Thanks all for leaving comments and e-mailing me about Augusto Monterroso’s estate. I’m happy to say I’ve gotten in contact with them and it’s looking like there’s a very good chance I’ll be able to include his story in the anthology.
Tuesday night I did a read-through of the stories in the maybe pile. Out of the 276 stories, I check marked 149. What does this mean exactly? Well, those 149 stories were what stuck out to me at that moment. Because these stories are so short and rely so much on my participation as a reader (i.e., a lot of imagination), my mood at the time (even the weather) can sway my opinion on any particular story. So I’m setting those stories aside and next week will read through the 276 stories again. I know the suspense is killing some of you, and I apologize for that, but I hope you understand the amount of time and thought I need to put into these stories. If this were a magazine with multiple issues, I probably could have made my decisions by now and sent out responses. But obviously in terms of this anthology — most likely a once and done thing — I have to be extremely selective.
Finally, I am curious to know what you think makes a professional writer. A couple posts back in the comments section there had been a mention of novice and professional writers, and I had said for argument sake let’s assume a professional writer is someone who makes their living completely off their writing, with no other source of income. Daniel Olivas then mentioned how he didn’t quite agree with that statement, saying he doesn’t think many “professional” writers write full-time.
He’s right, of course. As Joe Konrath once put it, more people play in the NFL than there are people who write full-time.
No two writers are alike. Michael Connelly published four novels before he quit working as a crime reporter and went to write full-time. T.C. Boyle regularly publishes stories in The New Yorker and Playboy and has a book coming out almost every year, many bestsellers, but still he teaches writing at the University of Southern California where he’s been since 1978. My buddy Joe Schreiber, who has two novels coming out next month (one a Star Wars novel, another an original horror novel), works full-time as an MRI tech. He’s married, has kids, but still manages to find time to write. When I asked him once if he ever thought he’d get to a point where he could write full-time, he said he’d be happy to get to a point where he could cut back to part-time work and spend the rest writing.
Again, no two writers are alike, but despite all those differences, I consider all three of those gentlemen professional writers.
There is no definitive answer on this topic. Just like everyone has their own definition of what lazy means, everyone has their own definition of what professional means. I will say that I think many people base whether or not someone is a “professional” in terms of success. If a writer has a bestseller or wins a lot of awards, they can easily be considered a professional writer (even if that writer still has a day job). Then there are other writers who aren’t very well known, who have never won an award, yet they somehow manage to make enough money to stay afloat writing full-time. Would they, then, be considered a professional writer?
This is why I’m curious to see what other people think. And this doesn’t even have to apply to writers. Like, what makes a professional musician? Somebody who’s signed by a major record label and whose songs are played nonstop on the radio? They make their living off their art, sure, but so do some people in cover bands that play local bars. Not a lot of people, but a few, and if both types make their living off their music … well, I’m sure you see just how slippery this slope really is.
It’s also worth noting that there are “professional writers” who are arrogant assholes that act very unprofessional most of the time. Yet they continue to be successful in the amount of books they sell, the awards they win, etc.
And then you have the novice writer who has been trying to sell a novel for years and hasn’t managed it yet, and despite how frustrating it is, how it looks like it will never happen, they manage to maintain a level of professionalism in every aspect of their writing.
I could keep throwing out examples but I think I’ll open it up to you. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer, but still I’m curious to see what you have to say.
I’ll have to think about the question some more and maybe blog about it myself, but this is what comes immediately to mind for me: professional behaviour makes a professional writer.
Specifically:
“Then there are other writers who aren’t very well known, who have never won an award, yet they somehow manage to make enough money to stay afloat writing full-time. Would they, then, be considered a professional writer?”
I’m one of those.
I make the majority of my income through editing books, freelancing for a nearby regional newspaper, writing random ‘Net copy, and designing wedding and baby shower invitations. (Hey, I know some affordable offset printers; you use what you’ve got.) I write poetry for kicks and giggles, and no one I know is impressed in the slightest when it gets published.
This is all I do; I have filed it, at a profit, on my taxes for several consecutive years.
I consider myself a professional writer and editor. People pay me to work with their words. That’s my qualifier.
That said, as someone once told me before I grew enough cajones to be a freelancer, “Anyone can hang a shingle.”
In my world, and in the world I viewed from the outside before I could say these things, a pro was someone who got money to perform a said service.
A guy who you pay twenty dollars to for the service of painting your living room, therefore, is a professional painter.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t going to do a shitty job.
One of the first steps that led to my getting ANY writing gigs at all was that I TOLD people I was becoming a professional writer. Someone asked me if I could write a news article, completely out of the blue, and I said, “Yes, yes I could.”
