Shelf Life Year One in Review
Or, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Run My Mouth
I won’t bury the lede because I never bury the lede: I always let you know what you’ll be getting, right up front. I will continue to write Shelf Life for as long as I have topics of interest (to me, to you) to write about, which, if you have ever met me, you know is likely to be forever. Welcome to a very special anniversary episode of Shelf Life. I have more real topics, lots more, but I have pushed them all back to bring you this nonsense navel-gazing instead.
Approaching this anniversary, I gave some thought to whether I wanted to scale back and publish less frequently but I decided there is no need. Writing these is not a heavy lift and the project helps keep me writing other stuff, too. I also have built a lot of engagement with other writers while I’m out and about in the digital world trying to understand what they wish they knew about the inner workings of the publishing industry. So that has been a pleasant bonus.
Beginning with the first full-length article, which went live on September 10, 2020, I’m proud to have put out 107 essays total (not counting the one you are reading right now). As a person who is living with dyscalculia I’m not sure how that happened, because there are 52 weeks in a year and two Shelf Lifes in a week so I feel like there should have been 104. Whatever, math is hard.
Over these 107 articles I have written more than 250,000 words. That means this corpus is now somewhat longer than East of Eden, which was also written during the course of one year, and which Steinbeck drafted using 300 pencils (Blackwing 602s). Zero pencils (of any provenance) have been used in drafting Shelf Life (I hate pencils).
You probably should have spent your time reading East of Eden instead of this; you might have been better served. I don’t know, I’ve never read Steinbeck. This I can say for Shelf Life: It is at least still shorter than Ulysses; you’re welcome. Enjoy this brevity while it lasts.
This all started because my friend was tired of receiving long, rambling rants on publishing and related topics late at night via text, and she told me to go post my thoughts somewhere on the internet instead so she could read them at a more convenient (for her) time. I told her I did not think I had enough topics to make it worthwhile. She suggested I make a list of all the topics I could think of and see how many I came up with. I did make such a list, which is included here for posterity:
I don’t often let people look inside my notebooks because my handwriting is bad, so I hope you enjoy this glimpse.
That’s not the whole list; it goes on to another page. I transferred all the topics to a spreadsheet to make counting them easier and saw I had more than 80, which seemed like enough to get started. I reasoned that if I wrote two essays a week it would take me most of a year to run out, and that was even if I did not add any more topics along the way—but I figured I would add more topics along the way. From my original list of 80ish topics, I have now written 107 articles and my list of topics to write in the future presently numbers 88. This is objectively hilarious.
After I got comfortable writing the articles regularly and putting them out on time, I began to interact with more writers and more kinds of writers. In my career as an editor, I have worked exclusively with publishers. Although I’ve worked in many different formats (books, journals, magazines) and on many types of content (scholarly, academic, commercial fiction, commercial nonfiction), the common thread is that every writer I work with has already been picked up by a publisher.
These writers are at various stages of their writing careers. Some of them are more skilled and need less help from me while others are developing their writing and need more. As a rule, though, I do not do paid work directly with writers who are not represented by a publisher. No self-published authors and no writers who have not yet been signed by a publisher. This rule is purely about ease of business administration: First, publishers pay invoices faithfully without a lot of follow up, while individuals don’t always; and second, I don’t enjoy complicating my taxes. Even 1099s are a bit much for me (remember: math is hard).
I thought it would be a valuable exercise for me to learn about what kinds of questions nascent writers have. What do they want to know about the publishing industry, what misconceptions do they have? What could they benefit from knowing? Some of the things I’ve learned have been really surprising. From the inside of anything it’s hard to envision what those outside of it see and understand. I’ve mined a lot of great topics from talking to unpublished writers, self-published authors, people who hope to become writers or authors, and interested laypeople.
As a result, as Shelf Life has gone on, I’ve moved to a docket that better balances writing topics with publishing industry topics. When I started, I didn’t realize there was this much appetite for insider info on the nuts and bolts of the publishing industry. The value proposition remains the same, though. I’m an editor and career publisher first and a writer second. I don’t help with writing as a successful career writer, but as a successful career editor who also struggles with all the same stuff any other writer does.
During the last year I have written on topics requested directly (eg, “Can you write a post about X?”) and indirectly (“I don’t understand why X is how it is, why is it like that?”). I have also failed to write on some topics that were requested because I genuinely do not have the answer (or a good-enough answer). Some of those topics include:
How do you make your brain stop generating ideas once you’ve got it started?
How do you take a break from a project to rest without losing momentum?
What makes a really well-written and high-quality non-narrative manuscript?
I am going to continue thinking some more on those topics and hopefully will address them at some point. Also requested by several readers is an article on the art of sentence diagramming. I do have all the answers to that but I have not yet drafted it because I know I’m going to have to do a lot of drawing for it—physical drawing like with a pen and ruler—and I have not been able to find my ruler.
I challenge you to name any item that gets misplaced and lost with the same frequency as a 6-inch transparent plastic ruler.
Of the articles I have written for Shelf Life, the following are my favorites. If you missed any of them, these are the ones I would most love for you to go back and read:
The articles that others seem to have liked the most, shared the most, told me they enjoyed the most, or hit that heart button on the most, have been these ones:
I noticed an interesting pattern sometime midway through the year, and then I tested it a few times and it turned out to hold true: When I phone an article in—meaning, when I put together an article I think of as low-effort and/or not that interesting—it always turns out that people really like that article. More than they like the ones I think are good or helpful or useful. I’m still working on figuring out why that is.
Like this article you’re reading right now is fairly low-effort on my part, so you probably will like it a lot. I don’t know why you’re like this.
At the end of the day—or the end of the year, in this case—Shelf Life has developed some overarching themes and I hope I have been successful at hammering them mercilessly into the minds of everyone who reads. These are:
If you write stuff you’re a writer; writing is the only requirement for being “a real writer.”
Learning to seek out and accept criticism is one of the most valuable skills a writer can cultivate.
Every first draft is garbage. Even mine, even yours, even James Joyce’s.
Nobody gets good at anything without practice.
Trad publishing industry practices are sometimes esoteric or confusing, but they do not exist to make writers’ lives hard or to help us prey on writers.
Finally, I would hate to close an article without any new writing advice since that’s what you read for. Here are some writing tips I have on hand that haven’t fallen under an appropriate topic and so have not yet been shared in Shelf Life:
Don’t use a new scented soap, shampoo, or perfume right before you sit down to write. The smell will distract you.
Don’t force your brain to go into idea-generation mode late at night if you intend on sleeping.
Never use numerals in fiction writing; just never, ever do it. Always write around them.
Whether you read all the time, most of the time, some of the time, or only when I harangue you to read, I appreciate your readership. Shelf Life readers have an uncanny knack for knowing when I am tired or discouraged and sending me a message of appreciation or encouragement right at that moment. You all should be the ones writing a newsletter because that’s the skill we really need people to pick up.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.
Congratulations on the anniversary!