The first thing I ever wrote that was recognizable as a short story (as opposed to “nonreactive pile of words that failed to start a chain reaction of genius) was called “Bricks”, and was written in 1986, when I was fifteen. I’d recently been told that in order to get into college and stop the clear downward slide my life was already engaged in, I needed to have activities on my transcript.

(Anyone high school age reading this: You don’t. It’s an adult conspiracy to get you involved in school activities. Walk away.)

I showed up for one meeting of the wrestling team, and left after twenty minutes, because holy shit that’s a lot of work. So I figured I’d get involved in something a little closer to my comfort zone: Writing. So I joined the literary magazine. In order to join the literary magazine, you kind of had to have literary output, so I shifted from 100% novels to writing some short stories.

That was my first real short story. The first good short story came about three years later. And the first story I actually sold was written four years after that.

The Chapter Stops

I can divide my entire literary life that way, between eras marked by Firsts. Some of those chapter stops shift over time as my definition of good and successful change, but in general I can point to works and say, this was my first real novel, this was my first good novel, this was the first story I ever sold, this was the first story I ever got a dollar a word for.

Just as important, though, are the milestones that don’t have a fixed point in time—things like the best story or novel I wrote. It’s kind of great that that status keeps changing, because the only things worse than realizing the best thing you ever wrote was written thirty years ago is realizing the last thing you sold was thirty years ago. As long as your dates keep changing, as long as you have new milestones to mark, you’re okay. And to keep that happening, you have to keep working. You never know when your next idea is going to be the best one you’ve ever had.

Unless your idea is to spend the next few years observing your cats as research for a Watership Down-esque epic about them. That will never be your best idea. Trust me, I speak from experience.

I don’t hang out with other writers much, because I hate talking about writing. Discussions about craft tend to get pretentious, quick, and discussions about the business side make me squirrelly, because I was raised to never speak of money, for some reason. I think my parents were in dire financial straits for a long time—like, lose the house straits—and never once mentioned any of it to my brother and I. The only reason I even suspect this today is a few stray comments made by my mother in her later years. As a result, I prefer to pretend that I am a Gentleman Writer who publishes solely for the acclaim and the glamor, never the money.

There are some exceptions, mainly with writers who like to drink whiskey as much as I do. Whiskey is the social lubrication of the gods, after all. When I do get together with fellow writers and talk a bit about our work, there’s one thing I can count on: We all hate our old books.

Past Me is a Hack

It’s unsettling when you pull out a manuscript you wrote a few years ago and thought fondly of, a novel you thought might be revised and massaged into something great, and discover that Present You now hates it, and wonders what drugs Past You was on when he wrote it. I used to assume this had something to do with my growing vision and talent as a writer—older books were terrible because I had gotten so much better at it, just like I no longer think The Dukes of Hazzard is a good TV show because my taste in television has gotten more sophisticated.

Now, though, I realize that’s not quite it. Past Jeff is not the same person as Present Jeff, just as I will not be the same as Future Jeff. That stranger wrote a book, and incorporated all these weird ideas, and none of it is the way I would do it. So I hate it. I will always hate my older books, no matter how old they are, precisely, and no matter how well they are received or how well they continue to sell. They were written by a weirdo with my name, a man I don’t know any more.

This is probably why time travel never seems to happen. People invent it, travel back to see themselves, and end up murdering themselves and the universe reboots.

I don’t know how other writers do it, or have done it—sell novels, get agents, all that jazz. All I know is how I did it, so that’s the limit of my knowledge. It’s very possible (very possible) that other writers are smarter than me, more charming and connected, and that they’ve got some secret I don’t. That’s a pretty common fear/assumption, isn’t it, that other people have it easier because they know something you don’t. So, stipulated: Other writers may know something I don’t.

For me, it was all just doing the work. Writing the query letters, mailing out the sample chapters, emailing folks, all that jazz. There was literally no secret to it, no special networking. I never left the house, I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t go to conferences, and I didn’t read any books or blogs of advice. I just routinely sent out submissions to publishers and queries to agents, for years.

The Secret: There’s No Secret

That’s anti-climatic, isn’t it? And a bit dull. I wish I could say I had some amazing secret, believe me. But I just sat at my desk every day and wrote, and then sat a little longer and wrote funny, disastrously sloppy letters and then made photocopies of my typo-ridden manuscripts and mailed them out. Later, of course, the ridiculous cover letters became Word documents and the photocopies also Word documents and everything was via email, but it was essentially the same process. And somehow in 1999 this translated into a novel sold to a small publisher and in 2002 it translated into signing with an agent. All it took was a few hundred mailings and a lot of letters.

So, when people ask me for the secret to selling a book or landing an agent, I don’t mention conferences, pitch slams, or publishing events where I bought everyone cocktails, because for me those things didn’t exist. I just did my thing, for years, rinsing and repeating over and over again, until I found My People. My People get my jokes, forgive my typos, and generally think I’m a charming genius instead of a shambling mess. So the sum of my advice to folks who want to traditionally publish is: Find Your People.

