Three Simple Rules

As you all know, I’m not a complicated man. Give me a cat in my lap, a glass of scotch, and a keyboard and I’m more or less complete. Also, I have a tendency to reduce all of life’s questions to an extremely brief list of bullet points; I am comforted by limited choices, and so I boil everything down to insane levels of generality.

For example, my writing career philosophy (not to be confused with an artistic philosophy), which is essentially three nested rules:

1. It’s better to finish stories than not.
2. It’s better to be published than not.
3. It’s better to be paid than not.

That’s it. Those are the guiding principles of my writing career.

Simple Rules for a Simpleton

Better to finish stories. I make this point a lot, but it bears repeating: You sell exactly zero of the stories and novels you don’t finish. Even if I’m not feeling 100% confident in a story’s success, I try to finish it. I can always revise a mediocre story later. I can’t do anything with a story that isn’t even a story yet.

Better to be published than not. I firmly believe that the only reason for writing, for creating, is to share your ideas and works and let people read them. Possibly to force people to read them, too, but that’s a whole other blog post involving the small private army I’m organizing. The point is, I intend to publish everything I write, someday. And so should you.

Better to be paid. You can’t always control market forces, and you can’t always get paid. But you should aspire to always be paid, because being paid for your work recognizes the value of it, being paid means your publishing partner values your work, and being paid means you might be able to write more.

Those are simple rules, but they make all the difference. Notice there’s a lot of wiggle room with each, though; I don’t see much value in being rigid. Sometimes you might not finish something for a good reason, sometimes you might be okay with not being paid. Guidelines instead of rules, maybe—but useful nonetheless.

On the other hand, my rules for alcohol are even simpler:

1. Whiskey.