ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) seems to be the latest self-diagnosed disease ravaging those who struggle to concentrate for more than a few minutes, but Jon Morrow at Copyblogger wants to draw our attention to the far more serious - for a writer - MADD.
MADD, it seems, involved one’s muse. Jon provides a number of direct advice on how to work with your muse and not fall into the trap of so many bloggers and online writers who have left their forgotten efforts littering the blogosphere.
This is a fun little post which twists the often tedious “Top five ways to XXX” theme with a new angle and although very much tongue in cheek, Jon does have some good tips to share to keep you on the road to being consistently productive.
The movie Atonement is raking in the awards and nominations right now in this current, dampened, award season - and looks like it will manage a strong finish in the imminent BAFTAs. In an interview over at The New Republic, McEwan talks about how it feels to have one’s work adapted for the big screen.
In particular, I thought I would pick out this segment:
I’m sure I’d be possessive if I allowed myself to get involved in the writing of the script. There’s a lot to be said for not doing that. I did it once with The Innocent and John Schlesinger, and it was a fairly difficult process because everyone–the director, the designers, actors, everyone–had their own ideas and came piling in. And you are suddenly knocked off your perch as the God in this machine.
As someone who has written in both mediums (I will offer the disclaimer “not professionally” here), I can appreciate the challenges presented by writing the script. Story structure is critical, and the need to be as concise as possible in depicting the necessary elements, while omitting what is not essential - all the while maintaining the interest of the audience. This often leads to fundamental changes from the original written work, often by re-ordering the sequence of events as they are depicted, absorbing lines of dialogue into different scenes, and even switching important dialogue to a different characters. This is almost impossible to achieve as the author of the original piece, I suspect due to their understandable emotional attachment to their work. Conversely, the thought of someone else getting their hands on ‘your baby’ can be equally daunting.
McEwan goes on to discuss some of his past work, his beliefs, and talk about the kinds of subjects he likes to read about as well as write. It is invariably an insight to hear what an author reads. Find the TNR interview here.
Most authors never hit the big time, but a great many to manage a solid and comfortable income from their writing, while the majority will always need to supplement their writing earnings with other jobs.
The Crafty Writer has added to figures released by The Times recently about how much average authors earn in the UK - and it will likely not surprise you that it is not a rosy picture. Most authors, it seems, earn a third of the UK average wage and two thirds of them therefore have to hold down additional jobs to continue writing.
Fiona Veitch Smith at The Crafty Writer, has some interesting experience to impart related directly to this issue. In her seventh year as a writer, she has experienced a noticeable increase in income, which she attributes to a number of specific factors outlined in her article: Can You Earn Money as a Writer? The article is well worth the read as Fiona goes on to offer some practical to help you start earning as a writer, and provides a stack of links which you will almost certainly find useful.
Very few of us will shorten that ten years of graft and poverty to establish ourselves as writers, and many of us even then will not manage more than a low level income, but we don not do it for the money, right..?
