"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

From Misty, I learned how to be a professional тАУ and that I learned from watching
her. She came home from a full day of work and went straight into her office and
wrote her ten pages . . . every day, no matter what kind of a day she'd had. Only when
she'd done that did she come out and hang out. She was invariably polite and friendly
to her agent, her editors, her publishers, and her fans. She worked on ideas for one
project while writing another. She didn't have a shit fit about having to do rewrites тАУ
she just did them. She hit her deadlines. She wrote stories she wanted to write.

There. I've just given you a complete apprenticeship in writing. You have everything
you need to know to become a professional writer, and it took you a couple of
minutes of your time and didn't cost you a penny. The rest of being a professional
writer is writing тАУ sitting down and putting words on a page, one after another after
another.

If you want to pay $40,000 or $60,000 or whatever for a college education, you can
do that, and perhaps you'll even have one or two professors in your program who are
actually working as writers. They aren't doing it full time, of course, because if they
were, they wouldn't be supplementing their income by teaching, so you won't be able
to model a full-time writer by watching them. You'll have to spend a lot of time doing
things that have no relationship to what you want to do with your life. And you need
to remember that most people who go to college to become writers don't. They find
their focus shifted to education, or business, and they give up on their dream. College
educations are designed by conformists to create conformists. Even those colleges
HOLLY LISLE
 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 27

which point to their radical stance and avante garde teaching are creating students
who conform to their mold тАУ their sort of radicals, their sort of avante garde.
Students in college have to earn the approval of their teachers in order to get their
grades and graduate. And you don't learn anything new if your main goal in life is
seeking the approval of experts.

If you're looking at writing as a career, you're looking at a future of tremendous
freedom. You can do what you want to do with your life, and publishers and editors
don't ask if you have a degree, and don't care if you have a degree. They only care
that you can put good words on a page, and that you can tell a story. They'll pay you
well if you can do those two things тАУ and you can learn to do them without a college
education, without a high school education, without having spent a day in your life
locked behind the walls of a classroom.
You'll learn to write if you teach yourself. Put yourself in situations where you can
learn new things from the people who actually do them. Hang out with policemen and
painters and long-distance runners and carpenters. Get them to show you the tricks of
their trade. Learn how to build a stained glass window, how to paddle a canoe, how to
swim, how to bait your own hook and tie your own flies and how to identify the
flowers and shrubs and trees native to your region. Grow a garden. Paint your own
house and fix your own leaky faucet. Go camping with a couple of outdoorsy friends.
Read lots and lots and lots of good books. Read fiction, read non-fiction. Especially
read lots of books about complicated subjects written for the intelligent layman.
Never, never pick up a textbook тАУ textbooks are worthless. They're politically correct
pabulum designed to spoon-feed tiny bits of information to people who aren't