YA Guy Defines... Success!

What does it mean to be a successful writer?

For many writers--and, perhaps, for the general public--"success" means six-figure advances, bestseller status, big-ticket awards (including those just announced for this year's very deserving Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz Award winners).

By that definition, most of us--including YA Guy--are abysmal failures. Given the very nature of publishing, the very nature of any business venture, most people don't achieve that kind of success. Most of us plug along somewhere in the middle, perhaps making some money, perhaps not, perhaps making a career of it, more likely not, perhaps winning an award or two, perhaps not, but never becoming household names.

I've been writing since I was about eight years old. (Actually, earlier than that, but it was around age eight that I tried to write my first novel--on my mom's manual typewriter. After a page of typos and frustration, I gave up.) Since that time, and with increasing frequency from the year I started college (1983) to the present, I've produced numerous creative nonfiction essays, short stories, academic books and articles, and partial or completed novels. Some of the above has been published, some of it hasn't. None of it has skyrocketed to fame. But all of it, even the things I didn't finish for one reason or another (because the idea wasn't as good as I first thought, because I ran out of steam, whatever), has been written.

So I decided to pursue a different definition of "success," one based purely on page totals. In my calculations, I ruled out academic books and articles, as well as short pieces (fiction and nonfiction), and focused on novels. The numbers are skewed downward by that decision, considerably so, but since novel-writing was and is my highest aspiration (as it is for many writers), it made sense to me to narrow my output in that way.

For purposes of this quantitative analysis, I estimated a completed novel (whether published or unpublished) at 300 manuscript pages (except for my earliest novels, written in the years 1981-1987, which tended to be shorter, so I averaged those at 250 pages per novel). An unfinished novel--either one that I've discarded permanently or that I'm still working on--I assigned an average of 100 pages. With those estimates, here's what I came up with:

In total from the years 1981 (when I completed my first novel at age 16) to the present, I've written roughly 4,750 manuscript pages of novel-length works. This breaks down as follows:

• On average, I've written 125 pages worth of novels per year over a period of 38 years, or about a page every three days.
• Narrowed down to the years of my greatest productivity, from 2010 to the present, I've written about 3,900 pages, for an average of 433 pages per year. That's over a page a day for almost 10 years.
• Limited to completed novels, it works out to approximately 3,300 pages or 366 pages per year.
• Confined further to completed and published novels, it drops to about 2,100 pages or 233 pages per year. However, that number is unacceptably low--because, of the seven novels I've started but not finished, only three of them have been completely abandoned, so the other four might be considered "on their way" to completion and, hopefully, publication. Ditto with the four novels from 2010-2019 that are completed but unpublished; two of them will never see the light of day, but one is currently being shopped by my agent and the other I plan to self-publish.

The point is, any way you slice it, I've been pretty productive as a writer of novels throughout my life, and especially in the past decade.

Dare I say I've been successful?

Maybe yes, maybe no. If the almost 5,000 pages of novel-material I've produced in my lifetime have been complete and utter garbage, then maybe I'm less successful than delusional. But on the other hand, even if those pages have been junk, I've written them, and writing counts for something in and of itself. I like to think my success as a writer has been like my career as a writer: somewhere in the middle. No, I'm not one of the great writers of my own or any time, but I'm not a hack either. I'm a writer like most writers, producing as much work as I can that's as good as I can make it.

I hope this exercise doesn't seem merely a pep talk to myself. My purpose in conducting it was to offer words of encouragement to the many writers who are in the same place that I am: people who've been writing for years without the obvious signs of "success" that some writers have achieved. I'm thinking it would be a good idea for those writers to take the time, now and again, to redefine "success." You can do it quantitatively as I've done, or you can find some other qualitative measure: satisfaction, personal growth, positive reviews, the stranger on the street who recognized you. All of those measures (and many more) are valid, and validating.

So be a successful writer. Your own kind of successful writer.

YA Guy... Self-Publishes!

Back in the day, when YA Guy was a mere stripling of sixteen, I wrote my first complete novel. Titled To Alter the Past, it was a fairly routine swords-and-sorcery epic, with warriors and monsters and all the things my Tolkien-reading and D&D-playing self was into at the time. I still have it on a shelf in my closet, a manuscript typed on my mom's manual typewriter, with all the typos carefully corrected with white-out.

The reason it's on my shelf and not yours is that my options for publishing it at the time were limited. I sent it to a family friend who was in publishing, and he very nicely read the first chapter and provided me with feedback that amounted to: "This isn't publishable; keep working on your craft." Not satisfied with that answer, I flirted with having it published by a subsidy ("vanity") press at the approximate cost of $5000; I was going to owe my parents big-time for that. But when the press sent me a couple of their books and I realized my writing, even at age sixteen, was considerably more polished than these samples, I wisely decided to take the family friend's advice. I honed my craft for over thirty years, and now, of course, I've published one novel and have another due out next year.

The point of this lengthy story is that while publishing options were limited back then, they're ubiquitous now. Anyone with a computer can self-publish a book, typically at minimal cost, and have it available for sale. People choose to self-publish for a variety of reasons, and I personally find no fault with any of them. In my case, though I've chosen to pursue the traditional route, I've kept open the possibility that I might also choose to self-publish some day.

Well, today is the day! Available now in Kindle e-book, under my pen name of J. D. Belyi, is my fantasy novel THE PASSING OF BOSS KRENKEL!

