How I Got Started as a Writer
Posted by admin in Writing Tips on January 1st, 2010
Some writers always know that they want to write. They grow up reading voraciously and imitating their favorite authors. They just have this inner sense of where they are going from an early age.
That’s not how it happened for me.
I always enjoyed reading, but I did not read much until I was in 7th grade. Then I started to read books about Kit Carson, Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok, every musty book on Western life that I could find in our little school library.
It wasn’t until I was 18 years old, standing over a copy machine one day, when it hit me: “You could write a book.” That was over three decades ago. It was the moment that the bell tolled for me.
I’ve never forgotten that day, and the feeling that I wanted to be a writer has never left me.
Another electrifying moment for me was when I was talking on the telephone with a magazine editor. She asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said to her, “I want to be a writer.” Those words surprised me. Where did they come from? Did I really believe them? They went through me like a shock, inflicting permanent damage from which I have never recovered. I was 21 years old.
I have always loved horses, and a few years later I got an associate’s degree in horsemanship and stable management from a small college in Idaho (barely, I am still wondering why they gave me a diploma). But I also wanted a bachelor’s degree. Never forgetting my earlier revelation that I could write books, I eventually decided to major in English.
My father, to say the least, was not thrilled. “What are you going to do with that?” he’d ask. I told him that I was going to be a writer, and that I would start out as a technical writer. He said, “You can’t be a technical writer.” Not exactly encouraging, but I knew what I wanted, and was determined to get my hands on it.
Four years later, in 1983, I finally graduated from university with a bachelor’s degree in English, and a few months later, got my first job as a writer at Tektronix, an electronics company, and I’ve been writing for hire ever since.
Within ten years of landing my first writing job, I had written articles for newspapers and magazines—mostly travel articles—and also several books, though none of the were published. Wait. Let me correct that: None of them were publishable. I still had plenty of work to do.
In 1995, I self-published a children’s board book under the label of our own little publishing company Overdue Books. I could not find a distributor for the book, but I was able to sell a number of copies independently by mail order. (The Internet had not really caught on yet with the masses.)
Finally, I got a break in 1999. I was working for Intel, editing a book—a joint Intel-Microsoft project that was to be published by John Wiley & Sons. Through this contact, I was able to gain access to an editor at Wiley, and within a short time, I had signed my first book contract. I wrote two books for Wiley, and after that, I signed with O’Reilly and, so far, I have written five books and two ebooks for them.
After 26 years of working as a writer, I am still going strong, there is no end in sight. It is an endless challenge, but that’s what I like about it. I still love what I do. I have no desire to stop. I will never retire from writing. I fully expect that, some morning, when I am 85 years old, my wife will find my lifeless body slumped over a keyboard, the cursor blinking on the screen, taking up where my heart left off.
Three Keys to Writing
Posted by admin in Writing Tips on December 3rd, 2009
I’m Mike Fitzgerald. I’ve been a writer for about 25 years. I want to share with you my experience with writing, and three keys that I have found that are really important.
Number 1. I think it’s important to be yourself when you write to not try too hard. Think about this for a minute. When you go to a high school play, for example, and you see a young actor on the stage, you can tell when he or she is trying too hard, right? They are trying to act. And we really like it when someone is natural, and feels at ease on the stage or screen. Those are the kinds of actors that we really like to watch.
Singing is another example. Think about singers that are trying too hard to sound like someone else. You can really tell the difference there. Another thing I think about often is Louis Armstrong. You probably are familiar with his singing voice. It was rough and gravelly. It was not a highly trained voice. But people really liked it! And they still like it, and they still buy his recordings.
Why? Because it was such a natural voice. I want to suggest to you, as a writer, that you need to find your natural voice, you’ve got to find your passion and your integrity. When you find those things, you’ll also find an audience.
Number 2. Next, I don’t think you should be too hard on yourself. This is something that a lot of us struggle with, and I think it’s at the root of writer’s block. Let me tell you about an experience I had.
I’ve written a number of books. I’ve got books on Amazon.com. And I remember one day looking at the reviews of one of my books, and one of the reviewers said “This book is not worth the paper that it’s written on.”
Well, at first, it was kind of painful to read that, to think that someone could be that critical of something that I had poured so much time and energy into. But, after thinking about it for some time, I realized that anyone can have a bad day, and everything I write—not everyone’s going to like it. And I’m going to make mistakes. But I think it’s important not too be hard on yourself. I think we need to let go, like we did when we were small children.
Remember when you were a child? You would produce paintings and drawings, and make up stories, and you really didn’t care so much about what other people thought, you just did it. It was just your natural self. Sure, our moms and dads praised us and that helped, but I think we didn’t worry so much about that.
And then we get into our teenage years, and we become obscenely self-conscious, and some of us never get over that. Now I’m not saying don’t pay attention to critics. I pay attention to them sometimes, but for the most part, I don’t really worry so much about what other people think of me anymore. It just isn’t worth the time.
There’s a book out there entitled What Other People Think of You Is None of My Business. I can’t remember the name of the author. But I think that’s a great concept, and that it applies to writing.
We just have to let go. I remember William Stafford, the poet from Oregon, talking about writing once, and he said “If you’re having trouble getting things down, lower your standards.” I think what that meant was don’t be so hard on yourself. Just find your natural voice and just let it come out.
Number 3. The last thing I want to share with you is to write from the seat of your heart. This is probably the most important thing you can do as a writer. You’ve got to find that place that really speaks from your heart, because that’s what is going to connect with other people. I don’t care if it’s non-fiction, fiction, poetry, even technical writing.
Look at David Pogue. He writes a lot of technical books, but he writes from his heart. His books are very appealing because it’s really him. It’s who he really is, with all his asides.
So it doesn’t really matter what the genre is: you’ve got to write from the seat of your heart.
Now think about this for a minute. Think about the phrase, “It was raining today.” That’s just a simple phrase that we hear often. Boring, in and of itself. But when you write from the seat of the heart, you would say something like “The rain fell hard on my December.”
You see, there’s a difference there. The difference is that when you write from the seat of the heart, it has color, and mood, and the things that dreams are made of.
People are dreamers. We dream all the time. And every night, even though you don’t remember it, you are dreaming. And even during the day, we’re often in a dream-like state, especially when you’re in a boring meeting. So there’s a part of us that’s often hidden that really connects when we hear other people speak from that dream-like state, and that dream-like state comes from the heart.
I really recommend that you’ve got to follow the first two steps first, and when you get to the point when you’re not trying too hard, and when you’re not too hard on yourself, that you can really find that place in your heart where you can express the true you—your passion, your feeling, your integrity with yourself. That’s what people really want to see.