So you want to become a professional author/writer. How do you do it?

The vast majority of people who want to become writers think they’re going to sit down, write the great American (or whatever) novel, and the rest will take care of itself.

I hate to burst your bubble, but that is not going to happen.

We’ve all heard of authors who had never written anything before, wrote their first novel, hit the big time, and made millions of dollars. JK Rowling comes to mind.

There are a few other examples, but those authors are one in a million. If you like those odds, best of luck to you.
There are actions you can take to vastly increase your odds of success.

If you look at the statistics on the number of marriages that end in divorce, you might be inclined to believe that the odds are stacked against you. You might think it would be better not to get married at all since the odds are so weighted against a good outcome.

That isn’t the whole story, though. If you break down the statistics, you’ll realize that certain populations and communities have very different divorce rates. Hollywood, for instance, has a divorce rate in the 90% range.

Deeply traditional religious communities have a divorce rate of less than 5%. That’s a pretty sharp difference.

From this we learn that actions and procedures greatly affect whether a marriage will end in divorce.

By the same token, certain actions, procedures, and approaches will vastly affect whether you succeed in your dream to become a full-time, professional author.

Qualify For It

If you set out to become a professional engineer, you would have to qualify for that position before any sane person would give you any money to do the job. You would have to demonstrate not only that you’d received the required education and training, but that you had some experience at the professional level that qualified you to do the job you were getting paid to do.

If you’ve just written your first novel—or your first ten novels—you’re really at the entry level. You’re below the entry level. You aren’t experienced enough or proficient enough to get paid to do the job.

You wouldn’t expect someone who had just graduated from college with a psychology degree to start earning a full salary as a therapist. That comes with market experience, expertise, and practice.

If you are sitting down at your desk to write your first novel, you aren’t performing at a professional level. You don’t have the work ethic, the discipline, the know-how, or the years of seasoning to inspire confidence in anyone even to read your book, much less pay you for something you basically don’t know how to do.

Reverse Goal Setting

We all know what goal setting is. You set a goal and then you lay out your to-do list of steps you need to take to get there. These probably include writing you novel, editing it, and submitting it to agents and publishers in the hopes of getting it published.

Reverse goal setting is a different concept. With this method, you set your goal. You envision exactly what your goal looks like, how much money you’re going to make, what your life will look like once you get there, etc.
 
Then you draw up a similar profile on the kind of person for whom that goal would become inevitable. What skills, habits, knowledge, disciplines, and practices would that person possess and implement in order to do the job? What does their daily work schedule look like? What kind of experience do they have that makes success inevitable?
 
This is the position I was in when I got published. I had been working as a contract ghostwriter for twelve years. I had written hundreds of books for paid contracts and I had several books already completed that were publication-ready just waiting to drop on the publisher that picked me up.

I spent every day working for up to twelve hours on my career. I wrote tens of thousands of words per day. I outline everything down to the smallest detail. I had to because, during my ghostwriting career, I had to show my outlines to my clients before I could get a job approved, so outlining everything became second nature.

I understand the publishing industry better than most of my clients. I understand the genre and subniche reader expectations, tropes, and formulas so that my clients always get the book they want.

It’s exceptionally important to me that the client always gets what they paid for. I make sure my clients always walk away happy, even if it means I have to rewrite the book from scratch. Fortunately, I understand the business well enough that this doesn’t happen.

I have an iron-clad code of honor when it comes to meeting deadlines. Deadlines are non-negotiable to me. I do not miss deadlines—ever. If I tell a client or a publisher that I’m going to finish a project by a certain date, I finish it—no excuses—ever.

I’m ruthless with my editing. I know the English language and its grammar rules like the back of my hand. I’m detail-oriented in the extreme when it comes to any written content that passes through my hands.

