I'm doing a webinar on July 21! You should come.
"On Purpose: Reclaiming Your Writing Time" will be hosted by the Creative Nonfiction Foundation.
Do you read Jane Friedman’s Electric Speed newsletter? If you’re interested in pursuing a creative vocation, I think you should give it a look—and I’m not just saying that because I’ve known Jane as a fellow denizen of the publishing industry for more than a decade. (Nor because she was kind enough to share an excerpt from Our Endless and Proper Work with her readers earlier this summer!)
I like Electric Speed because every issue combines solid information about the book business while engaging its community in lively discussions—reminding us that it is a business, but it’s also supposed to be a pleasure. Although the recent issue I have in mind opened with some very sobering statistics about the industry.
It’s the sort of thing I’m sure you’ve beard before, either through your own research or from people who, for whatever reason, want to dissuade you from pursuing a career as a writer. Hardly anybody earns out their advance, you know! Only a handful of people make “real” money from their books; the vast majority won’t even sell as many as 5,000 copies in their first year. And so on.
All of which is true! As I’ve written before, though, if all you want to do is get rich, there are so many better ways to go about it than writing books.
Insert the standard caveat here about there being nothing wrong with money, and how of course it’s a fine reward for one’s labor especially when you’re living in a capitalist society, and creative writing is a totes legit way to earn that reward if you can. Still, I believe that there needs to be something more—that we need to believe that our creative labor matters, that we’re producing something that holds greater value than whatever price a publisher or a bookseller might put on it.
Along those lines, I’m teaming up with the Creative Nonfiction Foundation to lead a webinar on Wednesday, July 21, at 2pm EDT, called “On Purpose: Reclaiming Your Writing Time.” I can’t promise you that you’ll find your purpose as a writer at the end of that hour—but I do hope you’ll come out of the session with a better idea of how to establish your focus and keep your writing practice moving forward.
“Without a clear sense of purpose, even the most experienced writers may find themselves at a creative standstill,” the webinar’s description says. “It’s very easy to want to write; it’s also very easy not to write. After all, there’s always something else you could be doing.”
The trick is to convince yourself not to do those other things—but you can’t do that unless you have a firm idea of what’s at stake in your writing, and why you want to pursue it. If you can figure that out…
“…you can look more closely at how you spend your time and consciously reprioritize your decisions. To do that, you not only need to convince yourself of the value of your story, you need to convince yourself that you have room in your life for writing—and that writing is one of the most meaningful things you could be doing with that time.”
If you haven’t already bought Our Endless and Proper Work, taking part in this webinar will enable you to purchase it directly from Belt Publishing at a 15% discount.
I hope you’ll join me on the 21st—I haven’t done a workshop in a while, but I’ve been going over my script for this one, and I think it’s going to be fun. If you know someone else who might find the webinar helpful, please be sure to spread the word.
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