money … flowing like a river

Rules are made for the common good, which is all very good for the common.  ~ Jasmine Guy, as Whitley Gilbert

Last post, I went after one of my least favorite writing “rules”: Write What You Know.  My favorite teacher never fed me that party line — thank God — and I think I’ve been the better writer for it.  Today I want to go after another rule that’s doing some people more harm than good:

Money Always Flows Toward The Writer.

Before I really get rolling, I want to say that my stance regarding the flow of money is not quite so rigid as my position against WWYK.  Certainly we want money flowing toward the writer.  My opposition is to the dogmatic application of the MoneyFlow rule.  The truth is that not only will money flow away from the writer from time to time, but that the writer should encourage that to happen.

If money always flows to the writer, how are we to buy the things we need to have?  Seriously.  Are we really going up to the register with our box of purple ballpoint pens and telling the cashier, “Hey, no, I’m a writer.  So I don’t have to pay for these.  In fact, you should give me twenty dollars.”

(If we are supposed to be doing that, by the way, I really do need to hear about it, since I’m spending my own money on that stuff.)

The Money Flow rule, applied dogmatically, would seem to prohibit spending any money, not just on pencils and pens and that wonderful stuff but on classes and memberships and things like that.  Not a good result.  Writers need to send money flowing away from them sometimes.  We just need to watch where it flows and why it’s flowing there.

Some of the things I pay for are writing necessities.  There are the pencils and pens I mentioned earlier.  I didn’t pay for my laptop (my dad gave it to me as a gift), but I’ve spent money on flash drives and printer cartridges and paper.  I paid for my AlphaSmart when I thought the Internet was distracting me, and then I paid for a cable to connect it to my computer.  I need that stuff, and it’s been worthwhile to spend on it.

Some of the best money I spend on writing every year goes toward my membership dues for Romance Writers of America and the Virginia Romance Writers.  Every year, I get back more than I pay for.  Just the 12 issues of the Romance Writers Report, the downloadable handouts from each year’s National Conference and the online copy of Keys to Success are worth my annual dues, and the RWA has so much more to offer than those three things.  I’ve learned so much from regular meetings with the VRW (and from the Meetings After The Meetings, at lunch), and I’ve made some great friends I probably wouldn’t have met if money hadn’t been flowing from the writer.  It’s possible to do some networking and keep up with the industry and improve the actual writing without paying a dime.  But I know I’m getting real quality for my money, and if I didn’t think that was the case, I wouldn’t spend it.

Certainly the writing world is full of scams and shadiness and good old-fashioned wastes of money.  I’m a firm believer in investigating spending opportunities before I allow money to flow away from me.  Money doesn’t flow anywhere unless I know what I’m likely to get back — and whether I’m likely to get something every bit as good or better without paying for it.  But I spend money on my writing when it’s worthwhile to do so.

As a romance writer, I often have to grit my teeth and try to respond gracefully when people treat my work like a hobby (graceful responses are listed in Keys to Success, by the way).  But the MoneyFlow rule has made writing one of the only businesses in existence in which owners are actively discouraged from investing money into their own enterprises.  The MoneyFlow rule has the power to close doors and keep them closed.  Don’t let this bit of dogma keep you from getting ahead.

so what do *you* know?

Last week, the teacher who introduced me to creative writing died.

I was eight years old and in third grade when I wrote my first story in her class.  I may already have told you that it was a long (for me, anyway), handwritten mystery involving nuclear waste and a wildly complicated government conspiracy reaching from the Oval Office to our classroom.  There was even a little romance in it.  I enjoyed writing that story so much; it was more fun than anything I’d ever done before.  And it felt … right. 

My teacher gave me lots of opportunities to keep using that part of my creative energy.  She was the first person to show me that writing stories was something real people did as a job.  From that day to this, I’ve had only one answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” 

Today — after too much time away from this blog and from actual writing — I want to write about something my teacher never told me.

She never once said, “Write what you know.”

If she had, as so many others did in the years that followed, I would have stopped cold and never written another word.  I knew a lot for a little eight-year-old girl.  I was writing to get away from it.  The last thing in the world I wanted was to put what I knew into my stories, which were exciting and fun and everything I wanted from life.

