I get asked all the time about what advice I’d give to new writers.  It’s hard for me to answer that question because it really depends on each individual person and their skills.  Are you good at the creative/ideas part?  Because to me, that’s the hardest part of writing: coming up with a new piece every week that’s not an exact rehash of something else I’ve already written.  Are you good in the technical, English-major sense?  That’s great, but there are times when you’re going to want to break those rules in favor of defining an author/character through language.  For instance, long before I wrote for Cracked, the “John Cheese” that I write under used to be a full-on character.  Every dumbass thing he said as an author helped define him as a character.

But there are some things I’ve picked up over the years, and a lot of it comes in “what to expect” form.  For instance…

Most of Your Time will be Spent Researching; Not Writing

Even if you’re not doing a research type piece, you’re going to find that you need a fact to back up a claim you’re making.  For instance, it’s one thing to tell someone that an MRI is expensive, as I did in my article about Money Buying Happiness, but the point becomes more powerful and less disputable if you’re able to link to a trusted source that verifies your claims.  You’re going to run into this all the time.

You have to remember that without that trusted source, verifying what you’re saying, you are just another faceless person saying stuff.  People have no reason to trust you because they don’t know you.  Even with me pulling the regular traffic that I do, and even with almost 15 years of writing experience under my belt, I still have to do this because the majority of the people who read my articles are seeing my work for the first time.  Which leads me to…

Nobody will Know Who You Are

About a month ago, I did some math and found that I averaged a little over a million hits per article.  I’ve been mentioned in the Huffington Post.  I’ve had movie stars pass around my links.  I’ve been interviewed on the radio multiple times.  And still, one of the most common messages I get is, “Normally, I don’t notice the author’s name when I read a piece, but I went back over all of my old favorites, and I just realized that they’re all by you!”

People read titles.  Not author credits.  I’m saying that as a generalized whole of course.  Other writers tend to look at the author’s name.  Very avid readers will as well.  But if my article pulls half a million viewers, 400,000 of them won’t ever look up to see who wrote it.  That’s a fact of the industry you’re going to have to accept.

Your Favorite Piece will Pull the Least Traffic

One of my favorite pieces that I’ve worked on was making fun of video game sewer levels.  To date, one year after writing it, it has a little under 170,000 views.  That sounds like a lot, right?  Most of my articles pull that amount of traffic by noon, the day it was published.  There’s a reason for this:

Writing professionally means that you have to keep your audience in mind with everything you write.  Nobody wants to hear your conspiracy theories about government oppression, or opinions on tired subjects like Justin Bieber.  That doesn’t hold their interest.  As a writer, you’re going to be tempted to break out of the mold and do something different.  You’re going to want to show your audience that you’re not the same old writer they see everywhere else, and you’re going to want to keep it fresh for yourself as an artist.  And that is absolutely fine.  But be prepared because it’s going to turn a lot of mainstream people off.

Don’t let that detour you from trying new styles and ideas.  But if you’re not prepared for it, it’s going to crush you when that article does 20% of your regular traffic.  It’s an unfortunate fact of the industry that you just have to live with.

People will Always Bitch About the List Format

The following is from former Cracked editor and brilliant writer, Jay Pinkerton, who said it better than I ever could:

“A list article is a format. A mock-guide book is a format. An interview is a format. There are only so many, and they’ve all been done a million times over. Think of an article format as an empty glass you’re going to pour your ideas into.

“A premise is the sum total of your ideas. THIS is the important part. People who piss and moan about list-format articles irritate me, because they’re confusing format for premise. There are hundreds of brilliant articles out there on the web right now that are in list format. All it means is that you’re breaking your ideas down sequentially. This should not be hard for a writer to do. It’s an essay with titles in front of the points.

“When people complain about list articles, they’re really complaining about the premise: that too many are pop culture-centric, or random, or based on a faulty premise. These are all valid arguments. But they have NOTHING AT ALL TO DO with format.

“If you’re going to be a writer, you’re going to need to have confidence in your ideas, and to be aware of the various formats in which you can place them. Sitting around complaining that a certain format is overused is akin to complaining that you’re tired of people using that format with clichéd ideas, but not having any new ones yourself to make the format better.

“The sitcom is a format. It has three sections broken up by commercial breaks, and introduces a premise, escalates it and resolves it. Is this premise tired? In the wrong hands, yes. Then there’s Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Arrested Development. They took this format and elevated it with brilliant new ideas.

