I’ve got to get something off my chest. It’s about writing and writers. Why do writers suck so much? Clearly, my standards are not very high. I started this article with an annoying idiom “off my chest.” All I ask for is a bit of clarity and a healthy dose of content. I don’t require David Foster Wallace. Yet I find myself working with writers who turn in embarrassing stuff. Really: embarrassing.

In the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the first act ends with a number called, “A Book Report on Peter Rabbit.” And the characters all approach the assignment in different ways. Linus over-intellectualizes it, “In examining a work such as Peter Rabbit, it is important that its superficial characteristics of its deceptively simple plot not blind the reader to the more substantial fabric of its deeper motivations.” Schroeder insists upon writing about Robin Hood, “It reminded me of Robin Hood in the part where Little John jumped from the rock…” Charlie Brown procrastinates, “If I start writing now, when I’m not really rested, it could upset my system, which is not good at all.”

But Lucy takes an approach that is well known to English teachers everywhere. The book report must be 100 words long, and so Lucy approaches the book report as an engineering exercise. For example, she specifically lists some two dozen different vegetables that were in the garden. And she finishes the report with, “The very very very end.” I think this is just fine coming from an eight year old — especially one who is a cartoon. But one would think that such would not be the case with professional writers. Even when they are being paid by the word (which they mostly are), it seems to me that there would be a sense of honor about this. You just don’t do it!

What’s more, it really doesn’t work. The effort that goes into padding would be far more lucrative if the writer just thought up something interesting (or engaging or absorbing or refreshing or…) to add to the article. But okay, they can’t all be like me. (It is a point of both pride and disease that I write roughly a million words on this blog every year — roughly a novel a month.) The bigger problem is not that these people pad their writing. It is that they can’t throw anything away. They’ve written a hundred words and that’s ten bucks and by God, they are not just going to throw that money away!

The fundamental issue here is that these people do not have a broad enough vision of what they are writing about. Generally, one idea will get you 300 to 500 words. But these articles need to be longer than that. So that requires that the writer come up with more than a single idea. Songwriters understand this — choruses and bridges are among the basic building blocks of a song. But mixing things up is not so clear in the prose writing world. So they write things like, “When you download individual files, those files will also automatically be stored in your default folder for storing downloaded files.” You got us! You made an extra 40¢. One more time and you’ll be able to buy a candy bar!

I really do think the whole thing comes down to love. I can’t say that I love everything that I work on, but I grow extremely attached to the content for as long as I’m writing about it. This is a talent, I know. But there is no more important skill for the nonfiction writer. If you find the subject interesting, you will think of things to write about. If you don’t, then you will end up trying to engineer your way to a set number of words. And you will waste the reader’s time while being really boring.

The very very very end!

One of my editors is a bully. Really. She’s also very business savvy. So she bullied me into listening to a conference call with Steve Harrison called “How to Achieve a Lot More Success as an Author by Discovering the 7 Things Rich Authors Know That Poor Authors Don’t.” It was a conference call in the sense that you have to call in. Clearly, the discussion was prerecorded. It had all the authenticity of a sales pitch on QVC. Of course, I didn’t want to listen to it. I don’t go in for this kind of stuff. I’ve read a fair amount about the publishing business and marketing. What’s more, I’ve been in the business a long time and I know that there is no secret recipe for success.

Boy was I wrong!

Just kidding! It was entirely what I expected. It reminded me of an article Thomas Frank wrote two years ago, TED Talks Are Lying to You. It was about how business books about “creativity” are all the same: they give the same examples, the same vague advice, and are generally useless. It is his contention that these books tell the professional-managerial class that they are members of the “creative class.” But of course, they aren’t; they’re just middle-managers.

This talk wasn’t exactly that. You could sum up everything that Harrison said in one sentence: “Writing is a business.” So for people just starting out, it is probably a useful introduction to the business of writing. Even writers who have quite popular books usually have some kind of day job that relates to it. For example, Ian Millhiser, writer of one of my favor recent books, Injustices, and quite a successful magazine writer, is at base, “a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Editor of ThinkProgress Justice.”

