La Vie Boheme

What makes someone a successful

What makes someone a successful writer? A good writer?

It's a question that keeps coming up to me a lot lately. I like to think I'm a pretty good writer. I'm better than I was three years ago when I started getting serious about it, but I still think I have a long way to go. I'm proud of the improvements I've made, and I even manage not to cringe too much when I read my old stuff. Because that's where I was then, and even the worst stuff I wrote taught me something. Hell, the years I spent MUSHing taught me a ton, particularly about characterization and dialogue (of course, it also taught me some seriously lazy bad habits, but I've started breaking those, honest).

So I'm a pretty good writer. Am I successful one?

I don't know. I suppose it depends on how you measure success. This comes up a lot lately, or so it seems. I'm the one with a professional sale, I worked on the books for DP9, so it feels like I'm a basis for comparison a lot. I don't want to be. I absolutely do NOT want to knock what I did for DP9; as a writing experience, it was invaluable. But it wasn't anything like writing my own fiction in my own worlds. It wasn't anything like having someone say, "We like what you and you alone did, we want to pay you for your work." It was like getting paid for fan fiction. In a very real sense, the stuff I did for DP9 was fan fiction. (Insert standard "I'm not knocking fan fiction writers" disclaimer here.)

Getting published by DP9 was nothing like trying to get published by any of the big kids in the publishing world. In terms of writing ability, I think it's safe to say that me and the rest of Wicked Ink had no real competition. We could string sentences together interestingly and coherently, we were interested in doing the work, so we got the job. Any one of the writers I know, if they'd had the same interest and had been in the same place and time, would have gotten the same result. It wasn't as much about talent as it was about luck. Blind, crazy luck.

Likewise my one pro sale. It was a fluke. It had to be. "Rhythm of the Tides" was a story I worked on and polished for two years--because it was the only story I had. Game fiction disguised as regular fiction. It was good, and I'm proud of it, but in three years, it's still the only sale I've made.

So if getting published is all about luck and flukes, how do you measure success as a writer? I think it has jack and shit to do with publication credits. I'd have to say it's all about persistence. Dedication. Continually working to improve as a writer. I have been lucky enough to work with some incredible writers, both on collaborations and with the Minions.

I feel like a fraud a lot of the time. That when I trumpet my credits on a cover letter to an editor, I'm telling a great big lie, implying that I'm better than I really am. It's even worse when I feel that way around my friends too.

I'm a pretty good writer. I'm working to be a better one. I've been lucky. I'm trying to make that luck happen again. That's all.