In mid-November, just hours after Typhoon Ulysses ravaged a wide swath of the Philippine archipelago, a young woman who nicknamed herself “Lizzie” posted this note on my Facebook Messenger:
“Greetings sir! We don’t know each other but I always read every single post in your Forum updates. I’m just wondering if you could help me or at least give me some advice on how to become a writer. I mean, I know myself to be a writer and I’m currently writing but… Okay, so here it is, I want to be published. How could I do that? Do you have any platforms where I could possibly showcase my knack for writing?
“Sorry for being too wordy. I am thrilled, and it’s actually the first time I approached someone about this matter. I’m introverted and not particularly good in conversations, let alone with a stranger. But I’m really hopeful that something will come out of this.”
Lizzie’s frantic appeal reached me at a rather awkward time, but I managed to post this reply:
IMAGE CREDIT FOR WOMAN WRITING: THE CONVERSATION.COM, CREATIVE COMMONS“I’m thrilled by your great enthusiasm to become a writer of consequence and I’d like to assure you that I’d be happy to help you achieve that aspiration. I should be able to give it my full attention later today, perhaps early this evening. I just have to attend to a very important matter that needs to be set in motion right at this very hour and I expect it to demand my full attention. (You have such a long, long first name. How do I call you for short?)
The following day Lizzie e-mailed me this message: “Greetings sir! Pardon me for my unexpected and fickle messages. I hope you still have time and patience to entertain the request I sent you. Sorry for this hurried reply but please understand that my town is one of the places worst-struck by Typhoon Ulysses. At the moment, I wouldn’t be able to maintain correspondence with you. Tomorrow or the next? I’m quite uncertain, but I really am determined to be mentored. Till then sir! (Anyway, you can call me Lizzie.)”
I replied by e-mail: “Then take your time, Lizzie. I’m saddened to hear that your town has been worst-hit by Typhoon Ulysses. I hope and pray that you and your family will recover soon from the great distress and damage the typhoon has wrought on your place.”
To writers like Lizzie who are aspiring to get published, my foremost advice is to write interestingly about topics that readers would want to read, whether an essay, a feature article, a commentary, a starter collection of poems, a short-story, perhaps even a novelette—just a baby novel for a start, and not a huge one like Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace (1869: 1,296 pages) or Ken Follett’s
The Pillars of the Earth (1989: 816 pages). Your first job is to make a prospective publisher like your work and convince him or her that it’s worth publishing and paying you royalties for.
But of course you’ve got to do a lot of preparation to become a publishable writer, Lizzie. You have to write, write, and write and read the works of eminent published authors. One thing I can honestly tell you is that since you always read every single post in my online English-usage Forum, as you yourself said in your note, you’re now off to a good start.
I won’t be able to personally tutor you on the writing craft, Lizzie—it’s virtually impossible for me to do that—but if you religiously go over the thousands of Forum postings that I’ve put together during the past 11 years, you’d be as close as you can get to having me as a personal writing tutor for free,
gratis et amore.
(Next:
Sequencing tenses in sentences with relative clauses) December 3, 2020
This essay, 2,021st of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the November 26, 2020 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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