I have a professional standard by which I only allow myself to produce the highest quality written work—no matter what—no excuses—ever. This is the standard to which I hold myself as an artist and a professional. This has nothing to do with what my clients expect. This is a bond I hold with myself because I couldn’t respect myself as an artist and a professional if I didn’t.

Are you getting the picture now? Are you starting to see why my publishing success was inevitable?

Compare yourself to the professionals. Are you a professional who is working at a level where you’re qualified to get paid for your work? Or are you an amateur?

Practice, Practice, Practice

If your goal was to become a full-time, professional piano player, you would expect to spend hours every day for several decades practicing and perfecting your craft. You would continue to practice for many years even after you became successful.

You would never dream of learning a few pieces on the piano and expecting people to start paying you a professional salary. That would be ridiculous.

Yet people think that, because they’ve been taught to read and write in school, they can crank out a novel that will be worth people paying for it. This is simply not the case.

Fiction is an art form that takes years of practice. It takes years of studying writing craft, writing a lot of really terrible books, throwing them out, and starting over.

Stephen King has famously stated, “If you want to be a writer, you have to do two things: read a lot and write a lot..…..”

I agree with the part about writing a lot. I think writers should read a lot, but there comes a point where you have to stop reading and start practicing your craft.

Go back to the music analogy. There comes a point where a person has to stop listening to other people’s music and just get out your instrument and start practicing. Practicing your craft teaches you something you can’t learn by consuming someone else’s.

There comes a point at which listening to more music won’t help you at all. In fact, it might hold you back from doing the practice you really need to do.

Which leads me to my last piece of advice:

Get off the internet.

The internet is a cesspit. It’s the bottom of the intellectual barrel.

I use the internet for my work, but you need to be ruthless about weeding out anything that you aren’t specifically looking up—anything that isn’t helping you further your craft.

Creative energy is a one-way flow. It’s either flowing into you from other people or it’s flowing out of you into other people. You want to eliminate as far as possible the instances in your life where other people’s creative flow is coming into you. You need to stop consuming other people’s content and start producing your own.

Creative output is a muscle. It’s a habit that gets easier with practice.

The flow state is a product of mastery. Flow doesn’t happen until you reach a state of mastery. Think of our musician. A musician wouldn’t be able to get into a flow state and start improvising in any meaningful way that sounded good until after they mastered their instrument.

The same is true of fiction. Before you reach a state of mastery, it’s hard work. It’s excruciatingly difficult, but it gets easier the longer you practice.

A lot of people say that time is our most valuable resource. They say we have a limited number of hours in the day and that wasted time can never be regained.

But there is a resource that is even more valuable and much rarer. That resource is creative focus. We always have more time. We all have spare time we could be dedicating to perfecting our craft. As long as we’re still alive, we have more time.

Creative focus is much harder to come by, much more valuable, and much harder to get back once it’s been lost.
This is why you need to be ruthless about eliminating anything that breaks your creative focus. You need to preserve your creative focus at all costs and make sure you’re directing it where you want it to go.

I hope this helps. Good luck out there and keep writing. You will continue to get better the longer you work at it.

​All posts on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

I started writing fiction at the age of six and I wrote fiction and poetry throughout my life. From my first stories all the way through university, everyone always told me, "You're really good at this, but don't even try to make a living at it. Get a day job and do this on the side." Even my university advisors told me to give up trying to write fiction for a living.

For some reason, I took this message to heart. Eventually, I stopped writing altogether. I didn't see the point. This is the classic angst of the artist. If our art is so valuable, why doesn't society recognize and support it by giving us the means to create instead of wasting our energies on day jobs?

Needless to say, the time I spent in the employment world did not go well. My heart wasn't in it and I wasn't using my resources to their utmost or in a way that was in alignment with my inclinations. I spent many years unemployed on the public assistance system because I couldn't hold a "real" job.

Then I had children.