Had this person asked me if I’d ever done anything like that before in all of my born years, he would have received a different answer… but he didn’t.
I took that assignment to heart, busted my ass over the next week before the deadline hit, read every website and library book I could find on lede sentences, the inverted pyramid, and AP style.
By the time I turned it in, it was… okay. Passable.
But the editor saw enough spark in it to send me directions for a rewrite, future assignments, eventually a permanent contract and my own section page.
“Professional” does not equal “good”.
But I admire anyone who has the audacity to call themselves a professional and has the service level and work ethic to back it up. “Good” can be taught (though I’m not sure that “great” can) and fledgling writers have something that can be improved upon.
I used the word for the first time the day I had to call My Editor (capital M, captial E!) and give her my SSN for a 1099 form.
I almost pissed my pants.
But I KEPT the word because I meet deadlines, work until four in the morning (like I’m doing now), and can be trusted.
When my old-school relatives laugh about how much money I DIDN’T make this month from the two magazines that bought my poems, I remind myself that even the Poet Laureate of the United States has a day job.
It’s all relative, and probably always will be.
Great discussion starter… made me think.
And thanks, BTW, for taking the anthology so seriously. I’m one of those waiting (though I have no idea, of course, in which stack), and believe me–I’ve waited longer.
No worries; do what you do when you do it. This is your baby.
I am actually very interested to see how one screens through submissions and decides upon entries. The mechanics behind an anthology are always fascinating to me, since I know how to construct a short story and compose a novel, but never assemble an anthology. And on a side note, this has been the shortest response period in my experience with submissions so far. There is not much suspense, since we can see the progress via your posts and the element of the unknown is eliminated.
As far as professional authors go. I have my own vocabulary. The difference between a writer and an author is not whether they behave as professional, but whether they are published or not. A writer, no matter how well mannered and adequate, without a publication is not an author.
I view a writer as an author, when he/she has a publication in anywhere really, even vanity presses and non paying e-zines.
However a professional author is someone receiving money for his work in print or online. It doesn’t need to be award winning, best selling or sustaining the author financially.
This is an over simplification, but this structure helps me wade through confusion as to whom to regard as what type. I am open to hearing other people on this.
Hmmm. I very much agree with what Mr. Markov. That being said, I’m sure that I would call myself an author, although I have had some small works published. I would, however, call myself a professional from the standpoint that I have been published and I look on my writing as a profession, even if it’s not one that can sustain me financially. I want other people to view me as a professional. I want to be taken seriously. It’s a topic I’ll have to continue thinking on and probably post again later.
As for the anthology, take your time! I spent a week sorting my choices for submission out because everytime I read through them I was in a different mood and felt differently about them. There was only one of mine that got me every time, which of course got it chosen as one of my titles. But who knows, perhaps what stirred me about it will go flat for you. That’s what’s so great about Hint fiction, you can get a thousand stories out of one sentence!
Last week I interviewed the State Treasurer. When he sat across the table from me, he saw a professional writer. He didn’t know I felt trapped in a game of pretend.
I do not feel like a professional writer even though I’ve been writing and selling for years. There’s this ‘something’ way down deep that keeps telling me I’m a phony, and maybe I am. ‘Cause I’m lazy. I don’t ‘construct’ poetry anymore. I don’t struggle with exactly the right word to use anymore. My creativity comes and goes.
And I feel guity about it.
Friends who know me well say I’ve lost my passion. Others say I have a fear of failure and rejection. I often look at my work and ask myself if I can really write. Was that one novel I sold just a fluke? Probably.
But I’m still a professional writer—no matter how much or how little I submit or how much I get paid. I think anyone who writes and submits is, on some level, a professional writer.
I have a friend who says ‘if we live it, we will become it.’ So if unpubbed writer walks around feeling, acting (writing and submitting) and claiming to be a professional writer, then I suppose s/he is a professional writer–at some level.
I would hate to think the guy who goes home after a hard day at work, pounds the keys until midnight then gets up at 5 the next morning to go back to work–and does this day in and day out, submits over and over and over again, completes several novels, receives rejection upon rejection, would not be called a professional writer. Novice seems a cruel word for this kind of passion and dedication. This is the kind of guy who makes me feel guilty for calling myself a professional.
Thanks for your wonderful thought-provoking discussions. Great group of followers. I enjoy everyone’s comments and observations.
There are several ways to look at the professional question.
First, as an attorney, it has always been drilled into me that a “professional” is someone who practices in a specialized field (like the law) that requires specialized education and training and possibly accreditation. But in the legal field, anyone who is a lawyer is a professional – even if you’re no good, inexperienced and don’t “act like a professional.” In the novice vs. professional argument, you may be a novice lawyer – but that lawyer is still a professional.
