You hear so much yapping about a career in writing and art being a hard life. Shoveling coal for a living is a hard life, but when you are doing what you were put on earth to do with your life–and that is to write or paint–your life is simple, for then you have answered the most crucial questions of all: “What shall I be? “What shall I do? Then you ask, “How do I do it” and that is your craft, that is your art.
My blog is intended for writers and artists. Three million Americans identify themselves as writers. 2.7 million Americans identify themselves as artists. Of course, the blog also reaches millions of people in foreign countries who also identify themselves as artists and writers. To date my blog has been looked at by four hundred thousand writers and artists, the majority Americans, and others from even the least populated mountain and island kingdoms.
An Example of What Happens to Writers as Their Lives Unfold: The Opportunities that Appear
I will use myself as an example of a writer whose career over many years I can describe. It may be of value to writers and artists to compare to their own careers. Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life is my best and my favorite book. It was written to help people. The main beneficiaries of Fighting To Win are discouraged people—broke, out of work, disappointed with their career or life, etc. Fighting to Win lifts them up.
Many people–probably most– struggle to find direction for their lives, but some people know from their earliest years the life, the career, they will pursue. I began writing professionally at eight–$25 for a story published in Jack & Jill. I didn’t know then that eventually in my career as writer I would, as many writers do, evolve into writer/poet/book marketer/public speaker/blogger. I decided on the way home from school on a rainy day that my goal when I grew up would be to be a writer so I could write beautiful words like “lovely,” “sea-faring,” and “proficient.” That goal has never changed through the publications of twelve books that are not self-published.
Ninety percent of a writer’s talent is inborn. That’s why writers needn’t attend the Iowa school of writing, but are generally self-taught. Some writers who write surprisingly well when they are very young are prodigies. There are artist prodigies too that draw and paint beautifully like much older artists. They master perspective when they seem too young to have mastered it .Mozart was a music prodigy, composing at four. Baryshnikov was a prodigy in ballet. He was the greatest dancer of his era because he could leap highest.
An early blooming prodigy can perform something before being taught to do it. For example, a young writing prodigy can write a story that has a plot, characterization, themes, tension, mystery, a strong conclusion though they have not been taught those features. The remaining ten percent of a writer’s expertise is skill and technique that comes from study, a ten percent separating great from good, and a phase that introduces the need for hard work, even among the most naturally-gifted.
As in every field, sweat-and-toil hard workers out-perform lazy or listless workers. You cannot rely on natural talent alone to bring high success. Without drive and intelligence–however naturally talented you are–you will not go as far as you could. Each day writers and artists should hope they have talent and tell themselves. “Today I will be energetic. Today I will be focused.”
A career in the arts is in keeping with my Welsh heritage. The Welsh entertain each other with stories and songs. I completed three degrees in American literature and taught Self Development in a university graduate school. At age twenty I had a short story published in a major literary journal. At twenty-one, a highly-regarded writing teacher said of my paper, “Teachers wait their entire career for a student who can write like this.”
I knew nothing about publishing and sent the entire manuscript of Fighting to Win to a publisher who called me and said they wanted to publish the book. I asked what kind of changes they wanted made and they said, “None. The book is a perfect book.” That statement soured me. Surely no book in first draft form is that good. I wanted a more demanding publisher who would encourage me to write my best. I turned the offer down. Having some doubts about the book I wrote an entirely new draft, starting from scratch, consuming a year.
I made an agreement with an excellent literary agent. I owe him a debt of gratitude. He was energetic and honest, and placed my book Fighting to Win with Doubleday. After the success of Fighting to Win, another publisher said they wanted me to write a book for them. “What do you want me to write about?” I asked. They said, “Whatever you want.” So I wrote Waging Business Warfare for Scribner’s publisher, a book that The Wall Street Journal said would change the way companies do business. Both books climbed the best sealer charts. Fighting to Win was also a best seller in Sweden. Waging Business Warfare in France and Japan.
