[Writerpreneur OS] Lesson 0303: Choose Your Model, Raise Your Sights to Succeed

This is a long established success route for authors. Emulate the most successful in your field, the type of stories that are already popular...

The writer is not like other professionals. In most of these, they only have to compete with local rivals. Unless he can rival the best writers in his field throughout the nation, or the whole English-speaking world, he may very well starve to death.

Some are too shy to compete with the best men in his field, so he chooses some fifth-rate author as his model, and so adding his own mistakes to the model’s.

Other than a cultivated minority of readers, the buying public imagines it is getting subject matter when it buys a book. But the author is actually selling only skill. That is all he can bring to the world — everything else he uses was here before he came.

The greatest artists did not scorn models. They didn’t they shrink from trying to excel them. They familiarized themselves with what others were doing, and then used every means to surpass them. That is why they are prominent artists. Also, that is why they were successful, famous, and “fortunate”. If you are familiar with the lives of Molière, Shakespeare, or any of the prominent writers, you understand what we mean here.

It savvy wisdom to adopt their methods, to follow their example. Like them, let’s adopt and follow models. And since we must use models, is it not wiser to use exemplary models, as they did — models consciously chosen and carefully studied?

The most original writers have been those who had the most complete mastery of technique. Without that mastery, their originality could not have shown up.

We choose the best model, because we will already make plenty of mistakes of cur own, but without imitating the mistakes of inferior writers.

We choose a contemporary model, because only in contemporary literature can we be sure of the things we wish to study in the model - the author’s intentions and the reader’s reactions.

And we carefully choose the thing we wish to write, because we don’t have a lifetime before us to get our work done.

This doesn’t mean to discourage the study of the classics. Indeed, we should adopt the methods of the masters. That is the sincerest compliment we can pay them. In the literature of all ages, though the subject-matter is old, the technique is always contemporary and always ready for the living public.

Models already familiar to a specific public are more readily accepted than new ones.

Choose for yourself just the model that will suit your public, your subject, your talents, and your skill.

You may make some inquiry from readers, librarians, and booksellers. Also, look into book reviews, statements by authors, critiques, and similar sources of information for reader opinion. Out of all this, make up your own mind.

But avoid too much browsing in models which you have not chosen. You can hardly work from a dozen models at once, especially when you are learning the craft.

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