Of course, when someone approaches me for advice of this sort I at first act all mysterious and imply heavily that there is a secret that I’ll tell them if they buy me, say, five whiskies. Because I’m an idiot, but I’m not a fool.

No one said writing was going to be easy. We choose this life because we can’t help ourselves; certainly no one decides to be a writer for the immense riches it offers. Sure, there are immense riches, but they’re not common.

So, you’re writing a story and it’s not heading where you want it to go. Whether a Pantser or a Plotter (or a Plantser), writing a story is like steering the goddamn Titanic in an asteroid belt—that is, not easy. After a certain point trying to nudge your plot back in the direction you want is like leaning against a mountain—it has no effect. You’re heading towards a brick wall and getting bored with your own story.

In these moments, I like to pull a Truck Driver’s Gear Change.

Watching the Clutch Sail Through the Air

What’s a Truck Driver’s Gear Change? In music, it’s when you suddenly modulate a song up into a new key. One famous example is Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson; at the end of the song everyone just soars up out of nowhere. It’s either a genius move or a cheap ploy to keep listener’s attention in a repetitive song.

In writing, it’s a sudden left turn. In my book The Unconventional Novelist, I talk about a Crazy Ivan, which is the same sort of concept but in more of a plotting sense. For Pantsers, a Truck Driver’s Gear Change can be dropped into any story. Say you’re writing a romantic story about a young couple on a first date. It’s sweet and lyrical, but whatever you initial goal for the story it’s getting boring. A Truck Driver’s Gear Change would be to suddenly have them attacked by werewolves, or aliens. A hard turn into a totally different genre, tone, and concept.

It’s saved several stories for me. The initial stuff remains as strong background and foundational material, supporting the sudden shift. It doesn’t always work, but if your story is dying right in front of you anyway, it’s often exactly the reckless move you need to save it from being a complete failure. Try it! It’s fun.

Let’s just say it straight out: Your ideas are not worth very much. Ideas are cheap because ideas are like hydrogen: They are the most common elements in the writing world. Everyone walking around all those conferences, bookstores, and readings? They are absolutely dripping with ideas. And those ideas are worthless, because all have them, and very often we have the same ideas.

What makes an idea worth something is the work you put into it. That’s why writers can actually sell their stories, after all; if it was just about generating ideas we could build some sort of machine and feed it ideas and it would write books based on them (it’s possible this has already happened and they replaced several popular thriller authors with such a machine, but I digress).

It’s what you bring to an idea, the execution, that makes your writing valuable. Here, let’s have an experiment.

An Idea Experiment

If you doubt me, just check out Reddit’s Writing Prompts subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/)—which has, by the way, more than 10 million subscribers. People throw ideas out there every single day, and so far there’s no shortage in sight.

I’m now going to dash off ten ideas for stories. I swear I haven’t prepared in advance; you’re just going to have to trust me that I’ll be doing this cold. Ten ideas off the top of my head—use them if you like; I might too. Here we go:

1. Man has always heard running water that no one else hears. When he was a kid it was a trickle, but recently it’s more like a heavy rain.
2. Thief breaks into a huge mansion in search of riches, discovers it’s an immense Mystery House-cum-Murder Mansion and becomes lost in the secret rooms.
3. Old man writes a memoir and tries to sell it to publishers, only to be accused of plagiarism because his life is essentially the plot of a famous novel.
4. Couple move into a new apartment and their next-door neighbors are super loud. A noise war ensues, getting increasingly absurd, until one day next door is … chillingly silent.
5. Embittered woman drunkenly decides to murder her unfaithful husband via poison. When she wakes up in a dazed hangover her family and friends have come to visit and she can’t recall where she put the poison.
6. Man joins an online dating service, checks no sexual preference, and keeps being matches with himself.
7. Woman has been keeping a diary since she was ten. During a house move she starts flipping back through them and realizes someone’s been editing them, and deleting information.
8. Aliens invade, conquer us brutally, and offer a choice to all survivors of the Six Week War: Be hunted and killed, or live out your life as zoo exhibits. Our protagonist accepts, then keeps escaping his enclosure on the alien world, and becomes a celebrity animal.
9. Time travel of a sort is invented; you can show where a molecule or group of molecules (e.g. a person) will be in a certain period of time. The main use is to show precisely when you’re going to die, and where.
10. In the near future subdermal chips are commonly implanted in employees (which is already a rare but real thing). Now they’re being used to enforce non-compete clauses, and after your fifth job in three years you literally aren’t legally allowed to work anywhere.

Obviously some of these could use some polishing—I just made them up, after all. This took me five minutes. It’s not the ideas—it’s the execution of those ideas.