Writer or artist, you have to distinguish yourself from the crowd. You have to get known. I’ve had many appearances in the national media on publicity tours and on my own. The books and my name became known in North America and foreign countries who purchased rights. I discovered that I am a good interviewee for marketing books, which is really sales. I have trained people in selling technique. The goal of a writer marketing to the broadcast media is to be invited back. Ideal is when the host of the show says “Call whenever you have something you want to talk about. We’ll put you on right away.”
Having written a book that becomes known by the public changes the author’s life forever. If you’re an author you’d better like the book since you and it from the publication date to the end of your life will be inseparable. You will be known as “So and so, the he author of….”
A New York publisher, I didn’t know, head of a major house who “had read everything,” generously called me out of the blue to tell me she had read Fighting to Win and found it “One of the two or three best books of any type–prose, poetry, biography, history, arts etc.–I have ever read.”
Then I took on a new career: public speaking in auditoriums in North America and Europe to audiences of thousands about their self-improvement, based on the content of Fighting to Win. I discovered a talent for public speaking to large audiences that I wasn’t aware of. Long ago I was afraid of public speaking, but now I enjoy it as much as I do writing, and the income is impressive. Many speakers/writers earn more money from speaking than from writing. The writer who can also speak is lucky. It is quite a shock to writers accustomed to working alone to find themselves on a stage addressing three, four, five thousand people who have come to hear an author’s wisdom.
Later I began this blog, designed to stimulate thinking about the important roles of writers and artists, especially those who hope to excel, a goal I share, placing emphasis on research and prescriptive how-to advice. I wanted to think of every aspect of writers’ and artists’ work life and write something practical to aid them. Each blog is an essay pertaining to the life of writers or artists–their necessary knowledge, their moods, their challenges, their discouragements, and so on. My most popular post is “The Characteristics of Creative People.” There are now 141 essays.
A major change in this writer’s life was turning, later in life, from writing prose to writing poetry. Since then there has been a stream of publications of poems and great joy. I wrote a book of poetry about adventures I had at seventeen when for six months I lived the life of a hobo hitching rides on freight trains: The Poetry of Riding Freight Trains Across America.
Philip Roth said eventually people won’t read novels anymore because with such busy lives, growing busier, they don’t have the many hours needed to read a novel. A poem can be read in a few minutes.
In Bliss
When you spend thousands of hours working hard over many years as many writers and artists have, and think of your craft all the time since childhood, writing and painting and other arts are the simplest tasks of your time here on earth. Dancers find a similar joy in dancing, actors in acting. When unhindered, such craftsmen write, paint, act, and dance in bliss.
© 2025 David J. Rogers
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The manuscript Golding submitted was worn, torn, and stained when Monteith first saw it. It had obviously been rejected by other publishers. Even Monteith agreed that this work of a public school teacher was over-written, disorganized, repetitive–a mess–and seemed never to get started. After many rejections Golding was losing hope of having the book published, of ever being published.
be recognized as a person with a talent that can generate revenue. When a writer is discovered by an agent or publisher, their life changes for the better. This post is about writers who were discovered, then published, and found success–perhaps more success than they expected. There are so many writers with all the talent in the world who are trying very hard to be discovered by an agent or publisher who is trying as hard to discover them. There is a good chance that many writers we read would never have been published had they not been discovered by the right agent and a right publisher.
Finally a small publisher picked it up. However, this editor who discovered the book, was different. He was enthusiastic and said to Harold, “Your book is going to be a best seller.” Finally what Harold had been hoping for: someone had faith in the book and its spiritual message. It became a phenomenal best -seller, the most popular book in the world, selling twenty -five million copies.
Persistent and confident in spite of failures, Jack London submitted his manuscripts hundreds of times to publishers that rejected the work before an editor discovered him. But after that, within a single year London, a self-educated writer, took the literary world by storm and was the most popular, most critically and financially successful novelist/short story writer in the world.
Invariably I would think, “All these incredibly talented performers I see–artists who are looking for a big break and are dying to be discovered.” Much like them, so many writers with so much talent also are trying very hard to be discovered. Without the people who discovered William Golding, Thomas Wolfe, Harold Kushner, or Jack London, would we have ever heard of those famous authors?
