I see a ton of this out there, but when you ask established writers how to write a book, their answers are not intended to make you happy. You being happy is irrelevant. The goal is to make your potential readers happy. That’s how you get to be successful!

There are few more obvious signs of a rank amateur than not having the slightest clue why they are doing a thing. This goes for everything. “I want to be happy!” Okay, good for you. Life isn’t about your happiness though. Moreover, your work, which is what writing is, that’s not meant to make you happy either. I see far too many people who fail at writing because they’re only doing it for their own comfort and not for the end product. It makes me think of a George Carlin bit out of “A Place For My Stuff”. “I’m not happy!” Well fuck you. Happiness isn’t something you get on a constant drip. It’s something that you develop over time. If you’re thinking that everything you do will make you overjoyed, you’ve got some really terrible expectations, sorry.

Now of course, a lot of amateurs will immediately bristle at that because, sadly, a lot of people in the modern world have been raised to think everything is all about them. It’s not. It never has been and it never will and being successful is going to take a fundamental change in how you view the world.

That’s not to say that you ought to be miserable, that’s going too far the other way, there is a “happy” medium that we have to reach and I think that’s where we really start to look at work ethics and having a reasonable grasp on the reality of the world. If you ever hope to make money writing, and if you don’t, feel free to check out right now because I’m not talking to you, then you have to remember that  your writing is a product and the purpose of a product is to appeal to your potential customers. It is not to give you an emotional buzz.

If you can get to the point where you enjoy your own work and enjoy the process of creating it, great. I’m at that point. I love writing. I love creating. I just know that ultimately, whatever I do, it’s got to appeal more to a potential audience than to my own personal tastes. I start with ideas that appeal to me and that is tempered by what I think the market wants. Writing to market matters. If you don’t know what your target audience is looking for, how can you ever hope to succeed?

Now I could write an entire post about that and many people have so I’m going to set it aside for the moment and go a different direction. You need to treat your writing like a job. You need to develop a strict work ethic, made more difficult by the fact that nobody is looking over  your shoulder and holding you accountable. I see so many people who want to “write when they’re inspired”. Great. Welcome to the worst kind of failure you can imagine. Professional writers don’t write when they’re inspired. You don’t go to work when you’re inspired, do you? You’ll lose your job. “Boss, I don’t feel like coming in today. I’m just not motivated!” Yeah, get in the unemployment line.

Like it or not, writing is no different. If your goal is to be published, traditionally or otherwise, you have to eject that idea and adopt a very hard-working attitude. You don’t write when you feel like it, you write because that’s what you have to do. You have to produce and the more that you produce, the more that  you have to push yourself to produce more. It’s a never-ending cycle of self-improvement and if that sounds like hard work, welcome to reality because it is!

This is really where we have so many problems from the amateurs because they have no clue what writing actually is. They think it’s something that you can sit down in your underwear an hour or two in the morning when you feel like it and you get the rest of your time to play. That’s not how it works. Now it’s probably a little more free-form than having a 9-5, and most of us have to do that too and still make it work, there is no time for the wicked, but you need to set aside time to do your work and the minute you sit down, you have to be able to get something done.

You need to train your brain to be creative on command. How you do that is up to you. It’s not easy. Nothing about writing ever is but you have to figure out how to manage it and then hold yourself accountable for getting the job done. Because here’s the thing. If you do get a publishing contract, if you do self-publish a book, then your publisher or  your audience is going to expect you to produce new books on the regular whether you’re “motivated” or not. It stops being about “happy” and starts being about job obligations. Play time is going to be over and work time is going to begin.

That scares a lot of people and, perhaps, rightfully so. This is yet another reason why most authors don’t publish a book until they’ve got a  trunk full of unpublished novels under their belt. Not only did the exercise teach them how to write, it taught them how to produce faster and faster and that’s something that will never stop. I write a whole lot faster today than I ever did in the past and I am constantly looking forward to consider how I can streamline my process even more and produce even more every year. This year, for the first time in my life, I’ll produce 8 books and over a million words. It’s a great feeling. But you know something? I’ve already mentally, back-of-the-napkin, looked at next year and realized that if I kept up the pace, I could crank out 9. Whether I will or not, I don’t know yet, I’m not to the point of making concrete plans and I’m satisfied with 8 for the moment. If I can do that again, proving that it wasn’t just a fluke, that would be great. Eventually, I’ll hit 9 and probably 10. I know writers who are producing a dozen a year consistently, and I don’t mean short 75k novels, I mean 120-150k full-length doorstops over and over and over again. High quality, well-selling, it’s how they make six figures every single year.

And here’s the thing. You can too. If that’s your goal, you can do it but you’ve got to earn it first. It doesn’t just happen because you want it, you have to learn how to get there and work your tail off and earn the right to it. That’s entirely up to you and the first thing you have to do is get rid of the “I’m not happy” mindset. Life isn’t about being happy constantly. It’s about hard work and only through that hard work can you squeeze out a few moments of joy. It’s how you earn happiness.

Now get back to work.