SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER
The writing world has changed a lot since I was a lad. (Well, I’ve changed a lot, too!) I first got published by reading lots of men’s magazines and working out the story formula they liked. The mags. were published by the KG Murray Publishing Company. They had titles like, “Man”, “Man Junior”, “Adam”, “Pocket Man”. They each published at least 3 stories a month = 144-150 stories a year. I wrote detective and crime stories for them on my Olivetti portable typewriter.
I also tried Readers Digest and Australian Women’s Weekly but didn’t get the formula right. My background had conditioned me to issues of sex, violence and the expression of male power through those avenues. Romance and Optimism didn’t come naturally to me. There has to be a resonance between your instinctive concerns and the market’s audience. Or, if you like, your psychopathology has to match that of your readers.
Along came a Welshman , Gareth Powell, and his magazines – “Chance”, “Squire”, “Pol” (for the ladies) – were far more sophisticated than the KGM stables. I found my style suited his formula.
Two things killed that market. One was the liberalisation of censorship laws which meant we had to compete with “Playboy”. Besides “Playboy’s” cleavage, we were also competing with Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, et al.
The other thing was local television drama production. Crawford Productions became the KG Murray of television and I was now pitching story ideas to ‘Homicide”, “Division 4”, “Bluey”. I wrote regularly for “Possessions”, a short-lived attempt at creating a sophisticated, glamorous crime and high-life series by Grundy’s. But Australians like their TV drama to be low-life. Glamor still doesn’t cut it on the local small screen.
The lesson? If you want to be a writer, find out where the market is. How do people engage with stories? What sort of stories do they engage with?
I set up “The Story of the Future” at the Australia Council because I believed, in 2005, that digital games and online stories were the way of future stories. Some major publishers said that my secret agenda was to destroy book culture. It wasn’t. I wanted writers to have a reasonable income stream and I was convinced that the way forward lay with the digital world. I clashed with literary purists who regarded digital – as one literary publisher said at a SOF seminar – “as nothing but crap!”
There were some great projects came out of SOF. But we also engaged with the problem of how to make a living as a writer in the digital world. And it’s this I want to share with you. Here’s the roadmap. Here’s the terrain. Go for it!