Why, you ask, did I choose to self-publish this title? That's another long story. It's actually the first novel I completed after I'd taken a twenty-year hiatus from writing fiction; I finished it in 2010, just before I started writing what would become my first published novel, SURVIVAL COLONY 9. BOSS KRENKEL was a project I'd dreamed of writing for years, a twisted retelling of the Santa Claus story in which Kris Kringle is a brutal colonizer of the North Pole's indigenous people, the Alephs (later Elves). The idea came to me when my own children were young and my wife and I were still practicing the gentle deception of encouraging their belief in Santa Claus; I asked myself what the logical culmination would be if there were a deeper, more sinister deception to this myth, and BOSS KRENKEL was my answer.

But here's the thing: it wasn't publishable. That's what editors and agents told me (including my own). Though the writing, if I do say so myself, is among the best I've produced; though the story and world-building and mythology are, in my view, as good as they're going to get, the nature of the story I chose to tell just wasn't commercial enough. Maybe, if I'd spent years beating the bushes, trying to find an advocate for this book--or making such substantial revisions to it that it would no longer resemble the book I originally set out to write--I would have been able to publish it the traditional way. But I didn't want to spend my energy as a writer in that possibly fruitless struggle; I wanted to move on to other projects (and I did). BOSS KRENKEL remains what it was when I wrote it: a story I love, and good practice for other stories I've managed to sell. But if it was going to see the light of day, it was going to have to do so via a non-traditional means.

They tell you when you start writing not to worry about market trends or commercial viability but to "write the book of your heart," the book you most want to write. I agree with that. But if you do so, you have to accept the possibility that the book of your heart might not be publishable, and that you'll have to decide what to do with it. BOSS KRENKEL was (and to some extent still is) the book of my heart, and I wanted it to be out there in some form. I don't care if it sells, which is actually incredibly liberating; I just care for the pure creative act that produced it. If anyone wants to give it a try, I'd love to hear what you think of it; but for the most part, I'm just happy it's mine.

So welcome, BOSS KRENKEL! Thanks for everything you've done for me. And now it's time to move on to the next book I long to write.

YA Guy Reveals... Tolkien Was a Pantser!

YA Guy's hard at work on a manuscript tentatively titled Skaldi City, the third book in a series that starts with my debut, Survival Colony Nine. I haven't sold Book Two yet, but so what?

Now, as I've probably announced on this blog before, I'm a classic pantser: I don't plan my novels before I write them. I make my best discoveries when I don't know where I'm going, so generally I just sit down and write. With Book Three, I had a little more of a plan--most of the characters were in place, plus Book Two ends on a cliffhanger that needed to be resolved, plus the whole thing needs to be resolved in a way that I have at least an inkling of--but still, I'm mostly pantsing it, waiting to see what will happen.

And it's a comfort to me in this process to learn that my favorite author of all time, J. R. R. Tolkien, was something of a pantser too.

Here's the story: Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937. It was moderately successful, and his publisher asked for a sequel. Tolkien sat down to write a follow-up, with the same genial tone, the same whimsical characters, the same children's storybook feel. (Hence the first chapter of what would become The Fellowship of the Ring, which has a much lighter tone than the rest of the novel.) But somewhere during the writing, the book veered into the deeper, darker past, and it became the trilogy we know.

It took nearly twenty years for the book to evolve. Fellowship wasn't published until 1954.

What led this "tale to grow in the telling" (as Tolkien put it), no one is quite sure. Tolkien's son, Christopher, who's performed the invaluable service of publishing and commenting on many of his father's unpublished manuscripts, describes the unfolding of Tolkien's magnum opus in the four-part History of Middle-Earth series beginning with The Return of the Shadow. He traces the evolution of his father's manuscript, the many changes that led to the finished product. But he can't account for the element that shifted the manuscript irrevocably toward its final form: the appearance of a Black Rider on the road to Bree.

At the time Tolkien introduced this character, his son speculates, he likely had no idea what it was and how it related to Sauron and the Second Age. It may only have been a complication Tolkien threw in to make the journey more interesting. But once it appeared, and once Tolkien started to think about its implications, the book would never be the same.

It's funny to note all the changes that took place from early drafts to finished product. Here are only a few:

• Frodo was originally named (ahem) Bingo
• Strider/Aragorn was originally a hobbit, Trotter, who had (??) wooden feet
• Treebeard was originally an evil ogre who captured Gandalf
• Saruman was a late addition to the manuscript
• There was no balrog in Moria
• Gollum was nothing more than the funny little creature he'd been in The Hobbit. In fact, Tolkien had to rewrite the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter (which had originally included Gollum's willingness to give Bilbo the Ring) after Fellowship was published to make it accord with the later book. He did so, ingeniously, by suggesting that the previous version was Bilbo's tale, concocted to justify his possession of the Ring

There's much more to the story--I strongly recommend the History books for those who are diehard Tolkien fans--but you get the picture. One of the greatest works of imaginative literature of all time was written by a guy who was basically winging it.

Of course, it was only a genius like Tolkien, a man who'd immersed himself in invented languages and histories for years, who could wing it so brilliantly. I'm not at all disdaining those writers who plot things out beforehand, nor am I suggesting that pantsers are invariably more successful than planners. I'm simply pointing out how mysterious the writing process is, how unexpected and wonderful.

There are no Black Riders in Skaldi City. But I wonder what will enter without my conscious intention and make the book what it finally turns out to be.