You may have noticed that there’s a routine building around these parts. Or not, ’cause really, it’s mostly a routine that exists in my head and it’s only been going for, like, a week. In any case, this is a bonus post. As in, something I didn’t intend to write, but I’m going to anyway.

I’ve offered some advice about Writing and Tracking Your Rights over on LL Hannetts blog as part of her Tuesday Therapy series.

I am, for someone who once made a career of dispensing writing advice in the tertiary sector, remarkably squeamish about the process. I either want to impart everything or nothing, since the wrong piece of advice delivered at the wrong time can be fatal to a developing creative process. I still suffer crippling moments of doubt induced by something I read in Samuel Delany’s About Writing four years ago. It’s not bad advice – it’s remarkably good – but I heard it at the wrong time and I can’t let it go and its incompatible enough to my practice to be a problem.

I’m also aware that the vast majority of my writing advice isn’t mine, since teaching writing means you accumulate advice like a bowerbird, lining your nest with the wisdom of better writers until they become part of your habitat. Any advice that I give is probably ripping off someone smarter than me, and it’d inevitably result in me spending hours revisiting folders full of print-outs until I figured out who.

Copyright, though. Rights are something I get passionate about.

I don’t mean this in a piracy kind of way – I have my issues with electronic piracy but they’re somewhat marginal compared to the bone-headed things writers will do when signing contracts. Hell, it’s nothing compared to some of the boneheaded things in contracts I’ve signed over the course of my writing career, and I tend to pay attention more than most.

I talk about it in more detail over on Lisa’s blog, but the basic gist of most writing advice should be this: be smart, do your homework, think long-term, and treat your writing like a business. It’s possible to do a lot in writing with very little technical training or awareness of how writing works, but the business part is one of those things that should be universal.

I’ve sold a few short stories over the course of my (relatively) short writing career; in that times I’ve asked for contracts to be changed a couple of times because there was something, usually e-rights related, that bothered me. Publishers have occasionally been surprised by that, but they’ve always been remarkably open to discussing the agreement I was about to sign and changing it to address my concerns.

It surprises me that more people don’t do that. Worse, it makes me a little sad.

PeterMBall

PeterMBall

Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.
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