Want to be an editor?
rosefox gives good advice for those wanting to become editors, as well as for writers seeking to launch a career.
It can take ten years, as she said. (To which I'd add it can take six months, or thirty years.) Finding your voice is definitely part of it, the rest is getting good revision notes and then working on how to get the page to reflect your vision.
Here is another thought or two, springing off some things Margaret Atwood says in her essays about being a writer in Netotiating with the Dead. She has interesting things to say about the career of a writer, that is, making writing one's lifelong work.
Most of us think the very idea of a career (implied here a modicum of success) sheer heaven, if we can achieve it. I guess one has to ask what kind of success one wants . . . not that we have a lot of control over how to get it. Atwood quotes Cyril Connolly who broke "success" down into three kinds: social, which isn't too bad because it can provide material (to which I would add, most of us love the idea of seeing smiles when we enter a room, instead of a lot of backs and total indifference); professional, that is, the regard of fellow artists, which is usually a good thing, and popular success, which is a grave danger.
Why?
According to Connolly, Atwood relates, A writer may become popular for his entertainment value, for political reasons, or because he has the human touch.
Of these, the political factor is the least fatal to art, he thinks, because politics are volatile and complacency therefore unlikely. An entertainer does not benefit from informed criticism because nobody ever offers any; his fate is simply to "go on and on until he wakes up one day to find himself obscure."
I suspect that one is akin to writers who carefully surround themselves with nothing but admirers, and choke off any discourse that isn't fulsome praise. Or writers whose investment is in personal admiration as much as they want their writing admired.
But those with the human touch may be ruined as artists: Connolly says, "Neither harsh reviews, the contempt of equals, nor the indifference of superiors can affect those who have once tapped the great heart of suffering humanity and found out what a goldmine it is."
Whew. Of course there are some who have built careers on fictive suffering, riding as it does on that complacent conviction that its readers are superior to those who read for pleasure. But I suspect the author despised here is the one who is selling millions of copies in spite of the fact that everyone you know thinks the books are stinkers.
Her other thoughts about reader, text, writer are worth writerly pondering, imo.
It can take ten years, as she said. (To which I'd add it can take six months, or thirty years.) Finding your voice is definitely part of it, the rest is getting good revision notes and then working on how to get the page to reflect your vision.
Here is another thought or two, springing off some things Margaret Atwood says in her essays about being a writer in Netotiating with the Dead. She has interesting things to say about the career of a writer, that is, making writing one's lifelong work.
Most of us think the very idea of a career (implied here a modicum of success) sheer heaven, if we can achieve it. I guess one has to ask what kind of success one wants . . . not that we have a lot of control over how to get it. Atwood quotes Cyril Connolly who broke "success" down into three kinds: social, which isn't too bad because it can provide material (to which I would add, most of us love the idea of seeing smiles when we enter a room, instead of a lot of backs and total indifference); professional, that is, the regard of fellow artists, which is usually a good thing, and popular success, which is a grave danger.
Why?
According to Connolly, Atwood relates, A writer may become popular for his entertainment value, for political reasons, or because he has the human touch.
Of these, the political factor is the least fatal to art, he thinks, because politics are volatile and complacency therefore unlikely. An entertainer does not benefit from informed criticism because nobody ever offers any; his fate is simply to "go on and on until he wakes up one day to find himself obscure."
I suspect that one is akin to writers who carefully surround themselves with nothing but admirers, and choke off any discourse that isn't fulsome praise. Or writers whose investment is in personal admiration as much as they want their writing admired.
But those with the human touch may be ruined as artists: Connolly says, "Neither harsh reviews, the contempt of equals, nor the indifference of superiors can affect those who have once tapped the great heart of suffering humanity and found out what a goldmine it is."
Whew. Of course there are some who have built careers on fictive suffering, riding as it does on that complacent conviction that its readers are superior to those who read for pleasure. But I suspect the author despised here is the one who is selling millions of copies in spite of the fact that everyone you know thinks the books are stinkers.
Her other thoughts about reader, text, writer are worth writerly pondering, imo.