Seven Things Rich Authors Know

So let’s go through these “7 things.” The first one is, “Poor authors think you just need a good book; rich authors know they need a good marketing plan.” Well, I kind of think you need both, but if you had to pick one, the marketing plan is the choice. And that is one of the big changes in the publishing industry over the last several decades: publishers used to provide marketing plans. Now, you really are on your own. But is this a difference between rich and poor authors? Most poor authors are well of aware of this — certainly the ones who have actually published a book do.

The second “thing” is, “Poor authors expect most money to come from the book; rich authors know their money will come from additional offerings.” What he’s saying is true in a way. As I discussed above, books open up possibilities for other jobs. I have offers to write books. I’m just not that interested, because I know they will not open up the kind of possibilities that I’m interested in — or really any possibilities at all. The main reason I would publish a nonfiction book is so I could get better freelance work.

But Steve Harrison’s discussion of this destroys what he is supposedly talking about. He talked about how the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad uses it to sell his board game Cashflow. So this really isn’t about writing, is it? It’s about people making money. And here’s a trick for all you people who want to make a lot of money: don’t go into writing! It isn’t a terribly good field. Go into business. If you happen to do some writing along the way to make tons of cash, great! If you happen to kill some people along the way to make tons of cash, great! Whatever. The point is money, not writing.

The third “thing” is that poor authors think their copyrights are worth something and rich authors most value their list of customers. Networking! Woo! Who are these writers who think their copyrights are so very valuable? In my experience: unpublished writers.

Fourth, “Poor writers market to everyone; rich writers market to people who say, ‘That’s me!'” And then he points out that books about tennis should be marketed to tennis players. This is something that literally everyone knows. I cannot image someone writing a how to book about tennis and thinking that it ought to be marketed to people in hospice. But this “thing” is just setting up the next one.

Fifth, “Poor authors sell books one at a time; rich authors sell books by the truckload.” First, this is question begging. If you are selling books by the truckload, you are obviously doing well. But what he’s getting at is bulk sales. You could sell to the “conservative book club.” Or to a vitamin company as a promotion. Or to tennis coaches who will sell them for you. This is pretty obvious. But it is also true that books are generally sold through a distributor. On this one, I think he shows that his market is mostly people who self-publish — which means he is mostly going after the fool market. (Note: I think people can self-publish really well; I just think that most don’t; and it generally requires that you already understand publishing, which means experience.)

On number six, we learn that poor authors depend upon publicity whereas rich authors depend upon a “predictable system for making money from their message.” So get those email lists! That’s something that Harrison should know about because that’s all he’s doing here is collecting email addresses. He’s already sent me four email messages and I’m sure they will continue. Of course, I created an email address especially for the event: richauthor@franklycurious.com, which I will delete as soon as I finish this article.

You would think that the seventh “thing” would be a doozy: something really great. But it is — What is that word? — pathetic: poor authors do everything themselves, and rich authors have a support team. More question begging? Not at all! You can get an unpaid intern. What college graduate wouldn’t want to work for free helping out an unsuccessful self-published writer?! Really, it was that bad. One of the biggest problems unsuccessful writers have is listening to people tell them to stop this writing nonsense. There aren’t people begging to help.

At this point (it took 45 minutes to get this far), Steve Harrison brought on some woman who had apparently made so much money with his Quantum Leap program (or another of his hugely expensive programs), that she spends her time hocking for him. I hung up.

My editor said that if you gain just one thing from these things, they are helpful. Well, I did: I gained this blog post. And that’s it. As I expected, it was your typical business for dummies nonsense: buy low, sell high; increase your volume; network. But if you really want to make a lot of money in the “writing” business, I suggest you do what Steve Harrison does: convince writers to give you tons of money for banal and questionable advice.

If there is one “misuse” of a word that is likely to make a grammar pedant go crazy, it is the use of “literally” to mean “not literally”: figuratively or metaphorically. But like with most things about pedants, they are wrong. For the millionth time, grammar is a way to understand how language works. It is not a way of constraining it. Grammar snobs are ridiculous in the same way that physicists would be who complain that relativistic mechanics doesn’t act the way that Newton’s theory does. But grammar snobs can get away with this because most people don’t understand that grammar is a model and not a definition.