When my second child was born, we decided to move to a different city to give the kids a better education. I started looking for some work I could do online that would allow me to dedicate as much time as I needed to my children. That's when I discovered writing--rediscovered it, actually. I started trying to write greeting card poetry, but that didn't take off. Then I tried doing academic writing, which I loved. I soon realized, however, that most of the "clients" were university students who wanted to pass the work off as their own. Then I turned to fiction.

I started writing erotica which, in case you've ever tried it, is probably the most boring kind of writing there is. I finished a contract and I noticed that my client had posted a job for an action/adventure book. I asked him to give me a chance and the rest is history.

I discovered very quickly that I could not only write fiction for a living, but that I could earn a very comfortable living at it. I supported a family of five on my writing alone for five years before my marriage ended. Then I supported my children and myself single-handedly on my fiction writing alone until I entered the publishing world with my own books.

DO NOT EVER LET ANYONE TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN'T MAKE A LIVING AS AN ARTIST. I am living proof that that is bullshit. Don't let anyone take away your dream, and for the love of God, don't ever tell children that. It's probably the most damaging message you can give someone and children are more inclined to believe it. It's also patently untrue. Many of us are doing exactly that.

So that's a little bit about me. Feel free to ask any questions on the contact page .

I hope you like the books.

​All posts on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

​We’ve all been hearing a lot lately about how AI will either change our entire way of life or, in the worst-case scenario, how it might wipe out the human race entirely.

That claim gives AI a lot of power over our lives. If it’s true, then we’re all in serious trouble.

We’ve also heard a lot lately about how AI will change the arts, especially the art of writing, now that AI can do the job so much faster, more accurately, and more efficiently than humans. After all, we don’t have to worry about making grammar and spelling mistakes when we have AI to do our writing for us.

Do a quick internet search and you’ll find no end of articles, charts, and infographics showing that the arts are likely to be one of the industries most drastically affected by the advent of AI.

So what does this mean for us as fiction writers?

When I first started to make the transition from ghostwriting for paying clients to publishing my own work under my own name, I had this conversation with my writing coach.

She’d recently been listening to a publishing-related podcast where the guests were saying they planned to publish ten thousand books a year with the help of AI.

“How do you feel about that?” she asked me. “How will it affect you to compete against that kind of output?

My answer was unequivocal and it galvanized my determination to publish my own work.

I don’t believe that kind of publishing will affect me at all.

I don’t consider myself to be in competition with those people or their work—not in any way whatsoever.

I believe AI will affect the fiction market in one very significant way.

I believe the fiction market will very quickly divide into two very separate and unbridgeable audiences.

The first will be those for whom AI-generated fiction offers some appeal. I don’t really understand this because AI-generated content doesn’t appeal to me, so I can only guess who these people might be and what they might be thinking.

These might be people who read vast numbers of very low-quality books and who don’t care about things like connecting to and identifying with the characters.

Again, I don’t really see how this would be possible because even the lowest quality fiction still relies entirely on characterization, internal conflicts, and the audience identifying with and investing in the characters.

For the sake of argument, let’s say this audience actually exists and these people would like and buy AI-generated fiction.

The second audience will be those readers who specifically want and seek out fiction with a human element—fiction that goes out of its way to tell human stories about relatable human characters going through normal, identifiable human conflicts.

These readers will be repulsed by AI-generated content. They will avoid it like the plague.

Modern fiction audiences are smart enough to tell the difference between these two offerings. They will very quickly develop the ability to distinguish AI-generated fiction and fiction that has been written by a human author about human situations, people, and relationships.

So my response to my writing coach was this:

If someone is interested in AI-generated fiction, I don’t want that person anywhere near my book. I don’t want them even looking at it and I definitely don’t want them reading it.

Those people are not my audience and I have no intention of competing for their readership. Those people are not the readers I’m trying to attract.

I want people who are interested in human themes and human emotions. I want my work to be a study of human nature.

In fact, all of fiction is the study of human nature. Characterization is the mastery of accurately and realistically portraying human emotions and human relationships.

