Vote Me Off the Island!

Every once in a while I write something that sets people off. Sometimes I write the same thing again, knowing full well that I’ll take more flack for it.

For example, I am dead-set against Vanity or Self-Publishing. I believe that instead of paying someone to publish my work, it should be the other way around. If I do the work, I should be the one who gets paid for it. I’m sure I’ll set off a lot of people about this in a future diatribe.

For now I want to talk about what I consider to be the amateur writer’s biggest mistake. Autobiography.

I don’t care how exciting your life is or has been. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had to struggle with grades, you made it (or didn’t) onto the Cross-Country team in high school, or if your parents divorced after an ugly fight. Really. It doesn’t matter… that is, it doesn’t matter to most everybody else.

It’s a cold, hard fact no matter how dizzying your life has been, almost nobody is interested. Why not, you ask? After all, you find it fascinating. The simple truth is that unless you are a famous actor, a discredited politician, a defrocked priest, or a serial killer with an ax (so to speak) to grind, who cares?

Yeah. I know. That’s really cold.

But wait! (As they say on TV infomercials) There’s more!

OK, I’ve trashed the idea that your personal biography will be the next great novel. Write it anyway.

What?

Yeah. Here’s the deal. Any writing project you take from inception to completion is a good thing. Salable or not. Secondly, taking all the wonderful things that have happened in your life, dressing them up for drama and action, and calling it a novel (a.k.a. fiction), may give you a real chance with the work.

Then, once you’ve made a name for yourself… once you’ve sold a million copies of your best novel… once your short story has been optioned for a movie… why, then you can write your real biography and people will be interested.

OK, go ahead. Vote me off the island.