Second, professional is used in lingo to mean someone who gets paid for doing what amateurs do for free. College basketball vs. professional (nba) basketball. This could technically apply to writers – but we don’t have a farm system and the league or majors. So who would decide how much money someone should get paid to be a professional? In the NCAA world any small payment may disqualify you as an amateur – but it doesn’t necessarily make you a professional especially if it is a one time payment.
Third, more generically, a professional seems to be someone who works at a craft or a skill and is generally recognized in the field as a competent practitioner. This seems to be the one that applies to writers more so that the above two.
Me, I’m a novice (some would say hack). 12 or 13 short stories published – usually for little or no money. Couldn’t come close to sustaining a living on writing even if I were to quit my day job and work at it full time. I “work” at my craft, but don’t have an MFA and don’t attend writing seminars or even industry events.
Maybe it’s like obscenity – we know a professional when we see one – but the definition is too hard to figure out.
I guess because Jason and I are both in the legal profession, I like how he has parsed out the various issues. But let me add one other issue into mix:
I consider what we do as writers to be an art form. Some of us try to make a lasting literary mark at one end of the spectrum, while others study the “market” and are attempting to write a blockbuster. (Digression: This reminds me of a comment made by an editor for a large New York publishing house when she turned down one of my short-story collections as being “wonderful” but not “commercial enough” and “too literary. She wanted me to submit a novel that “would sell” and had “movie potential” I told her that if I ever wrote that kind of novel, I’d send it her way.) This is similar to those who paint or draw: some would like to create great art, others will aim for more commercial (i.e., profitable) output. Certainly, some do both. For example, one fine short-story writer also writes novelizations for a hit TV series. He considers these novels to be exactly what they are: quickly dashed off product tie-ins that sell nicely and allow him to write “literary” fiction (he also teaches creative writing at a major university). I think that all of these writers are “professional” if they earn some kind of income from what they produce, even if it isn’t much and even if they must earn most of their money doing other things. But in the end, I agree with Jay that when it comes to writers (and other artists, for that matter), using the word “professional” might cause more confusion than anything else. I don’t know if I’ve added much to the discussion but those are my thoughts.
Robert: Thank you for this forum. I am taking a vacation day (from my law job) and therefore using today to edit my novel and chat with all of these wonderful writers on your blog!
Wow, everyone, thanks so much for your insightful comments! A lot of great stuff here. And Harry, you bring up another good question re: author vs. writer. That sounds like a blog post for another time
I think that because trying to assess whether someone is a “professional” based on income or money alone is really hard, when think of a professional writer I generally think of someone who less-experienced writers would or could turn to for advice or knowledge.
It’s not all that less complicated than trying to tease out who is professional and who isn’t based on if they can make a living off of it, but I also think that in the arts, a certain degree of professionalism comes when you have spent enough time on the craft to be able to share it with newer artists.
All the above comments are thought provoking. Someone said, “If you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, then well you are a duck.”
I am one of those people that fought not to become a writer. Why? I didn’t think I could ever live up to society’s definition of professional writer/author. So I made a great living doing something else. Periodically the writing would come back to haunt me like an old friendship I felt quilty over abandoning. You can only fool yourself for so long then you become what was intended from the beginning. I became a professional writer the first time someone said they enjoyed reading what I had written. Isn’t that really what writing is all about to began with? Someone reading and enjoying your work. So hello, I am Debra Johnson, I have a blog, get paid a small amount for writing a monthly e-zine column, have a story to be released in an anthology next month and I am a professional writer.
I think ‘professional’ is a state of mind. Not being a ‘label’ kind of person, I believe the way someone views their writing, and their commitment to it, is all that really matters. Cash/income aside, if you approach your writing with a passion (or if it has you in its stranglehold) – you’re a writer, ‘professional’ or not. Of course, there’s a skill-set that all writers must have (no one’s ‘gunna read ya storee if you ain’t got you sum good grammer n stuff’), and therein lies the rub. If your passion is the written word, you do all that you can, learn all that you can, to ensure your writing is the best it can be. If that’s not a level of professionalism (regardless of publishing credits), I don’t know what is.
I barely squish out a living from my writing, and have to supplement my income elsewhere, but if someone asks me what I do, my answer is always the same. “I write.” It’s what I do. It’s who I am. ‘Professional’ or ‘novice’, my answer won’t change.
To those who have had extraordinary literary success, I take my hat off to you. To those who continue to struggle with publication, who refuse to put their pen down, *you* are the professional.
I’ll step off my soapbox now, I’ve some writing to do.
