UnPhiltered (Part 3)
Catch up on chapters 9-12 of my writing-life story
Chapter 9 — Becoming Hemingway
I started to introduce myself as a writer.
Maybe it was because I wasn’t doing much else.
I spent Spring 2019 in Seville. Stories virtually leapt out at every corner and found their way onto my laptop. It’s a pretty inspiring place, especially when most of your day is spent writing in a bullfighting-themed cafe, and shooting the shit over brandy with your writing buddy (yes, everyone has a bit of a Hemingway phase).
It felt good to have some paid publications, hear my story read on a podcast, and be able to carry my book around with me to every cafe. People are reluctant to introduce themselves as a writer if they aren’t doing it full-time for a plum wage.
NEWSFLASH — I don’t know a single short story writer who earns a living doing only that. Plus, now I do earn a living completely from writing, it’s not as sexy as people think. Terms like ‘content’, ‘op-eds’, and ‘thought leadership’ tend to make eyes glaze over.
You’re a writer if you live it. Simple as that.
After Seville, I walked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. Thirty days of flat landscapes, blisters, and searching for small-town supermarkets daring enough to stock items as exotic as hummus and guacamole.
You have a lot of time to think on the Camino. Walk, arrive, wash your pants, find some food, chat a bit, and wait for the next day. Almost everyone I met wrote a diary. A bit like with photos, I’ve never really been one for diaries or morning pages. I need to have the capacity to forget an image, a thought, or an idea. What tends to stick deep is the feelings, sensory data, and the sentiment that comes out between the lines of a story.
My Camino experience manifested in a novel, written in one month while I worked in a hostel in Morocco. Between serving tea, checking in guests, and cleaning toilets, I wrote 2,000 words a day. There was one point when I realized I hadn’t left the hostel for three days or so. It was intense.
‘Network Trail’ is the story of Geoffrey Rossi, a middle-aged ex-rail engineer and wannabe comedian who runs a hostel for walkers of a path running the length of Great Britain (similar to Spain’s Camino de Santiago).
Geoffrey makes a LOT of train jokes, suffers a break up and personal loss, which leads him to walk the trail himself, culminating in a life-altering experience at the end of it all.
In writing the book, I learned how uncomfortable I am following the typical novel story structure.
The novel is OK. It works as a story. It delves into creativity, masculinity, and mental health. But the submission process to literary agents with names like Ridley Farquois III and Camille Winter-Smythe made me lose interest in the entire sector and lose conviction in the project.
Since then, things have gotten much worse in traditional publishing, so I don’t see myself rushing back to it.
Still, I’m glad to have written a novel.
Maybe someday, I’ll finish my next one.
Chapter 10 — Teaching Others
Pro writers never stop learning. Even accomplished novelists and those who teach Master’s students keep improving their vocabulary, their technique, their knowledge.
That’s one of the things I like about writing. The line between student and teacher is fluid; it is not defined by qualifications, awards, or book sales. Teachers must learn to collate and impart useful techniques, then give considered and honest feedback.
I began helping others online with their writing in 2019.
Back then, it was often PhD theses, university applications, and business texts.
But as I helped language students online, I honed my own knowledge of the English language. I learned how to critique texts so students would improve next time. And I developed frameworks to explain best practices for style, voice, and technique (depending on the context).
Teaching is perhaps the best base for becoming a pro writer.
You develop efficient research skills.
You can appreciate your strengths and blind spots.
You become a concise explainer.
In addition to teaching, I built profiles on sites like Substack and Medium. While I continued with my creative outlet of writing short stories, I needed to make sense of the materials and techniques I was producing for students. My columns on Substack were mostly on literature and short stories, while I wrote more about language and technique on Medium.
When you start out writing, it’s more about creating something from within; as you move forward in your writing career, you feel the need to reach more readers.
Publishing on sites where you must build an audience from the millions of readers already on the platform turns you from blogger to writer. It’s not all about algorithms and clickbait titles, though. Both sites are ‘semi-professional’ in that they are open for all to publish, but editors and readers expect a certain level of quality.
When regularly publishing on ‘semi-pro’ platforms, writers develop good habits — understanding the structures that resonate, going deeper with research and evidence, formatting for readability, and proofreading thoroughly.
The days of building your writing chops from shadowing a wizened editor at a local newspaper are over. Writers need to find their own reasons to develop and share their skills. They need a semi-pro stepping stone before launching a business. And they need to keep learning.
I suppose that’s what I did in 2019/20. More short online courses and workshops, analyzing (not just consuming) top blogs and articles, and reading the odd book on writing craft.
This was all done while I travelled in Asia, searching for possible ‘digital nomad’ bases.
