Hey everyone, I'm a professional writer and I just wanted to let anyone interested in writing in on a few open secrets. Many of these come from Chris Fox's books, but he's "apolitical" and defines success by making enough money to survive via self-publishing on Amazon. I have found Amazon to be pretty much a black hole when it comes to making money, even if you make major compromises to your artistic vision. I believe that you should write what you love, but also try to keep people's preferences in mind, and that ultimately any success you experience in a market economy is due to luck and/or privilege. If you can get just one person (you don't personally know) to enjoy reading your work, I think that's a pretty major fucking achievement. Amazon is also fucking evil and "working" with them in any capacity is gross, but they're pretty much the only show in town, and all the other companies out there are just less fortunate versions of Amazon.

Okay. So to write a book, you need to be able to write really quickly. On a few very good days, I have been able to pump out a little under 30 pages. (Most of the time, I only average a few pages a day.) At that kind of rate, you can have a first draft of a novel ready in a couple of weeks. And although the quality might not be perfect, it's definitely true that the more you write (and the more you publish), the more you learn. Plus, if you fuck up with a novel you wrote in a few weeks, only a few weeks are down the drain. Just try to learn from your mistakes and move on to your next project.

Here are the things I've found that need to be done in order to actually write a lot really fast:

• If you have trouble thinking up ideas, use the TVTropes plot generator. Its ideas might be too ridiculous to consider, but it can help you think more about what you actually want to do.

• Plot out your stories chapter-by-chapter. Conflict should be driven by character flaws. Steal plots from the best sources, just try not to be too obvious about it. "Every character must want something, even if it's just a cup of water." Give us a character to root for. It's okay if characters fail, but they always have to try their best, and it's extremely unsatisfying if they get rescued by random chance. This is why the deus ex machina is so popular. Basically, in the end of a story, characters are put in impossible situations to ratchet up the tension. They can only be rescued by some kind of outside force (like Han rescuing Luke at the end of Star Wars). Just make sure to set up that force—by plotting out your story! You can also change the plot as you go along. I've just found that it really helps to know where you're going. Force your characters to make difficult choices. Usually these seem to come down to family versus dreams or family versus career.

• When your plot is ready, you need to block the internet on your computer and any other devices you have. Use apps, hide your phone, lock yourself out using passwords only a friend knows, that sort of thing.

• I use Scrivener to write. It's a little expensive but if you hunt around you can probably find a way to get it for free.

• Find some white noise or movie soundtrack music to listen to over and over again. Don't destroy your ears.

• This is where the bourgeois aspects of writing come in: you need a place to write where no one is going to bother you, as well as time to write. A lot of people get up early in the morning to pull this off.

• Try not to edit until you've finished your first draft. I break this rule all the time though.

• Try not to lecture your reader. As revolutionaries it's definitely our duty to politicize our work. But you have to work the politics into the plot or else people are going to get bored or even angry. If you want to talk about racism in America, for instance, it's a lot easier to adopt the Star Trek approach and just have like a person with green skin being mistreated because he has green skin. If you publish a book that is very blatantly political, you're going to get reviews complaining about this. I break this rule all the time as well, but I really try not to. You can see what I mean if you look at Tolstoy's novels. They're so fucking good, but they get incredibly boring when he starts going on and on about his political ideas.

• There are techniques you can use to keep an eye on your words-per-minute, like counting how many words you can write in an hour. Push yourself and see how fast you can write. Don't worry too much about fucking up. Just write! You'll be amazed at what you're capable of.

• Once you've finished your manuscript, congratulate yourself, and then get to editing as well as thinking about your next project. If you're writing SF/F, extended series are extremely popular, so you could even plan out an entire trilogy or series if you want to. This helps with making money on Amazon, if that's something you want to try doing.

• I do multiple rounds of editing. I read the entire manuscript at least once. Then I feed some of it into slickwrite.com to see if there's any weird stylistic issues I've missed, like using way too many fucking adverbs, or having super long sentences. I have VoiceDreamReader read the entire book to me so I can pick up on other things I've missed. I'll also use an (expensive) program like Vellum to make an epub for me, and then I'll read that on my phone. Looking at your work in different formats can help to pick up shit you've missed. Once you're at a point when you can't stand the thought of editing any further, you're ready to publish.

• I have found writing circles to be pretty useless. They might be more helpful if all of you are working in the same genre. But writers are hyper-critical of writing. They're always looking for problems, while readers who actually buy your work are looking for things to like, because they feel like idiots if they realize they just bought something that turns out to be garbage. If you've been burned in writing circles or have super cringey memories from writing circles (I do), try not to let it get to you.

• A book like "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" is extremely helpful when it comes to honing your craft. Don't be a dickhead, like I was, and treat writing as though it all comes from divine inspiration. Professionals write reliably on time, and try to make their work as fun as possible.

• Once you're ready to publish, you can go two ways: either via Amazon or via traditional publishing. Both suck ass. If you're a member of a minority group, try querying agents. If you look at any of their "what I am looking for" pages, they're all basically after minority women who can write decent stories. They have trouble finding these people because almost all writers are bourgeois and therefore white. This is tied in to Trump and MeToo. If you're a white dude, on the other hand, you can try querying agents, but even if you've written the next Moby Dick, it's going to be hard. I queried hundreds over the course of several years before one finally agreed to take me, and that was only because I had written an "ethnic" story and could say that an "ethnic" person I know is a cowriter. (I'm a white dude; this "ethnic" person agreed to work with me, read my book, told me what to change, and would have split the money we made with the book, had any publisher actually picked it up.) Any other professional writers out there who have had different experiences with this, please let me know. I know it may sound controversial to say so. It's kind of an open secret. If you head to your nearest book store or library and look at the new fiction, it's going to be two groups of people publishing: debut writers from minority backgrounds, and white people who have been selling shitloads of books for years. That's pretty much it. Agents and publishers also don't seem terribly interested in minority writers who happen to be socialists, either.

• Some smaller publishers don't require agents for submission. (Just watch out for scams, of course.) If you can get a small publisher to publish your book, you might be able to leverage that into a swell job as a writing teacher somewhere.

• If you decide to self-publish, there's a few things to consider. One, maybe hire an editor, if you can. