When I worked at Writer’s Digest, we typically published books in three key categories:
- how to write better (craft & technique)
- how to get published
- inspiration / self-help
This last category I always felt wary of; it encompasses your bestsellers and worstsellers. It’s about the stuff that surrounds the actual writing, such as how to balance the demands of authorship with other demands in your life—or how to make sure you write in the first place. It often tackles the psychological battles.
Such territory is incredibly subjective and very personality-driven.
That’s why I like this 30-point list from David James Poissant—How to Balance Writing, Family, Work, and Life: An Unhelpful Guide for the Perplexed—which plays on our desire for this type of advice, but also on the paradoxes that lie within it. For example, a few items:
7. Throw away your television.
16. Okay, don’t throw away your television. You’ll miss it when the tornado’s on the way. But, at least, like, unsubscribe from premium cable.
30. Results vary. Side effects range from obscurity to the Nobel Prize.
Read the full 30-point list over at Glimmer Train.
Also this month at Glimmer Train: Revision as Therapy: I Didn’t Understand My Book Until After I Sold by Matthew Salesses
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
[…] Writers may desire advice on how to better balance their writing lives and be productive, but few prescriptives are one size fits all. […]
It’s interesting, Jane, because the very issues that you’re wary of — the psychological issues that surround the actual writing — that’s what intrigues me most. It’s why I named my blog Mudpie Writing since writing is delicious, but messy. David James Poissant was very clever and I won’t throw away my TV. Thanks.