Readers read fiction to form a human connection with the characters and to see themselves reflected in the characters’ experiences.

And human nature is something that AI will never be able to replicate.

We’re already seeing a backlash in the fiction market against AI-generated content.

The vast majority of the jobs posted on my freelancing platform specifically prohibit AI-generated content, and thanks to AI itself, we now have the tools to identify AI-generated content using AI tools.

There are rumors that Amazon plans to introduce a feature to its book marketplace where authors and publishers have to disclose whether a book was produced using AI.

Even if this never happens, I believe the reading public will be able to tell the difference. Readers will very quickly begin to recognize whether a book was written using AI and readers will be completely turned off by something that was written by a computer.

I also believe we will see a divide in the price spread between books produced by AI—which will cost nothing to produce—and human-generated fiction. Human-generated fiction will cost more.

AI-generated fiction will be sold for less because those who put it on the market will try to appeal to people based on the lower price. On the other side of the divide, readers will be willing to pay more for fiction that actually relates to their daily lives and fulfills their desire to connect to the characters at a human level.

Let’s use music as an analogy.

Compare the artist Tom Waites with any random computer-generated synth music. People will pay hundreds of dollars for a single ticket to see Tom Waites in concert. He’s a legend in the music world and commands the highest respect from other greats in the industry. He’s one of my all-time greatest artistic heroes precisely because he’s so unique and so mind-blowingly talented.

No one would say anything like that about any kind of computer-generated music. No one goes out of their way to see computer-generated music performed. It isn’t good for much besides background music.

AI would never be able to reproduce Tom Waites’s work. No computer program would ever be able to predict that his combination of grit and tenderness would produce such an appealing product. He’s totally unique in the world for the content of his lyrics, his voice both figurative and literal, the poignant, touching emotionality of his musicianship, and the unexpected combination of all those factors.

Tom Waites has been famously quoted as saying, “The world is a hellish place and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

This quote so perfectly embodies everything that Tom Waites stands for and everything that he accomplishes with every single song in his entire body of work.

Every one of his songs describes human suffering and the ghastly nature of the world in which we live, and yet, the music he uses to accompany these descriptions elevates his subject and shows us the beauty and human element of everything he sings about.

AI would never be able to do that. AI wouldn’t even think of it. AI will never be able to comprehend what makes this combination so appealing to us or how or why it portrays such a deep dimension of the human experience.

I can give you two examples from fiction, but we can see this same problem in countless other examples across every artistic domain.

The first example is Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. If you told an AI generator to write you a children’s story about a pig that makes friends with a spider, the generator would never come out with Charlotte’s Web because the book isn’t about a pig that makes friends with a spider.

This book is being taught in university creative writing classes as an example of one of the most perfect works in fiction history. There’s a very good reason for this. The book is about humanity itself.

Charlotte’s Web is about the meaning of death in human experience and what death a person’s death means to the survivors. It’s about how death makes way for a new dimension of meaning through the next generation. It’s about the passage of time, growing up, friendship, relationships, religion, and a thousand other human mysteries all packaged up in a deceptively simple children’s story. AI could never have written this book.

The other example is Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne. We’re still reading these books more than a hundred years after they were written—not because they’re about a teddy bear who has adventures in the forest. They aren’t about a teddy bear who has adventures in the forest. They’re a study in human nature.

Winnie the Pooh is based on the Four Humors, a nineteenth-century system of thought that describes four personality types: the phlegmatic personality, the choleric personality, the melancholic personality, and the sanguine personality. This system is basically the nineteenth-century version of the Myers-Briggs personality assay.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham is another example of this from the same era—and we are also still reading this book more than a hundred years later for precisely the same reason. This is my favorite book of all time. If I was stranded on a desert island with only one book, it would  be this.

The Choleric personality is a drill sergeant who directs everyone and tells everyone else what to do. In Winnie the Pooh, this is Rabbit. In Wind in the Willows, this is the Water Rat.

