you. That doesn’t mean you stop aspiring to be the furry Stephen King, but it means setting goals along the way that can bring you a good deal of satisfaction to accomplish. Think about the things that are important to you, and how you can direct your writing career to accomplish those, and as you progress, add more or subtract some! Your writing career is yours, and nobody else gets to tell you what constitutes “success.”