Fortunately, my teacher let me write whatever I pleased, and if she minded the ambitious scope of my stories, she never let on.  By the time someone first tried to tell me to write what I knew, the warning had little effect on me.  I heard it all the time, but I wasn’t listening.

Write what you know (WWYK) is one of the most dangerous things people say to new writers for a number of reasons.  There’s sound advice at its base, but the delivery is keeping new writers, especially the young ones, from hearing it.  Like a lot of other writing “rules,” WWYK has lost its true spirit to robotic repetition and dogmatic application.  The heart of WWYK is worth preserving.  Today, I want to examine what it could really mean.

1.  Write What You Feel.

WWYK drives young writers into formula and cliché because it feels limiting.  So many of us come to writing when we’re coming to terms with the limitations of Real Life, as opposed to the realm of No Such Thing As.  At that crucial juncture, the warning of WWYK can sound a lot like “there’s no such thing as,” which in turn can sound a lot like a restriction to the confines of Real Life.  What a bummer for the young writer!  That would have put a stop to my tale of conspiracy for sure, and I’m not sure any of my current stories would fare any better.  I’ve spent too much time in earlier posts wailing about how little I know of Real Life romance.

The better approach is to encourage young writers to Write What You Feel.  Preserve the outlandish scenarios.  We grownups used to call it playing make-believe, but now we call it suspension of disbelief, and we need it to survive Real Life.  If reality must intrude — if we really need the story to be realistic — let’s build that foundation with real emotions.  It’s the same thing that makes science fiction and fantasy work so well.  No matter how wild the rest of the story is, what draws us in is not whether we *know* about magic or *know* about space travel.  What draws us in is what we feel for the characters, what we feel with the characters, and what we can learn about our own feelings and our own lives.

2.  Know What You Write.

WWYK has always sounded to me like a condescending reminder that I haven’t convinced my reader that I know the details about my subject matter.  Years ago, I think a lot of writing teachers would have stopped me as soon as I started with the nuclear waste (it was a lovely bright green and glowed in the dark).  Nuclear waste isn’t really like that, they’d say.  Shouldn’t I stick to something I know more about?

Well, sure I could.  But I couldn’t think of a plausible reason the Oval Office would be involved with anything I knew about.

Seriously, though, rather than limiting writers to what they already know, why not encourage them to get to know what they’re writing?  The Internet’s a gold mine, if all you need are superficial details, but if you need to know a lot about what you’re writing, that’s where the fun really starts.

I started work on a story where the hero and heroine were traveling in a single-engine plane.  At first, I had a fight scene planned, in which the hero would struggle with the villain at the back of the plane.  But I realized that I had never been in one of those planes before, and I wanted to be sure I got the layout of it right.

So I went to the handy-dandy Internet, and I went searching for someone nearby with a single engine plane.  I found New Kent Aviation and Doug Cumins.  According to his website, Doug would not only show me the inside of a single-engine plane, he’d let me take the wheel, and all for a surprisingly low fee.  I sent Doug an email explaining that I was a writer researching a story and looking for details about single-engine planes.  He signed me up for a discovery flight. 

I wanted details, and I sure got them!  I thought I’d only be spending a little time in the pilot’s seat — I was surprised to find that I’d be there for most of the flight.  Doug had a set of controls on his side, thank God, but I learned firsthand what it might be like to fly that plane.  As if that weren’t more than enough, Doug answered all my questions about emergency landings, how much space my characters could use for luggage, how far they could expect to travel on one tank of fuel, everything.  It was the experience of a lifetime, and now I know more about what I’m writing, too.  I’ve just got to actually write it.  That’s another post for another day.

3.  You Know More Than You Think.

The worst part of WWYK is that it gives writers little credit for what they do know and how many different ways that can be applied.  It’s easy to say “write what you know” and far more difficult to encourage young writers to really examine what they know.  Even the youngest of writers has a perspective, a point of view, a body of life experience that’s fresh and new to the world.  That’s the WYK of WWYK.  It’s not about a list of accomplishments or milestones along the road of life.  It’s something personal and unique that is a part of every writer in such a way that they may not recognize that it’s a source they can use for their writing.  Every writer knows something — at least one thing — that no one else knows.  That’s absolutely what should be written about, and it’ll find its home in any setting the writer chooses.  Even the outlandish ones.