Writers and artists throughout history have feared and hated rejections of their work.
Each rejection compounds the effects of the previous rejections and can lead writers and artists from heights of blissful optimism to the total disappearance of confidence. Yet without 
respond when editors reject their work, and there it was, the questions “What is winning? Is winning the only thing that matters? Is getting published the only thing that matters? Is that the only credential that makes you a significant literary person?”
I remember once learning that a publishing house I was interested in submitting to typically received 5,000 unsolicited manuscripts a year. Less than seventy would be published. What about those thousands of disappointed writers? I’m sure they had worked very hard and had high hopes. But their hopes would be shattered. Are they to conceive of themselves as failures? Are they supposed to give up hope of ever being successful?
You are winning and not failing when you are persistent in spite of setbacks, are able to recover quickly, and are resilient.
You are winning and not failing when you are 
Those are the ways you are really winning even during those times when it feels like you are not.
had, but doesn’t. It is a highly-regarded journal and would enhance any serious writer’s reputation to appear in it. That journal had published other pieces of Kathy’s in the past during her particularly prolific period when work poured out of her and was in demand by editors and readers. Some of her books were being published at the time, and many of her articles appearing in magazines were achieving record readership scores.
I am talking about the difference between writers whose overriding goal is to see their work in print–a Publication Focus–contrasted with writers whose overriding goal stops short of publication in which they are not interested. They are concerned solely with generating what is in their judgment the highest possible quality text–a Production Focus. The latter are more than contented to produce works they are proud of without seeing them published.
matters to them is that the works they produce be the best they have the skills to produce. They believe that because they are not interested in publishing but in producing the highest quality work they can, they are more creative and do better work than they would were they competing with others to see their work in print, and there are grounds for that belief.
produced was then graded by professionals–seasoned painters grading the paintings, experienced writers the writing, etc. The results were significant in that no matter what the reward was or when it was given, if the subjects thought they were working for external rewards, even a little trinket, and not for fun and pleasure, they became less creative. But when they were light-hearted and fooling around and no external reward was involved, they were more creative and their work was better.
a clear, informative, and entertaining way concepts that were unfamiliar to western thinking. It was a challenge because the concept of the book was totally new and original. Every day’s work of many hours was fulfilling, I didn’t spend a second thinking about how my book would do in the stores, only about the book’s clarity and how useful I could make it and how inviting it would be for readers. It was a highly successful and profitable book and my ambitions for the next book I began were high. But I found my thoughts losing focus. They often wandered away from the book’s content and style and how to satisfy the reader to where I would build the new house the new book’s royalties would bring me and the kind of cars I would buy. Both books received many accolades and made best seller lists. But whereas I wouldn’t change a single word of the first book, I live with the knowledge that the second book could have been better.
“One day I seemed to shut a door between me and all publishers. I said to myself, ‘Now I can write.” He started working on The Sound and the Fury, “thinking of books, publication, only in the sense in saying to myself, I wont (sic) have to worry about publishers liking or not liking this at all.”
writing every day. Most of them quit because of the heavy, depressing weight of too many failures and too few–if any–successes and the toll of failures on one’s 
bored. Just as children do that, writers can do something remarkable. As fully absorbed as children, they can work on perfecting a single paragraph forty or fifty times without experiencing a moment of boredom while people who are not writers and think that one draft is sufficient are astonished that such a feat is possible. The conclusion of Amabile’s experiments was that a playful approach like that of children increases the likelihood of producing creative results, and that pursuing external rewards diminishes the person’s creativity.
themselves) which Production Writers experience has been shown to improve the quality of the work that is produced. That is why so many famous writers think that they, and no one else, are the best judge of their work and why so many of them ignore or don’t ask for the advice of editors. Who enjoys being evaluated? Writers often dread evaluations, and evaluations negatively affect the writer’s mood and thus the quality of work that is produced. A Production Writer may ask for editorial assistance–to be helped–but not to be evaluated.
davidjrogersftw 