Honestly, it never crossed my mind that no one had ever offered to teach it. And not just finances, but the idea that writing is a career, a profession, something that writers must learn alongside their craft.
No professional school in the university system teaches everything a professional needs to know to practice a trade. Law schools don’t spend much time on how to run a law practice, but they do at least mention it now and then. Medical schools have only started dealing with money management in the last decade or so, but wannabe doctors always knew that they had the option of opening their own office to make a living.
Writers never get that. Not once in seventy-six years have writers thought of their work as work, let alone as a profession, let alone as something they could make a good living at.
When you don’t even know that something exists, you can’t learn about it. You can’t admit you don’t know enough about it, because it’s not even a part of your world-view.
That’s why writers whose careers have taken a downturn blame their craft. That’s what they learned, that’s what they believe the writing profession to be—only craft. Yet, if these writers knew business, they would understand that all businesses have cycles. Every business has downturns, and sharp business owners learn how to survive them. Sometimes tweaking the product (fixing your writing) is the exact wrong thing to do. Sometimes it’s necessary.
But if you can’t even see where the problem is, then you can’t solve the problem.
It also works on the flipside. If you’re successful, you can’t continue that success without understanding what you’re successful at. If you’re a good storyteller, but you believe you’ve become successful because you write pretty sentences, then you might jettison story to write even prettier sentences when, in fact, it might be your raw storytelling power and idiosyncratic grammar that makes your work sell.
In other words, in trying to “improve” upon your success, you might destroy it.
The myopic view of writing as offered by seventy-six years of university writers’ workshops and their non-university satellites has harmed entire generations of professional writers. Now it’s clear to me why so many writers have at best a ten-year career. At some point, a business sense must kick in. If the writer has farmed out the business part of her career to someone “who knows better,” then she has no idea if the person that she hired is doing something wrong. She has no idea if the reason her career is having a downturn is because she has trusted the wrong people, or because she’s writing in a genre that is glutted, or if she has signed a contract limiting her chances for success.
She is ignorant of all that will help her in her profession. She might be the best writer on the planet, but if she doesn’t know how to get her writing to readers—repeatedly—she won’t have a career.
Honestly, that saddens me. It’s the reason Dean and I have taught business for twenty years. We’re trying to rectify what we believed to be a small problem. In July of 2012, I realized just how big the problem is and why we’ve had so much trouble making inroads.
If you want to be a successful professional writer, you need to learn business. You will not have a long-term career if you fail to learn how the profession works. You also need to keep working on your craft.
Contrary to what writers learn in MFA programs, writing is not an easy profession, one in which a writer should be “encouraged.” Writing is hard work. Writers who want to put in the hours, who have a good work ethic, will survive in this profession while the “talented” will get eaten alive.
The university programs and that workshop attitude have it exactly backwards. To succeed in this profession, you need skills. Writing skills, business skills, survival skills.
Those skills are not taught in university writing programs. Right now, the only reliable way to get those skills is through the school of hard knocks.
I’ve been through that school repeatedly. It’s painful. I hope someday someone comes up with a system that helps writers through the early years with a formal education in business as well as craft.
Until then, cobble together your own curriculum. It’s directed study here in the school of hard knocks. You won’t get university credit, but you will end up with a lifelong career.
Good luck.
About the Author
Award-winning, bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch has published books under many names and in many genres. She has owned several businesses, and has worked for herself for more than thirty years. For more information on her work, go to kristinekathrynrusch.com.
If you found this short book helpful, you might want to read these books as well:
The Freelancer’s Survival Guide (Third Edition)
Goals and Dreams
How To Make Money
Time Management
The Secrets of Success
Surviving The Transition
The Pursuit of Perfection Page 5