Letters to the Editor
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Blood's a start
Now, if you want to get published, get out and live. And write about it daily. That means going beyond the pub or the nearest hiking trail. Stow away on a cargo ship or join a yacht and go somewhere very far away. Take no money or luggage -- just a passport, camera and notebook -- like one of the great travel writers, Peter Pinney, (www.dustonmyshoes.com) did. Stick your arse on the line for a decade or two and keep notes. Buy a one-way ticket to Jakarta, throw away all traces of who you are and disappear into the archipelago. Get a job in a gold mine in the Congo, cycle to Patagonia, join the NPA in the Philippines, walk across Borneo. Or if you're more of a homebody, join a gang, work in a slaughterhouse, become a hooker, get run over by a truck and learn how to walk again, race motorcycles. Ditch your precious or entitled ways so you can be revealed to yourself. Learn not to take it all too seriously.
Nothing like hard experience to buff out whatever creative muscles you were born with. It's easier to write when you have something to write about. It's a messy pursuit, not for the seeker of ease. You'll need to develop a capacity to absorb and reflect. You need to be able to see the beauty in the horrors, the souls in the wars, the hope in loneliness, the humour in despair, the generosity of the poverty-stricken, the freedoms of humility, the rewards in not thinking about me me me. You'll never regret that kind of hardship.
Get yourself away from familiarity and comfort, and chronicle. It's huge, but you'll be fine. You'll stink and you'll bleed, but strangers will look out for you, fortune will drop candies in your path, and you'll feel a thousand times more alive and loaded with ideas than you could at any writing school. You already know how to string a sentence together -- go from there.
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Do you like what you write?
I am an avid fan of great writers, I know the feeling, the connection, the inspiration I get when I read the words of artists, and I know what crap sounds like. I should know them both so well. I am a high school teacher that gets to read piles of crap writing. My students write shorts stories that start, "Well hey I don't know what to write about. I think this is boring..." or they write about their weed infused weekend, or fictitious sex they've been having. Then I go home and read the greats. Yeah I know the difference. You should too. If you read what you wrote and it just... well... sucks, then you should put the notebook down. I have read some of my past stuff and gone "Yeah! This rocks!" or "God, please tell me I didn't let anyone read this!" I write all the time. Some of my stuff is very much worthy of being published, but as some previous poster mentions, talent really does have little to do with getting published. So I don't really waste too much time trying to get published. Just send out your best stuff. If you yourself weren't impressed with your own work. Leave it. Walk away. But. If you find you don't have any thing that makes you feel all impressed with yourself, then pat yourself on the back -and wait for the rejection letter. Again, only crap gets published. So if you're one of the millions who write the literary mush that can so easily become the next American Bestseller, then onward ye shall march!
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Career
I have managed to buy food for my family and keep up the mortgage on my house solely by my writing for thirty years, and I still ask the LW's questions every day. Yep, every day. I'm starting a new script this morning and I have no idea if I will be able to write it. I am living in the moment when I hand it in and they tell me what they think of it, and I am living there in terror. Which is of course wrong. And that's what my morning bike ride is going to be about: bringing myself back from an unknowable future over which I have no control and back to the right now of the book I'm adapting, my thoughts about it, and what my first move is going to be.
A book that has been hugely helpful to me and which I can't recommend highly enough to LW and to anybody undertaking any kind of creative endeavor is The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield. It's way less goony and self-helpy than it sounds: it's actually really good. He talks about the concept of Resistance and how we overcome it not by fighting it but by accepting it.
And maybe most important: I have worked these thirty years knowing that on the talent/genius continuum I am barely a needle tick above the left side of the dial, and unlike the character in Little Women I nevertheless manage to keep going, and even very often enjoy it. So don't let how you match up against Faulkner stop you.
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re: Silenced
Not everybody is a workshop person. They're very useful for some people, not at all for others. Obviously I believe in them to some extent, since I've given workshops, but there are bad ones and good ones and not everybody works that way anyway.
I do know what you mean about taking critique. Not too long ago a new friend offered me her self-published "vanity press publisher's choice" novel and it was terrible. You could tell within two sentences that it was terrible. And it was terrible in a very fixable-with-advice way, but it was also very obvious that she wasn't the sort of person ever to listen to advice, so I nodded and said polite things and left her to it.
I believe in editing; I believe wholeheartedly in Orson Scott Card's suggestion to find a skilled reader. I just don't, necessarily, believe that skilled readers are only found at workshops, or that people who are not necessarily good at taking criticism face-to-face can't become good writers, or that famous writers who give workshops necessarily know what the hell they're doing in a way which allows them to teach it to others. The best "workshop" I've ever had was an online forum full of bored teenagers - it was like being pistol-whipped by reality - because you could see in real time whether what you were doing was working and why. There are many, many ways to learn, and many brilliant authors out there who never took a single workshop.