What Randy said in another post that stuck like a dart into this spinning psycho is to determine your biggest strength and your biggest weakness and work on those. That gives me something to focus on that may actually produce measurable and needed results.

If someone said they wanted to be a professional tennis player or golfer or baseball player or tuba player or engineer but they had 10 hours a week or less to devote to learning and practicing, they’d be laughed out of school.

I worked for 25 years as a technical writer and I’d often hear an engineer say he’d write the software manual himself, but he was just too busy.

I never said to these guys, “Sure, yeah, I’d write the program myself but I don’t have enough hours in the day.”

Can someone explain this attitude to me?

Thanks,

Andie

Randy sez: The 10 hour per week figure is the number of hours that I recommend writers should strive for to reach the status of being a “Junior”. Without at least this level of effort, they’ll be totally unprepared to sell a book, if and when an editor decides to buy it.

But at the “Freshman” level, 10 hours per week is unrealistic for most writers, who are starting from a dead stop. For them, I recommend that they work up to 5 hours per week over a period of months. I don’t consider a writer a “Sophmore” unless they’re writing at least 5 hours per week.

Once you sell a book, you are going to need to start putting in closer to 20 hours per week. At that point, you’ll be getting some compensation for it, but as Morgan points out, not a whole lot of compensation. Early in the game, writing is a sacrifice. There’s no way around that fact.

Fortunately for me I’m only a Freshman and so I need to build up to 10 hours. Sure, I’d love to be a professional writer… eventually. I’m not so naive anymore to believe it’s going to happen immediately, or without hard work on my part. (Thanks Randy!) In terms of goals, my short term goal is to make it to Sophmore in a year (no more than two - life tends to get in the way with little ones!). My long term goal is to be a professional writer.

Perhaps the key word in your question, Andrea, is ‘expect’ - it’s not that I don’t want to be a professional, just that I know it’s not realistic for me at this point in my life. I can work towards it, but I certainly don’t expect it.

Thanks for answering my question. It’s been awfully difficult to find 10 hours per week of late, though I’d like to think of myself as a “junior” nonetheless.

Andrea: What do you expect? Someone with a fulltime job who wants to break into writing to quit and live on air? Or work 80 hours per week?

Dave