The Melancholic personality is depressive and sees everything as a catastrophe or a tragedy. In Winnie the Pooh, this is Eeyore. In Wind in the Willows, this is Mr. Badger.

The Sanguine personality is a social butterfly that constantly flits from place to place and never takes any of them seriously. In Winnie the Pooh, this is Tigger. In Wind in the Willows, it’s Mr. Toad.

The Phlegmatic personality is slow, plodding, methodical, happy-go-lucky, and casual about everything. In Winnie the Pooh, this is Pooh, of course. In Wind in the Willows, this is the Mole.

We see another example of this in the Harry Potter series and the four Houses of Hogwarts. Hufflepuff House is the phlegmatic. Slytherin House is the melancholic. Gryffindor House is the sanguine. Ravenclaw House is the choleric.

Each of these is a study in human nature that AI will never be able to understand. Everybody loves Winnie the Pooh because it speaks to our understanding of human nature and how different personality types interact with each other. Even adults love reading Winnie the Pooh, not because it’s a story about a teddy bear, but because it speaks. We see ourselves and our understanding of human nature reflected in its characters’ little dramas.

All of these examples are also very funny. I’ll start to worry about AI when it can reproduce a human sense of humor. That will never happen because AI will never understand why people find something funny. Humor is a reflection of human nature and human experience. It’s completely outside AI’s field of capability.

AI will never be able to produce anything that’s considered legendary or artistically important, either. AI will never produce anything that causes the work to be remembered after the artist dies—because the work AI produces isn’t important. AI isn’t capable of saying anything important to our lives or of adding anything meaningful to a multi-generational conversation about what it means to be human.

Fiction is an art form, and as such, its job is to reflect, describe, and comment on the human condition and human nature. Fiction as an art form asks the big questions that each of us asks ourselves—the questions that make our lives mean something—the questions that make us human. That is precisely what AI will never be able to do.​

​All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

A few years ago, I went through a period of struggling with my motivation as a writer. When I first started working as a freelance fiction ghostwriter, I had to write because I had to pay the bills. I supported three children alone on my writing income, so our survival depended on me writing a certain number of words every day.

I didn't write because I wanted to. I wrote because I had to. I wrote to keep my kids alive. I have never written a book because I wanted to. I've always written for upfront payment.

My children eventually, inevitably got older and became more independent. I became more successful and commanded a higher pay rate for my work. I had more free time, and after more than ten years of working full time, it became less important that I write as much every day. I no longer had to do it and my motivation evaporated.

I struggled for several years to find something to motivate me. I got offered a huge publishing contract, but I couldn’t summon the motivation to write my next book. I didn’t have to, so I didn’t. I just kept not doing it and I realized that I was letting myself down.

I discussed the matter with my writing coach and I finally came up with a mental trick that motivated me to keep writing—and not just to keep writing. I doubled my output, finished several unfinished series, and launched several more.

What was this mental hack, you ask? George RR Martin.

George RR Martin is my poster child of artistic failure. He’s everything I don’t want to be. I look at him and think, “Don’t let this happen to you.”

Just thinking about George RR Martin motivates me to write and write and write some more. His failure is the most motivating thing in my life.

A well-known Youtuber who shall remain nameless critiqued Season 8 of the Game of Thrones TV series. This Youtuber catalogued all the many grievous failures the season committed—failures that led to the series’ ending being such a massive flop.

This Youtuber blamed Martin for the show’s failure because Martin didn’t finish the series of books. Martin continuously promised to finish the series, put it off, and eventually, everyone just gave up on him. Years later, no one expects him to ever finish it and it remains unfinished to this day.

I’ve read Neil Gaiman’s blog post stating that George RR Martin is not the reader’s bitch and I agree with a great many of Gaiman’s points. I agree that a fiction writer as an artist doesn’t owe his audience his next book. Nor does a fiction writer as an artist owe his audience the next book within a certain timeframe.

