Wednesday, August 15, 2012

How do you measure success?

I got a great book from the library.
Its called How I got published and its bursting at the seams with articles from great authors like Clive Cussler, Marian Keyes and David Brin to name 3 of the many many fine writers who took part. The book is edited by Ray White and Duane Lindsay and they have broken it up in to sections like

1) writing a synopsis

2) gripping title catchy tag line

3) getting to know agents and editors

4) Query letters
etc

All the articles are fascinating in themselves but one in particular piqued my interest. It's by a man called Keith Raffel and his question was 'What do you consider success?'
He published a book which got rave reviews and sold well. So he succeeded in all the steps to getting published and beyond. But he remained dissatisfied with his success. Why? Because he had not set his writing goal before he began. So every milestone he passed he was thinking about the next one.

He made me stop and think.

What do I consider my success to be?
I started this blog just one year ago and I have managed to post on it most weeks. This is a success but I am dissatisfied with it because I feel the quality of the writing in these posts could have been better.
The aim of the blog was to take part in the flash fiction challenges set each week by Chuck Wendig on terrible minds and that has been a success. Again maybe the quality of the writing could be improved (enormously).
So if I were to measure the blog simply as a) being activly publishing on it (score 1) and b) writing the challenges each friday (score 1)
I have reached my target.

But I want more from my writing.
I want to earn money and I guess some sort of acknowledgement that I have enought talent to be doing this.

Realisation! I need to start completing pieces to send out to magazines or papers.
What about competitions? I hate them. To be perfectly honest I feel like I am back doing exams in school when I do them. But I think they are a necessary evil to get know as a writer.

So my next target?
To get published.
Somewhere.
By Somebody.
For a something.

End of!

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