“Professional” cuts two ways: salary and behavior
I write, but I’m not a professional writer (i.e., I’m not making a significant income from writing). I do many other things…paint, read, drive, watch old movies, blog…and don’t claim to be a professional at any of them.
But part of that label, “professional”, relates to how I carry myself. When I submit, communicate with editors, agents, etc., I try to be as professional as possible.
Even though by salary I’m not a pro, I can still act the part. Professionalism can be a way of life regardless of one’s pay rate. I know plenty of “professionals” in other fields (especially some of my fellow teachers) who make a habit of demonstrating unprofessional behavior.
I’m tempted to say I don’t like labels and leave it at that, but I realize that wasn’t your question. As you said, there aren’t any right answers but here are a few thoughts.
When I think of the term ‘professional writer’ my first thoughts go to the word ‘profession’, which implies something you do for a living. Following that line I worked as a professional writer for many years doing technical and marketing writing. It was my full time job and I was paid well for it. The word ‘professional’ broadens the meaning to imply that you treat your work seriously AND are good at it. But what does ‘seriously’ mean? Is there an hour figure you can attach where it crosses over from being a hobby to a profession? And what does good mean? You can be a good writer without the world rewarding you for it. You can even die and have your writing become well known later.
I could go on but you get my drift. Here’s the bottom line for me: I would never tell someone that I was a professional writer. It smacks of trying too hard. I’m a writer who is striving to improve, who writes and submits in the margins of busy family life and part time hourly work, who is always trying to increase those margins, who has made as little as zero for a story and as much as $1,000 for a story.
Hey, there’s a hot button: if you haven’t done it before (sorry, I’m pretty new to your blog), how about a discussion on whether you should ever write for free? People really get boiling over that one…
To be honest with you, Lorri, I’m not a big fan of labels either. The whole topic was more food for thought than anything else. Plus, it’s fascinating to see what others think!
In terms of giving your work away for free, I did a very in-depth blog post at the old blog. Actually, it was so in-depth that I had to break it up into two parts:
http://robertswartwood.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/bottom-of-the-barrel-part-1/
http://robertswartwood.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/bottom-of-the-barrel-part-2/
Basically, I don’t see anything wrong with giving your work away for free as long as you KNOW you’re in fact giving your work away for free. Many writers (mostly novice) fool themselves into thinking that it’s just the same as getting paid. Well, it’s not of course. Main thing — if you’re giving your work away for free, it should be for a very good reason. Like with my novella The Silver Ring, I posted it online to get it out there and hopefully gain a new readership. Would I do that with a novel? Very unlikely. But a novella is a strange beast, because there are very limited markets and … well, like I said, I go much more in-depth in those old blog posts.
Thanks for stopping by
Hi Robert,
I always associated being paid with being a professional writer, but have changed my mind since I now spend far more time writing than doing my day job! So I am a writer, with a part time job to pay my bills! It would be a dream come true to be paid to write and in a position to give up my job (to spend even more time writing!) but at the moment I’m happy knowing there are readers out there enjoying my work – that’s the biggest thrill for me.
I agree about the pay thing, Robert. Of course everyone would love to get paid but if you submit to literary journals like I do, you know going in that many of them don’t pay or just pay nominally. But none of them lack for submissions because writers want to get published.
Thanks for the links to the old posts. I’ll check them out.
The professional versus non-professional question made me stop and think. Do I consider myself a professional writer?
No. Two reasons for that.
Yes, I have been published and have upcoming releases in both print and online venues, paying and non-paying. I still have no idea what most of the markets for short fiction want and I can’t afford to buy samples of each journal to get a feel for what they like. So, I flounder and do guess work. To compensate for not being able to read each journal, I read all guidelines carefully, construct my cover letter or query with care, follow submission procedure for each market I submit to and just hope what I write is what they like. I’m still building my platform and networking with others. I didn’t finish high school and never went to college. Yet, I’ve still managed to publish some of my work. And I am still not a professional writer.
I’m still learning about the publishing industry. I don’t know enough about it to call myself a professional. I try to be professional about my queries and submissions, but that doesn’t mean I am a professional. Until I can send out my work with confidence and know I have the right market for my horror short and longer work, I won’t be a professional. (An author–not yet either. I won’t call myself that until I have a novel length work out and maybe not even then.)
Secondly, my output is still varied too greatly. The word count for a single week can vary from 1000 words to 15000 words. I know several writers who can output 2000 words in a single day. I’ve done it myself, but there is never a steady number of words coming out. Sometimes it is a labor of love, sometimes it’s a stump-fest. There are times I struggle with every sentence, second guessing myself.
So no, I’m not a professional. Any writer who can submit with confidence and be consistent with their work is what constitutes a professional to me. Maybe I’m just weird, though.