I also agree with Gaiman that fiction writers need to have a life beyond their computer screens. Fiction writers have as much right to enjoy free time, go on vacation, paint their houses, and even to stop writing entirely if they want to, even if they do so in the middle of a series and leave it unfinished.

There is one point that Gaiman made that I don’t agree with and this strikes at the very heart of the George RR Martin phenomenon.

Gaiman makes the point that a fiction writer isn’t entering into a contract with the reader whereby the writer owes the reader the next book. Purchasing the writer’s book does not entitle the reader to the next book. The money spent on the first book doesn’t affect some kind of business contract between the writer and the reader and the reader has no right to expect the writer to produce the next book.

To a certain extent, Gaiman is right about this, too. Purchasing a book doesn’t entitle the reader to the next book in the series. The writer and the reader have not entered into any such contract and the reader shouldn’t see it that way.

There is one thing that the reader is entitled to, though, and that’s a satisfying ending. There might not be a business contract in place, but there is an artistic contract between the writer and the reader. I’m surprised Neil Gaiman didn’t mention this because it’s something every writer should know.

The very first time a writer puts words on a page, he or she is making a promise to the reader. The writer is saying, in effect, “If you go on this journey with me, I’ll take you somewhere really good, you’ll be entertained (or enlightened), and it will end in a way that is satisfying for you.”

This is the contract the writer is entering into with the reader and it’s a promise the reader expects the writer to fulfill. The writer is asking the reader to make a significant investment of time, attention, and in the case of fiction, emotional investment in the characters.

This is no small investment, especially for a long book or a series of books. The writer gets this investment upfront by promising to deliver the reader a good ending. A writer who fails to deliver on this promise can expect nothing less than to be eviscerated in the comments section and so they should be.

I agree with Gaiman that the writer can stop writing in the middle of the series and say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Sure, the fans will be disappointed, but that is the writer’s prerogative. No one is going to hold a gun to their head to make them continue.

It is not acceptable for a writer to promise to finish a book, fail to deliver, promise to finish a book, fail to deliver, promise to finish a book, and fail to deliver again. That is not acceptable. It’s despicable. It’s pathetic.

Even Martin himself has acknowledged this when he said that, if he didn’t finish the next book by a certain date, his fans had the right to lock him up until he did finish it.

Gaiman also acknowledges this in his post by saying that this is the very reason why he doesn’t usually write series. The pressure to finish them is too great. If a story “grows in the telling”, it’s difficult to decide where it should go and where it should end. He doesn’t write series because he understands, at least intuitively, that a series obligates the writer to come up with a coherent logical narrative with a coherent logical ending.

This obligation grows as the series gets longer. The longer the writer puts off the ending, the more obligated he becomes to his reader to make the ending as epic and satisfying as the reader expects.

The reason for this is so basic. It’s because the reader has invested so much already and continues to invest more and more with every book. The reader’s expectations grow with the series until the writer starts to dread letting the reader down.

For this reason, it’s critical that a writer understands the ending before he start writing. If you left New York and wanted to get to LA, you would need to know not only where LA is but the directions to get there.

If you left New York with no idea where LA was or even that LA existed, your journey wouldn’t end well, especially for anyone waiting for you at the other end. This is basic motivation and goal-setting 101.

I’ve read articles that suggest that fans are treating Martin like they’re his customers rather than devotees of an artist, but it’s basic Business 101 that it’s easier to keep an existing customer than it is to get a new one.

These readers purchased a product. They paid money for it. If readers want to purchase the product a second time and the writer tells them to suck eggs, of course the reader isn’t going to be happy. They’re going to call out the writer as a bad businessman and they’re going to look elsewhere. That’s their right as consumers, which is what a writer’s audience is.

