Neil Baker

The three things a succesful writer must have

What does it take to be a successful writer, freelance or otherwise? The new book from marathon runner, novelist and Raymond Carver fan Haruki Murakami has an interesting answer.

Murakami is writing about novelists, but I think what he says applies more widely. To succeed, you need:

1. Talent. Naturally. You won't get far as a writer unless you can.... write.
2. Focus. The ability to direct whatever talent you have to the task at hand.
3. Endurance. For a novel, you're looking at hours of work every day – for years. But even if you're just writing a 2,000 word feature, you've got to have the determination to keep going.

You need all three, but not in equal portions. All the talent in the world won't get you very far without focus and endurance. And bags of focus and endurance won't get you very far without some talent. But how much writing talent do you actually need?

A lot of endurance and focus can compensate for a lack of talent. I've worked with writers who are not actually that good at writing. But they have a cast-iron grip on what they want to achieve and will keep going until they get it. They are resilient buggers. And they are successful, I suppose. They rely on their editors and sub-editors to tidy up their prose – to compensate for their own lack of talent. Given that the demise of subs is now taken for granted, it'll be interesting to see how such writers fare in future.

I'd like to turn that into a formula somehow. Maybe:

success = 4xTalent + 2xFocus + 3xEndurance

But I don't know. I haven't got the focus or endurance needed to work it out.

How to get short story ideas

When I described my emergency technique for thinking up article ideas, I said I'd blog about the similar process I use for short stories. So here it is... the Five Step Short Story Idea Generating Process (TM pending).

1. Just write down, in a sentence, any idea you might have had knocking around for a while, even if you think it’s rubbish. Put it to one side.
2. Take a blank sheet of paper and make a random list of characters and their objectives: A man who desperately needs £100,000 within a week; a woman who needs to get the sack from work within 48 hours; a man who needs to get his head unstuck from some railings; a woman who wants to be young again; a person who wants to buy a second-hand caravan
3. Make a random list of  scenarios: The world will certainly end next Thursday; walking is made illegal; all the bees die; dogs rule the world; Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister again
4. Make a list of interesting words: Treachery, lust, envy, arrogance, porridge, goats, pasta, secrets
5. Quickly jot down sentences and ideas that take something from at least two of the lists. Such as:

• A man needs £100,000 to deceive a goat
• A woman trying to annoy a goat gets her head stuck in some railings
• Arrogance kills all of the bees
• Dogs rule through treachery
• Porridge is the secret of youth
• Over-consumption of pasta will lead the word to oblivion next Tuesday

Continue with step 5 until you have a sentence that sparks the idea that will get you going. Or write a story based on the idea you noted down at step 1 – if you failed to come up with anything at step 5, the first idea probably doesn’t look so bad now.

And just to prove that truth is stranger than fiction, since generating the "Arrogance kills all of the bees" idea, I've notice this book, just published: A World Without Bees, by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum.

How to create ideas for short stories and features? A five-step process

Jack el-Hai writes well about what he calls “The Mystery of Ideas” in the ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing. People tend to assume that words are the writer's basic unit of currency, but they are mistaken, he says: "Ideas are the raw materials for our industry.”

To be successful, you have to know how to find, develop and sell ideas. And where do these great ideas come from? Often, they are just lying around waiting to be picked up and used. You can find them in newspapers, magazines, websites, even your email inbox. You can get them by listening to people, or just by thinking.

Generating ideas is about being in the right frame of mind, rather than following a procedure, El-Hai argues. And he’s right, most of the time. But what if you desperately need an idea and you haven’t got one? (My first editor said you should never get yourself into that position – you should always have an idea in your notebook. But…)

Here’s a five-step technique I use when I’m stuck:

1/ Get a piece of paper and make a list of potential topics down the left-hand side. For me, this might be data security, fraud and people skills.

2/ Make another list of topics down the right-hand side. For me, insider dealing, biofuels, carbon trading.

3/ Between the two lists, write down a word or short phrase at random. Yesterday, I used “Chinese whispers”.

4/ Quickly jot down as many ways that you could link a word from the first list and word from the second, using your random word as a bridge between the two. Don't worry if they sound rubbish

5/ Pause, chuck in another random word and repeat step 4 until one of the ideas sounds workable

I used this technique yesterday and ended up with a column about George Michael, the lyrics for Careless Whisper, data security, insider dealing, and Andrew Ridgeley. Was it any good? I hit my deadline.

I’ve used a similar technique to generate short story ideas, which I'll post about soon.

Why I don't read my articles once they've been published

I don't read my articles once they've been published. Or I try not to. At least not when they first come out. Why? Because there's a lot to lose and nothing to gain. Here are some pros and cons:

Cons:

1. I'll just be reminded of the good stuff I had to leave out because I didn't have enough space
2. I'll just be reminded of the holes in my story that I didn't have time to fill
3. I might spot a clumsy change made by an editor
4. I might spot a clumsy mistake made by me (hopefully very, very rarely)
5. I'll come away with a general feeling of dissapointment

Pros:

1. I might get a cosy glow of satisfaction as I reflect on what a good job I did.

In my experience, the cons always outweigh the pros. If I do read a piece when it is first published, I tend to regret it. Not because it is full of those errors listed in points 1-4, but because of point 5 - that strange, nagging feeling of disappointment.

