Comment by chrismeller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrismeller | Hacker News Reader

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For anyone interested in writing “for real” (professionally or as a hobby) I highly recommend John Scalzi’s blog [1]. He’s cynical, he’s funny, and above all he’s practical.

Among his advice over the years a few things have really stuck with me:

1) Don’t get an MFA, it’s a waste of money. If you need a grammar class, take one. If you need more of a basis in x literary genre because that’s what you want to write in, take a class or just read a ton in that genre.

2) Set up the habit of writing. If you don’t write a lot of crap on a regular basis you’ll never write anything. You will throw away a TON of what you write, but it’s only by writing that 99% of crap that you’ll find the 1% that’s worth keeping.

3) Don’t quit your day job. You will never, ever, ever write for 8 hours a day straight. Rather than sitting around depressed all day because you haven’t written anything worth a damn, you may as well have a basic 8 to 5 office job that pays the bills, health insurance, etc. Not only does it remove money as a concern, but it gets your mind off of the fact that you haven’t written anything good and frees up your creative juices for that next scheduled writing period.

4) Don’t be pretentious and refuse to write anything that isn’t “pure” or “worthy”. All the advertisements you see and brochures you read are written by someone. Being persuasive with your writing can pay really well and give you the security to pound out that next great American novel.

1: https://whatever.scalzi.com/

Edit: line breaks

Do you have experience as a professional writer? I'm curious, how you think a person without a degree on journalism, writing, etc, can get a job writing? I'm a software engineer, by the way.

Not that I'm interested in changing my career or anything, but your comment was interesting and I do like writing, so I think it's worth knowing!

Incidentally, Scalzi also had that problem.

He wrote Agent to the Stars to try to figure out if he wanted to write and what it was to write. http://scalzi.com/agent/

> In the summer of 1997, I was 28 years old, and I decided that after years of thinking about writing a novel, I was simply going to go ahead and write one. There were two motivations for doing so. First, I was simply curious if I could; I'd had up to that time a reasonably successful life as a writer, but I'd never written anything longer than ten pages in my life outside of a classroom setting. Two, my ten-year high school reunion was coming up, and I wanted to be able to say I'd finished a novel just in case anyone asked (they didn't, the bastards).

> In sitting down to write the novel, I decided to make it easy on myself. I decided first that I wasn't going to try to write something near and dear to my heart, just a fun story. That way, if I screwed it up (which was a real possibility), it wasn't like I was screwing up the One Story That Mattered To Me. I decided also that the goal of writing the novel was the actual writing of it -- not the selling of it, which is usually the goal of a novelist. I didn't want to worry about whether it was good enough to sell; I just wanted to have the experience of writing a story over the length of a novel, and see what I thought about it. Not every writer is a novelist; I wanted to see if I was.

I'm a technical writer for a tech software start-up, but I started in sales. There's always some content that needs to be written. Blogposts, documentation, whitepapers, etc.

I started by... well writing. I wrote a some blogposts, and a few of them trended on HN. Eventually, when we hired our CMO, he saw what I had been putting out and asked me to help out more. At a certain point, it made sense for me to transition entirely to writing.

Since you're not a professional writer, don't expect to be given a lot of writing responsibility. You basically have to prove yourself. If you have an editor at your company, work with them. I didn't have any formal writing training, but I applied the feedback I got from our editor and slowly my quality improved. It took me about 4-5 months before I was fully trusted to write quality pieces without hand-holding.

Given that you're a software engineer, you have the domain knowledge to write some very useful content. It's just about finding your style.

Writers, unlike most software engineers (save those who work on open source) can readily share work samples with potential employers. Other than that it should only be a matter of getting your resume past the filter that requires a writing or journalism degree. You also didn't specify what you meant by writing jobs, so it's hard to give more detail.

Writing seems like programming in one respect: if you can do the job you can be hired, regardless of your education.

It depends on what you mean by professional writer. Being a developer advocate, at many companies, is equivalent to writing full-time, and a software engineer who has recently developed an interest in writing is typically an easier sell for those roles than a writer who has recently developed an interest in code.

This is basically true for all domain-specific writing jobs as well. Being an expert in the domain and being interested in writing is in many ways advantageous compared to being an expert in writing with an interest in the domain.

The caveat I'd make about devrel and related jobs is that they tend to be pretty people-oriented--which doesn't necessarily appeal to a lot of software engineers (or writers).

Any decent writer can make money from writing, but depending on how you want to be hired/paid then the approach could be very different. So, I guess it depends on...

1. What do you want to write? Ad copy? News? Fiction?

2. What do you bring to that subject matter that has value?

Here's a real life example: About 10 years ago, a friend of mine was a business major and had a day job in marketing. He liked to write so he spent an hour every weeknight writing on his website. That website gained a following and with that proven success, he wrote a book proposal, shopped it around with some book agents, then they shopped it around with some publishers.

