How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights

Write Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. --Rita Mae Brown Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: You need money and a room of your own if you're going to write. But I've written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out thirty-five issues of my zine without either one. If I'd waited for money and a room, I'd still be an unpublished welfare mom--except they would have cut my welfare off by now. It might be nice to have money and a room (or it might be suicidally depressing--who knows?), but all you really need is a blank page, a pen, and a little bit of time. Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you're dead, you'll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren't holding any paper. They've got plans, lemme tell ya, and their book is going to be better than yours. Too bad it's written entirely on the sheaves of their imagination. I don't know all the reasons folks pay good money to take my classes and still don't write, but often it has to do with their own high expectations of themselves and wild notions about genius. They think stories should spring fully formed like goddesses from their Zeus-heads. They read novels by masters and imagine their own books snuggling up with the classics at the bookstore. They can't fathom the reality that all these masterpieces were once messy scrawls across ripped pages. First drafts of masterpieces are rarely recognizable as such--and good writers don't leave the price tags on their work. Inspiration comes mythic-magical, but an annoying thing happens in the transmission from inspiration to worldly draft: Things come out a little fuzzy. Introductions are clunky, transitions are awkward, dialogue sounds forced, and sensory details are wholly lacking. A writer's privilege is that she can fix it later. And then fix it again. There's magic in the first raw draft of a story, but the real alchemy happens in rewriting. It doesn't take a world of discipline to put words to paper--plenty of writers are famously undisciplined procrastinators--but it does take a commitment bordering on obsession, and it takes some humility. It's Thursday evening and my dreamy student walks in and takes her seat, empty-handed. "Didn't get a chance to write anything this week?" I ask. She shakes her head, looks down at her lap. "I didn't have time." And I nod. "When do you have time to write?" she asks. And I answer as honestly as I can: If I'm on deadline, I write furiously. A chapter a day. One of my best writing teachers, Ms. Sarah Pollock back at Mills College, taught me that it isn't the most talented writers who are widely published, but rather the ones who meet their deadlines. So I've always met my deadlines. Left to my own inspirations, I write in spurts and stops--sometimes every day for hours and sometimes not at all. Weeks pass. I think I'm blocked. What does that mean, "blocked"? I decide I'm empty. With some relief and some nostalgia, I think it's over--this need to put thoughts to words and words to paper. I consider other jobs, like carpentry or bartending. I romanticize more physical hobbies like weight lifting or cooking. I forget all about it. I get distracted. And then one day I wake up from a strange dream of elephants stampeding over bridges and I sit down to a blank page and see what comes of it. That doesn't answer my student's question, of course. The answer is that I write when I can. As a teenager, I traveled all over Asia and Europe, almost never enrolled in school, almost never punctuated my days with a regular job. I didn't hAriel Gore is the author of 'How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307346483 and ISBN 030734648X.