Shootin' blanks

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between a hobby and a profession. It matters to me because I’m holding down a day job while writing two books and exercising my duties here as your humble correspondent. I want to know whether I’m an amateur or a professional?

Changes in the publishing industry right now are worrying published writers. Historically, being a professional writer has involved agents and publishers to protect the author from the commercial realities of the book business, protection that may not always be there. Dealing in the sordid matter of coin scares the hell out of some writers. To be a professional writer could soon involve taking responsibility for supply, marketing, selling and accounting, just like self-published authors. So what does it mean for how we think about the craft?

To call someone a writer

It’s probably best to examine how you can define someone as a writer. I think it’s simple: the noun follows the verb. You’re a writer if you write. If that’s your verb then you produce a healthy quantity of words at regular intervals. Some people call themselves a <noun> even if they don’t do the verb very often. I guess there’s a certain prestige in calling yourself by some pretentious title but it’s puerile and deluded.

The noun only becomes more than minimally useful if you actually do something to live up to it.

This doesn’t distinguish between a hobby and a profession because the fact that you write says nothing about whether your work is actually viable.

Success

Good writers want to create work which other people will enjoy. It’s amazing to me when people adopt my ideas because they’re relevant to what they do. Therefore I need to produce a range of variety of high quality work. Successful writers seem to have lots of varied, eminently selectable work likely to appeal to a particular niche of readers.

Is the writer aware of why a reader might select their idea, and how can they encourage it? The answer probably has something to do with creativity.

The purpose of creativity

Different people will have differents views on this. To me, creativity serves a micro, a macro and a super-macro purpose: reward, demand and progress.

Reward

That people create to generate some sort of reward isn’t exactly a revelation but it’s important. The reward doesn’t have to be financial. Recognition and feedback tickle the same part of my brain as money. All are simply tokens of value.

This reward is a kind of value proof-of-receipt. It’s what I get back from your selection of my work.

Demand

On a macro scale, creativity is like a giant cocktail shaker of ideas. It spreads ideas around and hones them to particular situations. Live in the city but fancy growing your own produce? You now have a demand for gardening or farming skills so those ideas have a greater value to you. If this sounds like an economic argument, it is. Creativity seeks to resolve any potential difference caused by ideas in demand. Creativity is really a process of memetic intercourse; it allows our ideas to breed and spread.

Progress

If you believe in the idea of human progress; that our existence is better now than it was in the past, then it is hard not to attribute this to creativity. Anyone enjoying the benefits of art and technology has the creativity of others to thank. And the height of their own starting platform is raised another inch for the benefit of those who come after them.

These three purposes depend upon the transmission of an idea and therefore impose upon the writer a simple obligation: to ship.

The difference between a hobby and a profession

Shipping is simple. It means producing and polishing your work to a standard where you are happy for it to represent your skills, and make it available for consumption in order that it may do so.

Shipping means selling your work in exchange for money or time or both. I think its important to be able to explain your choices to an audience and justify why they should offer attention. It’s really just a measure of the extent to which you take responsibility for the success of your work.

What you receive in return allows you to hone your skills and specialise further, producing better work. Every writer I’ve ever known, beyond that, every practitioner of some sort of skill has said that their abilities improve with both practice and exposure to an audience.

So perhaps it’s by selection and exchange that ideas breed and progress occurs.

The difference between an amateur and a professional lies in your willingness to ship and your willingness to sell. A professional writer is defined by the fact that they ship words and are able to ask for something in return. If you cannot ship or sell, you cannot reasonably call yourself a professional writer. If you cannot ship or sell, you’re shooting blanks.