alors, et toi?

On Being a Professional Writer

By Peter Budvietas

Getting paid for writing does NOT make a writer a professional! It is impossible to tell a good piece written by an amateur from one written by a professional, unless you know that the writer IS a professional. Magazines pay by the word, so the earning power is the same. Amateurs get published as frequently as the average professional writer and produce equally good works. They use the same tools – words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas and all the rest.

What makes the distinction?

Being a professional in any discipline starts with a Code of Conduct, sometimes called a “Code of Ethics” or “Code of Behavior”. This is a set of standards that shows how a professional in a particular discipline should behave to the people who pay them for applying their talents, including writing.

Codes of conduct for professional writing groups all have similar “rules.” One interpretation is that there are five primary rules:

  1. Believe in what you write.
  2. Know your assumptions.
  3. Do your best under all circumstances.
  4. Work to realistic deadlines.
  5. Don’t take criticisms as attacks on you.

Believe in what you write

Many people will tell you to “write what you know.” If you think about this, you will realize that “what you know” is either boring or results in one book (or article). Belief has no such limit. You might need to do research on a subject and spend hours on the background material when you could be writing, but, in the end, your belief in what you have learned is what will create a good piece of writing. Your belief transfers to the reader, through “suspended disbelief.” It is suspension of disbelief that gets the reader from the beginning of your piece to the end. If you do not believe in your content, the reader will not.

What if you are writing make-believe, like fantasy?

The rule still holds—all writing deals with information, not data. Data has to be always true. Information describes a reality. Even the most fantastic story can be “true” in the writer’s, and thus the reader’s, mind.

Know your Assumptions

The first assumption is always that there is a reader. It may be just one person (possibly only yourself), or it may be thousands of people. That’s your audience, the people who generate the money (or other consideration) you want. You need to know all the assumptions you are making about those readers. Check every assumption you make.

Imagine what the people in the audience are like—how they dress, how they pay attention, how they speak. Imagine you are reading your masterpiece to them, putting in the nuances you want, to make this entertainment. Now think of when that audience would lose interest...

Those are the parts that need further work, because you have made assumptions that do not hold.

Do your best under all circumstances

The professional writer knows he/she cannot consistently produce a masterpiece. At times, your writing will not be as good as it is at other times. But it can be consistently good—free of errors in fact, grammar/spelling, well-constructed, and readable!

Check your writing against the previous two rules. If you can be brutally honest with yourself in saying that you believe in what you are writing, and that you are aware of all your assumptions, it probably will NOT matter that it is not your best piece, as long as it is the best you can do at the time, within the deadlines you are working to (the next rule).

Work to realistic deadlines

One thing that editors—the people who decide to buy your piece—look for is your ability to produce a good piece on time and on demand. If he/she asks for 1,000 words by March 10 on such-and-such a topic, he/she does NOT mean 2,000 words by April 3, or 500 words by February 21. You might get away with 950 to 1050 words by March 10 (a 5% variation, which can usually be put into the same space), but the date is fixed!

What if the deadline is too short? You negotiate, before you agree on the deadline. If you find that you can’t meet the deadline, you tell the editor as soon as you know you can’t meet it. Don’t assume that you can fake your research or your work so that you can have something ready by the deadline—editors know when you are taking bad shortcuts.

Don’t take criticisms as attacks on you

Criticisms and critiques show you, as a professional writer, where you have weaknesses in your results. Check your work against the rules so far:

  1. Did you believe in what you were writing?
  2. Have you made assumptions that cause dropping out of suspension of disbelief?
  3. Does the piece meet audience needs?
  4. Is the piece the best you could do in the present circumstances?
  5. Did you take shortcuts to meet the deadline?

Don’t justify yourself. Don’t argue that it is your work, and that it should stand as you have written it. Just listen and learn—don’t assume that you are right or that the critic is right. Look carefully at the content of the criticisms—phraseology, undetected assumptions, why the commenter might have dropped out of suspended disbelief. Examine the suggestions to find what would make the piece better, more understandable, more readable, more succinct. Especially look for how you can use the suggestions in future pieces.

Living a Code of Conduct

There are many associations of professional writers. Most have full memberships, associate memberships, and even student memberships. Network with the group regularly and take part in the group’s activities. Not only will you find the group’s code easier to live with, you will find them steering you to new markets for your writing, places you would not otherwise have known existed.

When people start asking you to write, that’s when you become a professional in the craft of writing!

About The Author

Peter B Budvietas started writing (novels!) at six years old. His first pay cheques for writing came at 17, the cash used for travelling around France. Since then, he studied mathematics and physics; became a top notch systems analyst; produced millions of words in manuals, proposals and other documentation; developed courses in business, computing and (of course) writing; ghost-wrote books on computing, personal development, and life/family histories; put out a couple of books on business; lived in Canada for a while; and now lives in New Zealand. Published work is mostly under various pseudonyms, which makes finding the pieces extremely difficult. But, under his own name, he did have a story selected for Edit Red’s first short story anthology and a poem selected for Edit Red’s first poetry anthology. Now, sixty years after his first attempt, he is hoping to gain a reputation for his own name instead of staying anonymous.

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