Anne Enright describes it brilliantly in the Guardian:

"It doesn't matter what you think about your work. This is one of the weirdest lessons a writer has to learn, that the emotions that push you to write better, with greater accuracy, truth, verve, wit; the despair that makes you cast your eyes to the ceiling and then plunge back to the keyboard; the running pleasure of one good word being followed by a better; the glee as you set a time bomb ticking in the text; the glorious megalomania with which you set out to describe and yes! conquer! the! world! ... are all completely redundant once the piece is finished. More than redundant. They are dust and ashes. The thing you have written is a piece of shit. Can I say this louder? And then repeat it really, really quietly? The thing you have just written is a piece of shit."

After a decent interval, I will sometimes re-read a published article. Then a different kind of disappointment takes hold. Again, Enright captures it well:

"Five years, say, after you have written some piece of junk; some fraudulent, spatchcocked, scrap of literary debris, you come across it again, and you read it in an idle way, and you say, with a terrible sense of loss and shock, "I used to be able to write. I used to be quite good. Where's all that gone?"

You just can't win.

(note: the exception to my don't-read-your-own-stuff rule: when writing my first piece for a new client or publication, I check and see what edits they have made)

How to find a freelance writer or journalist

Often when I start working for a new editor or corporate client, I'm  surprised how hard they've had to search to find a freelance writer. I'd have thought they'd know loads of writers, or at least know how to find one, but frequently they don't.

Even without a fat contacts book, surely all they'd have to do is enter "how to find a freelance writer" into Google, and they'd be quickly sorted. Well, no. I just tried it, and all you get is pages and pages about how to be a freelance writer, not how to find one.

So if you've come across this post because you are trying to find a writer, here are five tips

1. Email me! I'd be glad to help, if I can. I gave this post a very descriptive header in the hope I'd attract people just like you.
2. Take a look at the National Union of Journalists' freelance directory. Great if you want someone UK based. You can search for people with the skills and experience you need
3. Or maybe try the search-able Journalist Directory at Sourcewire. It's a bit biased towards techie folk, but perhaps that's what you're after?
4. Still no luck? Go to the Find a Freelancer tool at the news and resource site journalism.co.uk - in which I don't have a listing, I've just noticed (odd)
5. If you want a writer based in the US, go to the American Society of Journalists and Authors and use their Freelance Writer Search

And if that still gets you nowhere, return to tip #1 and email me.

Just to check I'm up and running...

I decided back in November that I would stop blogging until I had finished my MA. And I decided back in April, when I submitted my final dissertation, that I would start again when I got my results. Well, the results came in today (Distinction - nice!), so I'm back. I'm assuming that everyone who subscribed to my feed will have deleted it because of the lack of activity, so I'm kind of starting from scratch. Oh well....

And just to check that I can still remember how to post a photo, this – hopefully – is what a 15,000 word cultural studies dissertation on work and identity looks like when you line it up in piles on the floor of your study:

Sky following Ben Hammersley's lead

Following the excellent work that Ben Hammersely has been doing for the BBC, Sky has started to use Twitter, Flickr and RSS to cover news, as the Press Gazette reports.

Sky report Derek Tedder went to the environmental protest camp at Heathrow, and posted live updates on the Sky News website by writing short messages on his mobile phone. He also took photos with the phone's camera and uploaded those to Flickr.

There's no link in the Press Gazette piece to Teder's efforts, but you can view them here.

Unfortunately, the results are pretty dull. "Apparently a large generator is being delivered," he reports at one point. Personally, I could have done without the as-it-happens report, and waited for the generator scoop to be confirmed. And you'd be pressed to find any of his photos - I couldn't.

Anyway, at least he's having a go.

If I ran the Internet...

I love this...

Social media and the middle classes

I was having lunch with a friend in Brighton yesterday. We got talking about Facebook. He'd never heard of it. I told him it was dominated by middle-class whites, a conclusion based on evidence from my own very limited useage.

It seems I was right. Research from the US shows:

"...those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college."

Was it really worth all the research time and money to prove something so obvious?

MySpace, on the other hand, has

"most of the kids who are socially ostracised at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers,"

Queers...? Did she really say that?

The changing role of the magazine editor

Most commentary I read about new media and journalism focuses on newspapers, and the "damage" done to their USP - news. David Hepworth has two interesting thoughts today about the impact on magazines.

1/ The role of the editor:

"Editors used to be judged solely on the quality and success of the most recent edition of their paper product. Not any more. Reader events, websites, podcasts, commercial initiatives, newsletters and other extensions not yet guessed at: these are part of the editor's job in the future and it will not be acceptable to do any of them grudgingly."

In the future? These should be part of an editor's job now. The key word here is "grudgingly."

2/ The big difference between newspapers and (monthly) magazines.

Newspapers are geared to churning out lots of stuff, so spewing that content onto the internet is relatively easy, compared to the changes needed to magazine culture:

"Alongside these steadily humming industrial operations, magazine teams are like jewellers, painstakingly cutting and polishing stones in order to make sure that they fit perfectly in one particular setting. Ironically, they pride themselves on spending the majority of their time deciding what not to include, which makes little sense amid the teeming bounty of the web"

Not sure about the "steadily humming industrial operations" part, but you get the point.