And just as I found one, Covid struck, and I returned to the UK for lockdown.
Chapter 11 - The Covid Diaries
I’m thankful for the Covid summer. Yes, there were nonsensical rule changes, paranoid neighbours, death, sadness, and constant media updates, but when you have to stay put and work on yourself, good things can happen.
Summer 2020 in southern England was beautiful. No cliché weather for once.
I ticked off all the lockdown cliches — daily Yoga, fitness, and writing a book — all while revelling in the online education boom.
Many of my stories and books begin with a desire to master a topic.
A story about a Country singer.
Trying my hand at Horror.
A book about ‘time’.
The trigger for my book was how our experience of time was turned on its head during Covid. Days were suddenly hard to track; time was malleable.
With no idea for the story in mind, I began to research what time actually comprised: biology, philosophy, physics, language, narrative, chemistry, astronomy, and more. I listened to podcasts, discovered Carlo Rovelli’s book, read Einstein’s Dreams, and went down the rabbit hole of how time itself is a mere construct.
Short stories are a way to explore themes without investing years in a fully blown book project. With time, I thought to expose the fractal: eighteen approaches to time with brief character narratives, all connected by one place.
I researched, I wrote, I edited, I paid for professional feedback, I submitted, I got a ‘maybe’, I waited, I queried again, got a ‘yes’, celebrated, edited again, and eventually, my book was scheduled for 2022 publication.
Here are the terms the independent publisher offered me to put my first traditionally published book into the world:
Production costs: paid by publisher
Other rights: publisher takes a percentage
Marketing: some tweets by the publisher
Distribution: a ropey website with 25-dollar worldwide shipping and no Amazon version
Print: black & white pamphlet with no eBook.
Author copies: bought at discount
Royalties: 0%
While the terms seem laughable, independent publishing is a rough business. The publisher was a one-woman operation, probably making a significant loss. Her model supports excellent literary works that would not be published elsewhere. She put real effort and care into editing.
Going through the process, doing an online launch, sending copies around the world (to reduce the silly shipping cost), and being able to call myself an author without the self-publishing caveat was life-changing. The book is with another publisher now, but I’m grateful to the first person who took a chance on me.
Fifteen Shades of Time is a book I’m proud of. I think it contributes to the canon of narratives on the subject. So does David Eagleman, the author of a best-selling book on afterlives with a similar structure. I was thrilled he read my book and gave a cover quote.
After the Covid summer, I moved to a place where time runs slower: The Canary Islands.
Chapter 12 — Riding a bike
Here is a list of work-related things I never thought I’d do:
Create video courses
Build a website (or six)
Host a podcast / livestream
Hire an assistant (+ fire an assistant)
Sell products and services on Zoom calls
Become a social media influencer (sort of)
Help dozens of clients get published or promoted
Run a paid community with 100+ members (not OnlyFans)
After all, I was just a lowly English teacher.
Before 2019, I wrote lesson plans, taught classes, and marked homework.
Well, after switching to online classes offering writing help, I began to learn more about how coaching differs from teaching and how digital businesses differ from teaching via online platforms.
I learned that a coaching session has no fixed price.
Value is completely subjective.
Everything depends on framing, strategies, and results.
I was liberated from the idea that my time was worth 10 Euros an hour, or 20, or even 250!
All of the items on the list occurred within three years or so. They were terrifying and difficult at first, but practice makes better, and once you get more comfortable with each process, it’s like riding a bike.
To improve more quickly, I took courses on marketing and business management, read a ton, joined helpful online communities, posted daily on socials, and, most importantly, I got used to failing fast.
The benefit of an online coaching business is that you start with a laptop and very few overheads. The only investment you make is your time, so you need to adapt quickly and test the market a lot.
I never thought I’d enjoy making videos, penning articles about language, and spending so much time on LinkedIn. But I did. My posts got millions of views (combined), and I attracted a little army of followers.
Being my own boss was scary and rewarding in equal measure. The highs are 10 times higher than when you are working for someone else; the lows are devastating (more on this in a future chapter).
What I loved most was the actual coaching: getting on weekly calls with clients, giving advice and learning from community members, editing great work, and getting messages about struggles and successes.
The problem with a coaching business is the ‘business’ part. You spend 90% of your time doing marketing, sales, and admin, and only 10% doing what you love.
How did my own writing fit into all of this?
1. Growing my skills in content writing — course materials, articles, and web copy.
2. Using LinkedIn as a creative outlet — writing funny slideshows about badgers and awful corpo influencers.
3. Continuing my narrative writing — I prepared to publish my second book of short fiction.
More on my second book next time…
Have you started a digital business?
What did you love/hate about it?