But if you were to click over to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and look at the entry for “literally,” you would notice something interesting. The first definition of the word is, “in a literal sense or manner: actually.” But the second definition of the word is, “in effect: virtually.” Now I should be clear: I try very hard to never use “literally” in the second sense. I like words to be clean. And I definitely don’t like to get into arguments (or cabs, elevators, or even really city blocks) with grammar pedants. They’re just exhausting.

There is something weird about the word “literally,” though. It’s kind of useless. Is it ever necessary to say, “He was standing literally in front of me?” About the only time the word is useful is as in, “He took my exaggeration literally.” And it just isn’t used that way very much. So there’s another reason not to use word. It is very rarely necessary. It just stands in the way of communicating what you want to say. But there is a reason that people use the word so much, and it isn’t unjustified.

“Literally” is mostly used as an intensifier: a word meant to add force to whatever is near it. So just as someone might say, “He was really big,” they might also say, “He was literally a giant.” Used in this way, those who “misuse” the word are actually right. Because if the man was André the Giant, it would be redundant to say that he was literally a giant; he was just a giant — it’s in the name. It’s little wrinkles like this that the grammar snobs almost never think about. But I don’t suppose it greatly matters.

But this explains why it is that the second definition of “literally” is the more common one. It isn’t a very useful word in its “correct” form. People love intensifiers — especially in spoken form. Note the extreme popularity of “fucking” used in this context. In fact, with minor syntactical changes, it can generally be used to replace “literally” in a sentence when it is used this way. But what the grammar pedants need to understand is that most of the time when they use literally “correctly” they are being redundant. And that is an even bigger sin than using literally in a way that literally everyone understands.

Last Christmas, my younger sister, Kim, came to visit us. And we got into a big argument. I will admit: I enjoy annoying my sister. She’s like me in the sense of having strong opinions about minor things. But she has never quite figured out how to exploit my weakness. Or maybe it is just because she is a better person than I am. Regardless, our argument was about how to make names that end in the letter “s” possessive.

We agree about the case of a normal noun. For example, “The lilacs’ color was muted due to a lack of water.” It is wrong to put an extra “s” at the end of that “lilacs’.” But Kim doesn’t like sentences like this, “Claudius’ stutter was what allowed him to live long enough to become emperor.” Kim thinks it should be, “Claudius’s stutter was what allowed him to live long enough to become emperor.” Our argument went on for days.

Kim thinks of this as a matter of phonetics. In that sentence, one would say, “Claudiuses stutter…” not “Claudius stutter…” Now on this point, she is mostly correct. But not entirely. The truth is that the second pronunciation is becoming more common. So I think that the language is moving in my direction — toward simplification. But she is right that the vast majority of people add the “es” when they say it. Therefore, she argues, in writing, we should add the “apostrophe s.”

(In point of fact, Kim did not argue this. I had to infer that this was her argument. She seems to take it as a given that I am just being difficult and that her case is self-evident. My first wife — also a very bright woman — did the same thing to me. I hate this. I may be bright, but that doesn’t mean that any given thing will be self-evident to me. I can be brilliantly perspective about one thing and totally clueless about the next.)

My argument is very simple: speaking is speaking; writing is writing; let’s make things as simple as possible. I don’t care if we all decide to put “apostrophe s” at the end of all possessives that end with “s.” I just don’t want to think about. I like clear and simple rules. And the state of grammar is now this:

Thus, I can live my life with two rules. Or I can live my life with one rule. I choose one.

But let me show you the madness that takes place in Kim’s grammar world. Consider the sentence, “The grass’ color was muted due to a lack of water.” In this case, almost everyone would say, “The grasses color…” So should we write this as, “The grass’s color…”? If we go with Kim’s rule, we really should. But then, we have to analyze every possessive noun that ends in “s” to determine how it sounds. And that is a terrible burden.

Let me admit that Kim’s system is a good and reasonable one. It actually makes more sense than mine. But it is too much work. And if we really want a language that makes sense, we had better start speaking Esperanto. Or rather: ni prefere komencu paroli Esperanton!