My Other Blog

Once you know that a writing career is what you want to do with your life, then what? How do you plan not just your next short story, but a whole career in writing?

One thing to do, as suggested by Holly Lisle on her web site (http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Articles/wc3-2.html) , is to find a writing role model. She suggests someone that is still alive and working, and that works in your field.

My own suggestion is to find more than one writing role model, and to look mostly at ones for whom information is accessible. It is fairly easy to find out information about Stephen King’s early career, for example, while for other authors little to nothing is available other than their published fiction.

My own writing role models don’t quite conform to Holly’s suggestion. One of them is not currently alive and working, though her books are still in print. Hedwig Courths-Mahler was a German romance writer who was born about 135 years ago. She wrote over 200 novels in her writing career.

I have a book, in German, on Hedwig Courths-Mahler’s life, “Hedwig Courths-Mahler: Ihr Leben” by Siegfried M. Pistorius, and as well some of Hedwig C-M’s novels. Even though romance novels are not my thing, I’ve enjoyed her books and am inspired by the story of her career.

Other writing role models are Marion Zimmer Bradley and Stephen King. MZB has written about her career in the afterword of one of her books, and again, her story is one I found inspiring.

I particularly enjoyed MZB’s Darkover novels, and I own every last one of them, including the hard-to-find “Sword of Aldones”. One thing I did a couple of years back was to line up every one of the Darkover books in the order that the stories were written. I could thus see how her writing had developed over the years of her career.

By learning about a writing role model’s career one can visualize the different stages of a writing career, from the beginning, learning-to-write stage to the later, slowing down stage at the end of the writing career. But of course what we really want to know is chiefly about the beginning. How do you go from being a wannabe writer to a published writer.

Some of the specifics we cannot copy from our role models, because the markets have changed. Many writers started out writing short stories for the many paying markets that once existed for the short story. Hedwig Courths-Mahler wrote serialized novels for various magazines, another market that no longer exists. Today the writer tends to have to begin with novels in order to get published, and that can be a problem because of the effort and the complexity of that project.

Perhaps a project that one might do is to look at some of the early writing activities of one of your writing role models and ask yourself, what can I do that is similar to that?