I’ve read a lot of articles on why George RR Martin failed to finish the next book in the Song of Fire and Ice series. One reason is that the pressure of delaying for this long has built up so many reader expectations that now he fears he won’t be able to do the book justice.

I’ve also read him quoted in interviews where he says that he thinks he’s rewriting too much. He takes a scene out, changes his mind, puts it back in, and then changes his mind the other way and takes the scene out again.

This is just plain bad writing. This is why the successful writer creates outlines. If you even have to question whether a scene belongs in the book, it doesn’t. A writer should know ahead of time that every single scene in the book is crucial to the plot. If a writer isn’t sure, he should cut the scene and never look back. Even questioning whether the scene is crucial means it’s superfluous.

This is why we have best practices for writing fiction novels. I’m not like the other girls and boys in that I was a contract writer for ten years before I got published. I had no choice but to outline everything and know exactly what I was going to write before I started writing.

I made this mistake early in my career. I started writing without an outline, winged the story, and it turned the series into a nightmare. I found it impossible to finish the series because I didn’t know where it was going or what to write next.

There’s also a little thing we call artistic discipline. Writing is hard work, which is why the best advice is to do it every single day. The writer needs to develop disciplinary practices around their craft so they get a certain amount done. It’s simply too easy not to do it.

Ballet dancers practice every day. World-class musicians practice every day. Athletes have coaches.

Every artist needs discipline, accountability, and direction. The more successful you become, the more crucial it is to have these structures in place. Once an artist becomes as rich as George RR Martin, there’s absolutely no excuse not to have them.

Anyone can hire a writing coach. I have a writing coach. I would not be able to do this job without one. Paying a writing coach is a business expense. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has a trainer. It’s an essential part of his business and his brand.

George RR Martin could have stopped writing a long time ago. He has enough money, but he didn’t do that. His mistake was keeping his fans on the hook for something he was never going to deliver.

No one expects him to deliver now, but it would have been much better if he just came right out and told everyone he wasn’t going to finish the series instead of dragging it out.

His failure keeps me motivated because I would never let that happen. I would never be caught dead letting my readers down like that. My self-respect as an artist depends on delivering what readers want. That’s my obligation to them for reading my work.

This problem has become epidemic in the fiction industry. Nearly every TV show and movie franchise that comes out plans to just keep going indefinitely. No one plans the ending in advance, so the ending always sucks.

The lack of a planned direction and planned ending usually means the series itself sucks, too. Failing to plan means planning to fail. You can see countless examples of this throughout the recent history of popular culture.

Take a look at The Walking Dead. It started out great and then just kept going and going and going and going. The quality of the story writing deteriorated over time until the show became a pathetic, laughable, cringe-worthy shadow of its former self.

The same thing has happened with an endless list of series and franchises. A story has to have a beginning, middle, and an end. That’s the definition of a story.

Imagine if you went to the doctor and he said, “We aren’t going to do any testing to find out what’s wrong with you. We’re just going to do whatever and give you a bunch of drugs and perform a bunch of random procedures and see what happens.” We would call that malpractice.

We expect doctors, pilots, plumbers, and every other kind of professional to have a plan based on the known facts and the stated objective the customer wants to achieve.

If a professional deviates from the plan, they better have a damn good reason. Entering into any endeavor without a plan is just unprofessional and it’s doomed to failure.

It’s the same thing with a human life. Life would have no meaning without death. Death wraps up the person’s life and gives the whole life a cohesive, coherent meaning and sense of story. We can understand the total impact of a person’s life, for good or bad, only once it’s over.
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If the person was bad during their life, there’s always the chance they could turn good as long as they’re still alive.

We just don’t know how it will truly end or what the person’s life will mean until it’s over. The same goes for a work of fiction. We can only understand the total, comprehensive meaning and message of a story in hindsight.

