Inspired by The Artist Next Level Podcast and an article by Sergio Gomez. You can find the podcast by clicking here.
Humans have been writing and making art for millennia so I think it’s essential to differentiate between those of us who want to make a career from our work and those who don’t.
Inspired by Sergio Gomez’s podcast called Revisiting the 10 Commandments for Artists, below are my 10 Commandments for (ambitious) writers.
1. Thou Shalt Write. It doesn’t have to be daily and it doesn’t have to be quality but you do need to write something. This should be fairly self-explanatory.
2. Thou shalt Read! Read widely across genres and deeply in your own.
3. Thou shalt learn the craft. Learn all you can about writing. Attend workshops. If you don’t want to spend money, there are plenty of writing craft books at most libraries and YouTube is full of free content from incredible writers like KM Weiland and Joanna Penn. Reedsy does regular free webinars on a host of topics.
4. Thou shalt experiment. Once you learn the rules (see Commandment #2) you can play with them. Try new forms, points of view, genres …
5. Thou shalt set attainable goals. Set goals over which you have some agency like ‘I am going to write a short story this month.’ Don’t set the goal to ‘be a best selling author’. Affirm it in your diary every day, but apart from writing the best book you can, you have no say in whether it’s a best seller or not.
6. Thou shalt network. Make writer friends. They are the only people who will truly understand what your life it like.
7. Thou shalt transform professional envy into fuel. Look at the author’s who careers you admire, what you see from te outside at least. If you want what they’ve got, you have to do what they do. Write a LOT. Travel. Speak. Learn. Their careers didn’t fall into their laps.
8. Thou shalt discover what success means to you. Do you really want to be ‘rich and famous?’ There are a bajillion easier ways to achieve that than writing. Journal on what success means to you. You can’t get ‘there’ if you don’t really know where ‘there’ is!
9. Thou shalt learn to seek and use quality feedback. The only way to make a career from your writing (while you’re still alive) is to get eyeballs on it. Learning to get the right feedback at the right time and using it to improve will level up your work. And some of those eyeballs aren’t going to like what you write, so learn not to take rejection personally. (For tips on feedback in all its glory, follow me on my new website, https://realfriendsproject.com/)
10. Thou shalt have fun. The writing life isn’t for everyone. Writing can be arduous, physically and emotionally exhausting and for 97% of authors, the pay is terrible. Publishing can be irksome. Marketing is hard work even when it’s a blast. But the writing life is for you if you can read those words and think, ‘nah, I’m still gonna give it a crack.’
