PopSyndicate.com

A question about career-enhancing book recommendations for writers... I want to be a full-time writer someday. What books do you recommend to prepare for a career as a fiction writer?

Ms. McConnell, Boulder, CO


Dear Ms. McConnell,

The following is a list of books that should be in every writer's personal library. They each deal with the challenges encountered in the individual phases of a writing career. Once you get a handle on each phase of the writer's life, you'll be able to move on to fully develop as a true writer. The first phase deals with that most tenacious of writing aspects...


• ... rejection! If writing were easy, they'd teach it in elementary school. Sure, it looks easy--toss a noun and a verb together, and you have a sentence. Tie a few sentences together and you have a paragraph. Run some paragraphs together, and you'll eventually have a chapter. Then toss those chapters together into a book. Voila! Instant novel. The writing doesn't get difficult until you submit and find out how easy rejection is.

It's not commercial enough. It's not high concept enough. I'm not feeling the characters. We've got a glut of transgender zombie romance novels right now. I'm sorry, but there's already a book out there about using macramé to create your own sex toys. See how easy that is? Sometimes, a rejection can be as simple as a reader in a bad mood or the story not being part of the new hot topic everyone's trying to cash in on. You'll be rejected no matter what, and they can create reasons to justify any rejection. Get used to it with the book Reject Me - I Love It!: 21 Secrets for Turning Rejection into Direction by John Fuhrman.

• Now, you're ready for the next phase. You've turned that rejection into a positive force for cranking out more work,, and you're beginning to wonder when the rejections will stop. You cling to that last little bit of hope that you can keep going, and the book offers will start rolling in. But letter after letter gets that hope fading fast and leads to downtrodden spirits and tons of comfort food. You're now dealing with Rejection's mother-in-law, Depression. Like most mother-in-laws, you want to be rid of her, but she won't go away. She overstays her welcome and nags at you the whole time about how her good little boy or girl could have married a successful computer programmer or a nice emu farmer or just someone with passable table manners. To send this relative packing, try the book, Undoing Depression by Richard O'Connor.

• Like most writers, you'll skip the book on depression and go straight into the next phase of your writing career... chemically coping. The use of alcohol in appropriate dosages will allow you to drown out the depression long enough to get back to writing and get some words on the page. You'll probably spend the next day trying to decipher what you wrote while working off your hangover, but there will be words on the page. Probably angry words... to the latest bastard to reject you or the guy on that message board that called you a hack or to your actual mother-in-law, the English teacher, who takes pleasure in red-lining your manuscripts. So, here's to you and your liquid-fortified mental health. And to make sure you enjoy a little variety through this phase, check out the Bartender's Black Book by Stephen Kittredge Cunningham.

• What? You want the next phase of a writer's career? Why not sit back and enjoy the current one for a bit. Hey, next round's on me. What? It didn't actually fix any of the underlying problems that caused both your rejections and your depression. Well, I did mention it was coping with the issues and not treating them. So what if things got worse--lost your day job, declared bankruptcy, alienated your spouse/significant other (or both), got arrested for a beer-goggle induced bout of public lewdness with your neighbor's garden gnome, and worst of all... got blacklisted from bars and liquor stores because of an inability to pay your tab. Now, you've successfully moved beyond depression and into an area so dark and bleak, there only seems to be no way out except one, desperate act to rid yourself of all these problems once and for all.

Rehabilitation. For this, you'd want to go with the classics like Alcoholics Anonymous - Big Book by AA Services. It gives you the twelve steps and helps you root out your addiction and get your life back.

• Of course when you start the rehab, you'll wish you were dead. This is where you'll have one of those in-between phases that occur in the middle of another phase, and since this one deals with thoughts of suicide, I consider it a very important topic. Not that anyone would really miss you or anything after you drove them off from all your drinking and disgusting garden gnome conquest stories, but this whole suicide thing can be a big hindrance to your career as a writer. Sure, some writers didn't become famous until after they were dead, but they managed to get something published before kicking the bucket. Be sure to keep a copy nearby of Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison. Or any thick math and/or science college textbook, which would put you to sleep so quickly, you wouldn't have time for suicide.

• Finally, you've got the suicide, liver damage, depression, and rejection overload out of your system, so it's time to get serious about your career and finally approach your obstacles to face them head-on with poise, confidence, and the best method for winning friends and influencing people... voodoo magic.

What? You don't believe in magic? Just take a second to think about the worst book you ever read. It was probably a book so horrible, its very sentences killed off brain cells faster than alcohol. Do you honestly believe that book could have been published without the aid of magic? Learn more about the beginning aspects of spellcraft in Charms, Spells, and Formulas by Ray Marlbrough.

####

Got a question about breaking in for The Creative Adviser?  Ask away!  It might even get answered!

---

All material in The Creative Adviser is fictitious and intended solely for the purpose of entertainment. Names are fabricated and any similarity to real people or places is purely coincidental except in those cases where public figures are being satirized.