Knowing Who You Are in This World

Highly creative people can sometimes come to believe that they can handle any subject, especially if they are educated, refined, and good at what they write. In the world of writing, it does a writer good to learn and be adaptable to various circumstances in life so that writing on a variety of subjects does not break your brain.

In a very practical sense, the more sociable you are and the greater variety of jobs you hold, the better prepared you are to make a career out of nonfiction writing. If you have no experiences in life, then you will struggle to write on anything except a few limited subjects. Your perspective will be severely limited and your writing approach will be somewhat elementary.

Hand in hand with experience and creativity is the importance of knowing who you are in society and in your world. This may seem like an obvious and small thing to say, but it comes into play in ways that you sometimes cannot anticipate. While you may think you can handle any subject, you may get into an assignment that you accepted in good faith and slam right into a wall.

The first time this happened to me was in 1989 while I was still a student at the University of Florida. My literature professor had assigned 16 books, one for each week, for which the class had to write a summary essay. The essays were due at the end of each week and we charged into the next 500+ page book. I was fine until we got to Saul Bellow's Herzog, and then I lost my balance.

A mere 100 pages into the book, I totally lost my cool, slamming the book against the wall, breaking its spine and busting it into chunks in my apartment. The worst part was that I was young and didn't really understand why I couldn't handle reading the book! It took me the better part of a week to figure out that I hated Bellow for rolling all of his five ex-wives into the main female character to create a monster that portrayed a woman I had never met in my entire life! How dare he?! But, in truth, how dare I? After all, he is the Pulitzer Prize winner and I was the mere student. Although you are not reading a book when you take an assignment, some of these dynamics are important to remember in your work.

It is good to understand who you are at the core. Know your core values, your likes and dislikes. Yes, if you are a woman reared up as an equal, and then know if you run into hard core bigotry, now you will likely have to make time to deal with your own response. The same is true of any hard core bigotry that is hurled at you or anything else that flies in the face of your core values. Even when you know who you are, you will not be perfect in discerning such situations. Try to be as kind as possible when you fall into such things because your client or editor will appreciate your straightforward handling of it.



Bad Habits to Break Right Away

I doubt that a bad habits list needs much commentary, so here's the list of things that most nonfiction writers will need to check off:

1. Moral habits. Any habit which can interfere with your writing, your reputation, or your ability to produce in a timely manner. Drinking, late night partying, and the like all come to mind. If you are getting in at 5 a.m. Saturday morning, then your entire Saturday is gone for putting in writing time.


2. Harsh judgments. The more a writer writes, the more engaged with the larger society you are required to become as you develop. Unless you suspend harsh or religious judgments, you will not produce a work that is good for your editor or your client. This does not mean that you surrender your values; it simply means that you refrain from carrying your hard line thoughts into your writing.


3. Sloppiness in your writing or speaking. If you write the little notes in life in a sloppy manner, then you will do the same in your serious work. The same is true of speech. If you speak slang or ghetto in your day-to-day life, then your professional efforts at writing will suffer.


4. Having to have the last word. If you have this habit, give it up now. It will hurt you in the world of nonfiction writing. Your job is to produce what your editor or client is looking for; it is not to argue with them or prove them wrong. Pride will cost you in the world of writing.


5. An inability to handle criticism. Your editor will always , and yes, I do mean always, do something to your best work. In time, you will learn to let this roll off of your back like water. You must understand the art of writing to understand why this will always happen; even the best writers get too close to the work as they produce it. There is a myopic event in the process of writing that prevents you from seeing all of the ways in which you can improve what you have written. As long as you are not sloppy in your writing and as long as you write with excellence, then you need not worry that an editor will always change your final product. The editor's job is to help perfect it and to make it fit publishing standards. Even amongst editors it is not normal to expect to produce a work without having another editor take the pen to it.
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