This is the concept behind the “my life flashed before my eyes” legend. It follows that our lives would flash before our eyes the moment before our deaths. That’s the only time when we can fully understand what our lives mean in their entirety. We couldn’t understand our lives fully until that moment because it wasn’t finished yet.

Imagine if a non-fiction writer did this. Imagine if they just started writing with no point to make and no definite conclusion in mind. The book would be a disaster.

Imagine if a non-fiction speaker got up to speak in front of a room full of people with no point to make, no time limit, and no plan ever to end their speech. Imagine if they just got up and started talking and kept on talking endlessly for hours and hours and hours.

We have no trouble seeing how wrong-headed this is when we talk about non-fiction. The same logic applies to fiction. The amazing thing is that no one seems to understand this simple logical process.

George RR Martin worked as a contract writer before he wrote the Song of Ice and Fire series, but he worked as a contract writer in the TV industry. He did not work as a contract writer of novels, which explains why he doesn’t understand the best practices of writing novels. He modeled the story on a TV series with endless episodes and no planned ending.

The deplorable nature of modern fiction stems from stories, series, and franchises trying to live forever. There’s a very simple reason for this. The writer (or producers) want to milk the audience for all their worth. They want to keep the audience on the hook so the producers can get their pound of flesh and make more money.

Anyone who does this is selling out their artistic integrity for money and they should be ashamed of themselves. Any writer who does this is selling their audience down the river for a handful of cash.

This is the mark of a writer or producer who doesn’t give a damn about their audience or their artistic integrity and only cares about making a buck. This is why modern fiction stinks.

Every writer, every TV and film producer—anyone engaged in the business of fiction—owes their audience a satisfying ending and that can only happen by planning the entire story in advance.

If the writer doesn’t do this, the story will be a failure. It’s inevitable and they will have broken their most sacred bond to the audience. These people should not be in the fiction business because they don’t understand the most basic tenets of writing craft. They’re amateurs, or worse, fraudsters who don’t know what they’re doing.

If you’ve read this far, I give you my solemn promise as an artist and a professional that I will never let this happen. I give you my word of honor as an artist that I will always finish the series (unless I die in the middle of it) and I will do everything in my power to give you the most satisfying ending possible.

I take the art of writing craft very seriously. It has been my job for over ten years and I treat it as a job now. I finish what I start. I put my professional reputation on the line every time I start writing a book and that is a stake I take very seriously.

It baffles me that other writers don’t take this process seriously. I can’t imagine what might be going through their heads, but they act as though writing fiction is some kind of game.

They seem to think they can start a series, see where it goes, and then, when it all goes wrong or gets too hard, they can just break off and go do something else.

Writing fiction doesn’t work that way. Writing fiction is work. It’s a job. The exciting part happens when you first start a book. About halfway through, maybe even before then, the honeymoon ends and writing a book turns into a chore.

Finishing a novel is like digging a ditch. When you get halfway through it, you only keep going so you can finish it and put it behind you. It ceases to be fun or interesting or exciting. If you’ve written a thorough outline, you already know what’s going to happen so the story no longer holds any surprises for you as the writer.

I finish a book because I made a commitment to my reader. That’s the only reason I finish it. It’s a hard slog through thick, waist-deep mud. It isn’t fun, but that’s what I do as an artist and a professional. I would be ashamed to show my face in public if I didn’t.

I cannot fathom how these people can live with themselves knowing how badly they’re letting their audiences down.

Apparently, these people are either too amateur and self-absorbed even to realize how badly they’re letting their audiences down.

These people don’t understand writing craft at all if they don’t understand these most basic principles. It’s obvious from the way these writers behave that most of them have never studied writing craft even once in their lives.

Audiences and readers worldwide need to demand better and stop patronizing artists and producers who do this.

This isn’t what the audience pays for. It’s fraudulent and despicable and I would never, ever in a million years do something like this.

Thank you for reading. Please pass this post on so we can improve the fiction industry and make it more enjoyable for everyone. God bless.

​All posts on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.