They eventually got him a book deal. That book did very well and he got another book deal. Then one book was optioned for a movie. After his third book deal he was able to quit his day job. The movie option expired after two years and another studio optioned it. It has yet to be turned into a movie, but he continues to get paid by a studio who wants to prevent other studios from turning it into a movie before them. They may never actually do it though. He's written a few more books since then too.

If you're thinking of writing a book though, the book itself is not where you make the money... you make the real money on whatever the book leads to: speaking engagements, movie options (fiction or nonfiction), other gigs that come from the awareness of you through the book, etc.

I think it would be much harder to be hired as a journalist without a journalism degree, unless you demonstrate your journalism ability somewhere else first (your own website perhaps).

As a developer, I think technical documentation could use a major improvement at many companies which might let you use both writing and development skills. But again, your journey to getting paid to write starts with knowing what you want to write.

You'll probably need a portfolio to get hired as a writer (or even into a job that has writing as a significant component).

For journalism, the issue isn't the lack of a journalism degree--which many/most journalists don't have. It's the general lack of jobs, especially those that pay more than subsistence wages. (And, even then, a lot of them are at pretty low quality sites. And the sort of local newspapers that a lot of journalists got started at are gone in large part.)

I agree with most of the other comments but I'd also point out that I'm pretty sure the majority of journalists I know do not have journalism degrees although most probably have a liberal arts degree of some sort. (And J School specifically is viewed by at least some as an anti-pattern.) I'd also echo another comment that, as a software engineer, there are certainly jobs at many tech companies that involve a lot of writing/speaking.

I'm not a full time writer but I do write as a freelancer from time to time.

Lately, I've been writing technical articles for a tech company. It all started because I wrote a introduction to their product on Github and shared it on Twitter. They liked it, and contacted me to write more of that stuff.

I'm sure there are plenty of tech companies that are willing to invest in producing content to get more exposure (guides, tutorials, videos, etc) for a new product.

I’m merely paraphrasing his thoughts, as a professional writer.

In this case I do agree however. Perhaps full time journalism would be a bit different, but writing short stories, novels, or freelance news pieces is going to come down to sending it randomly to a variety of publishers and hoping they like it enough to actually speak to you.

None of that process has anything to do with your “bonafides”, it has to do with writing well and composing a story (imaginary or otherwise) and some peon at the receiving firm actually liking it enough to bump it up the chain.

While I’ve used this advice to write better (blog entries, emails, presentations, arguments, etc.) I have not even endeavored to do it professionally. It’s still been helpful for me.

Note to self: don't get a Multi-Factor Authentication

By checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFA, I presume you meant Master of Fine Arts.

I have implemented multi-factor authentication systems and have given public presentations on the topic, but I didn't jump to that as the first association for the acronym MFA. Guess I need to work harder on my geek cred!

So true, who wants to look for their phone every time they sit down to write? ;-)

I would also recommend Writer on Writing by Peter Clines [0]. He is very practical, which I like, while covering a lot of subjects in a funny and easy to digest way.

[0]: http://thoth-amon.blogspot.com/

I had a lot of free time in the past and spend a lot of it writing. 99% of what someone writes will be crap. That is like 1% of the code you write actually running. It is really difficult to feel motivated to keep writing when your normal output is at such a low quality.

I'd argue that this is the number one hurdle to writing more and writing "better".

IMO that's the wrong way to think about it.

As I see it, it's not that what you write is 99% crap and 1% good stuff. It's more like you're sketching before producing the final painting. It's not crap, it's just an unavoidable part of the process you need to go through.

Also, thinking that 99% of what you write is crap must be super demoralizing.

I think it's the only realistic way to think about it. It's not sketching an outline then producing a quality piece of writing. It's sketching an outline then producing something that is very mediocre. Even after revisions. 99% of the time.

If you can accept that and still show up to write every day you will eventually produce some good work. If you cannot then you will very likely be demoralized and quit.

I'd argue some greats and naturals may have a higher quality output rate up to something like 5% but that's still 95% shit.

I don't know. To me there is a fundamental difference between something that needs more work and something that is shit. Maybe it's just a perception thing since writing is so malleable compared to other mediums where there is no fixing anything (eg: watercolor).

I don't suppose you have more specific links to the places where he's talked about this? I'd be interested in reading more.

The suggestion:

> 3) Don’t quit your day job.

Is interested advice. Does he actually have advice for how to do this, and maintain any sort of reasonable writing schedule? I can see the practicality, but the obvious downside is having your time squeezed into smaller and smaller pieces (especially if you're also a parent).

Get up at 430am. It's possible, even with a baby/toddler.

Having read about the habits of writers, a lot of writers limit their "writing" to a few hours/day and spend the rest of their time in the business of being a writer. If you're just starting, you mostly need to do the writing part.

Getting up at 4:30am is possible if you have a baby? Not only is it possible, in my experience it's inevitable.

Babies are different of course.. mine slept in a bit longer, but I definitely felt more capable in the all consuming parenting zone if I had a bit of my own locked in, too.

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