Blog Transcript: Wesley Stace
Wesley Stace: That's such a difficult question. To start with, do what you want to do, and believe that you want to do it, because nobody else will believe in it if you don't. If you're doing it half-heartedly, nobody can be able to persuade you that it's the right thing to do, so you might as well give up. And I think a lot of people, perhaps in writing programs, want the secret to it, and people with self-help books want the secrets to things, but there are no secrets. What there is is hard work, grind, keeping at it, not being afraid of failure, you know, there's all those things that -- these aren't lessons you can teach people and I've never taught creative writing, but I do very much get the feeling that, you know, you can make a bad thing good and you can probably make a good thing slightly better, but then there's the icing on the top, I mean that, who can teach that? Who could possibly teach that? So, you know, I just don't think there's a way it could be communicated. I mean it's either going to be there on the page the moment you read something by somebody or it isn't, it seems to me, or in the song. And it's so wonderful when it is. After that, you then have the reality of making it work in terms of how you make money doing it, and that's a whole separate issue altogether because, you know, the thing that you are doing, in my case being a songwriter, was directly in opposition to the ability to stay at home to write a novel. So like anybody else, I had a day job, it's just that mine happened at night. But you know you teach or you work in a shop to just give yourself the hours to write, but writing takes a long time, so that's very difficult too. So there's so many layers to this bit of the question. Then you get into issues of how do you persuade a publisher, or how do you get an agent? You know, all these things are incredibly complicated too, so it's like there's so not one possible answer to it, but what there are is a million little obstacles, and the first one is just knowing that it's what you want to do. And the second is approaching how you could possibly translate that to the world at large because there's then various fences you have to jump over to get it out into the marketplace and even when you're there, there's a whole other set of stuff. So I mean it's -- so it's such a magnificently perplexing question that it's tough to think of a simple answer for it. But I would say that the first bit is, you have to know you want to do it. A friend of mine got an advance to write a book, and he didn't finish the book, and he had to pay the advance back. And I said, "Did you learn anything from the experience?" And he said -- I mean this happened over many conversations -- but he said, "Yes, never take money from somebody unless you know you really, really want to do the thing that you've agreed to do. And obviously I just didn't, I just didn't realize that. I was so excited to get this deal to write this book." And I mean what a good piece of advice that is.
