Your Writing Apprenticeship

You hear a lot as an aspiring writer that you should write what you’re passionate about, that you should write from the heart, that you should follow your dreams and not cave to commercial pressures. You hear that you should dig down deep and be brave and spill your heart out. And I do believe all of those things.

But . . .

I don’t think any of those mean that you get to skip the process of learning that comes from rejection and rewriting. Just because you have written something that is deeply personal doesn’t mean it’s good writing. It doesn’t mean that you should ignore all criticism.

Which is why I sometimes wonder if it makes sense to work on practice projects for the first part of your apprenticeship. In the old days, apprentices were frequently given the task of copying something the master had done, in order to learn better skills. In our modern times, this is seen as somehow insulting or beneath any artist. I don’t know that it is.

I am glad I wrote and published the novels that I wrote and published in the early part of my career. I am even more glad that the novels that were rejected were rejected before I started publishing and even after I started publishing. So, so glad! I have a few friends who published early books with local presses and wish they hadn’t, simply because their writing skills weren’t very good.

There is nothing wrong with working on projects that aren’t your heart and soul. There is nothing wrong with doing things just for fun, or doing writing that you will get paid for that isn’t what you live and breathe and die for. You can use your writing skills to write advertising copy, websites for businesses, and even to write books for packagers if that’s what you need to do to survive. Those can be part of your apprenticeship.

When I was starting out, I went to a workshop by a big name author. One of his suggestions was to skip writing the smaller books and just go straight to the mega bestsellers. He had some advice on how to figure out which of your ideas was going to be a mega bestseller. But the problem I think about more and more is that most writers when they are publishing smaller books need that time to develop skills so that they can write the bigger books (and I mean bigger in more than just best-selling). They are developing storytelling skills that go beyond grammar and punctuation.

And guess what? They are developing other skills today. I can look back at my early career and see so many things I had to learn. I needed to learn how to present to a large group. I needed to learn how to capture the interest of a group of school children. I needed to learn how to talk about writing to other writers. I needed to learn how to do a newspaper interview, a radio interview. I needed to learn how to schmooze people in a bar (still learning that one, actually). I needed to learn how to cold call people. I needed to learn how to be kind to someone whose writing wasn’t very good.

I couldn’t just skip over all those parts and go straight to writing “the book of my heart.” I had no idea, frankly, what the book of my heart was. I didn’t know what my heart was. It’s like asking a high school kid what they want to do when they grow up. A lot of them think they know what they want and will tell you. And most of them will be wrong. The ones who are honest admit they might have some idea, but it’s pretty vague. And this is just fine. It’s fine not to know what you love and who you are. Even if you are a grown up. Even if you know you love writing and you love the book you’re working on, but aren’t sure if that’s the place you’re going to be in for the rest of your life.

So, yes, write what you’re passionate about. Write what you can’t not write about. But accept that it can change at any moment. *You* can change. That’s one of the joys of being alive. We are changeable. Very changeable. And doing the work that is given to you now doesn’t box you into any corners. Just because you write smaller books doesn’t mean you can’t write bigger books later, when you’re ready. And the reverse is true. If you’re writing big books now, you can write small books later if that’s where your heart takes you.