Ignore Career Advice From Established Writers

We don’t know anything about breaking into today’s market

“Breaking In,” is my latest column for Locus Magazine; it’s both the story of how I broke into science fiction, and an explanation of why there’s so little to learn from that story.

When I was trying to sell my first stories, I obsessively sought career advice and memoirs from established writers. I sat in on countless science fiction convention panels in which bestselling writers explained how they’d butter up long-dead editors to sell to long-defunct publications.

None of them ever mentioned that as interesting as this stuff might be as an historical artifact, it had zero applicability to the market I was trying to break into.

Not only did these writers enter a fundamentally different — and long-extinct publishing world than the current one, but their relationship to the current market was fundamentally different from my own.

Editors solicited work from them, not the other way around. When they wrote something on spec, they could directly contact editors with whom they’d had long and fruitful professional associations — bypassing the who “slush reader” apparatus.

I don’t know if these established writers failed to mention that none of this applied to the would-be writers in the audience because they thought it was obvious or because it never occurred to them, but either way, it didn’t do me a lick of good.

What worked for me? Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? What worked for me won’t work for you. Not only was my path into the field pretty idiosyncratic — any generally applicable principle to be derived from it has been obsolete for decades.

But some things don’t change. I benefited immensely from the kindness — sometimes protracted, sometimes momentary — of writers who spoke to youth groups, served as writers-in-residence, guest-lectured to my summer D&D camp.

Above all, I benefited from Judith Merril, a towering writer, critic and editor who went into voluntary exile in Toronto after the Chicago police riots of 1968, and opened the Spaced Out Library, now the Merril Collection, the largest public science fiction reference library in the world.