“Do the same. Don’t whine that a format’s limiting because Everybody Loves Raymond uses it. Go make Arrested Development instead.”

Your Biggest Insult will be “Do Your Research!”

I put in more time researching for an article than a lot of people do in their actual day job.  It’s a bigger part of the process than the actual writing/typing.  However, you’re eventually going to write something that not everyone agrees with.  Their go-to response will be, “Do your research!”  It’s not because they want you to educate yourself on a subject.  It’s because they know you’re a writer, and that’s an insult that deals directly with your job.  They say it because they think it’s a phrase that will hurt you.  That’s what insults are designed to do, after all.  They’re not wanting you to become better at your craft — they’re wanting to piss you off.

The thing is, it’s not just insulting to the writer, but it’s an even bigger slap to the company that hosts your writing.  Cracked, for instance, has the most rigorous research rules and guidelines that I’ve ever seen.  Not only is the writer, himself, required to do thorough research, but the editorial team at every step (from the initial editor, to the Senior Editor, to the copy editor, to the layout crew), checks those facts to make sure they’re 1) correct, and 2) come from a respectable source.

You have to learn to ignore these people because if you’re writing for a place like Cracked that takes extreme care in their fact checking, there is a 99% chance that you know more about the topic than the dipshit spouting his “do your research” idiocy.

Never, EVER Read the Comments Section

We have a comments section under each of our articles on Cracked.  I’ve never read them.  Actually, that’s not entirely true.  On an article I wrote back in 2008 as a guest columnist, I ended up reading the comments and dicking around with the people.  That was the last time I ever read a solitary word in the comments section.  Again, there’s a good reason for it.

I’m not one of those guys who can easily let an insult slide.  I work my ass off on my writing, and most of my stuff is designed to help people in some way or another.  So when some clueless, dipshit troll comes along, I take great offense at their little jabs.  Especially if I can tell that it’s some no-life-experience teenager, telling me how to do something they have no clue about, like raising my kids.

Since I have a hard time blowing off stuff like this, I choose to completely avoid it.  Yes, I still do get hate mail from time to time (I had HUNDREDS of stoners messaging me about how I’m a government propaganda machine, designed to keep the pot smokers down after reading this article).  And the second I realize it’s a hate mail, I simply close it out and delete it.  I can count on one hand how many times I’ve actually replied to those people, and in each case, I only replied because I thought they misunderstood the piece, and they had the mental capacity to comprehend the material if they read it with a calm, clear head.

But if you’re going to survive as a writer, and you take criticism and trolling personally, you’re going to have to learn to ignore it.  Those comments sections are generally filled with the scourge of the planet, and I just don’t feel the need to subject myself to it.  When they start signing my paycheck, they can tell me anything they want.

I’ve gotten a few messages from people, asking, “I know you don’t read the comments section, but if you don’t, how do you become a better writer?”  If you take anything from this piece, understand this:  Readers do not, under any circumstances, make you a better writer.  Writing makes you a better writer.  The day you start modifying your material to suit the wishes of bitter, complaining teenagers… that’s the day you should just hang it up and find another hobby.

You’re not Going to Get Rich by Writing

Even with the traffic I pull, the fanbase I’ve gathered, and the notoriety that Cracked has provided me, if I had to rely on just the money from writing to pay my bills, I wouldn’t be able to do it.  Most writers do other things to help pay the bills.  Or they have multiple outlets (write for different sites, magazines, etc).  Unless you luck into a high paying writing job, which is not likely, you’re not going to be able to survive on writing, alone.

Personally, on top of my column, I also work as one of the layout guys for Cracked.  Meaning that I do the coding, photo research, photoshopping, captions, and attributing photo sources for some of the articles.  That job is what makes it possible for me to write full time.  If I didn’t have that, I’d have to take a full time job in the “real world,” and around here (the farming Midwest), that means I’d likely end up in a factory somewhere.

I also run the website and social networking for David Wong’s John Dies at the End.  And I do some back-end stuff for Cracked.  And I’m working on a book.  All of this is necessary if I wish to keep doing what I’m doing as a columnist.  Here’s the funny part to me: when someone asks me what I do for a living, I don’t tell them all of the stuff that makes up the actual bulk of my paycheck.  I tell them I’m a comedy writer.

And I am.  You hear that, world?  I’m a fucking writer.  Suck it.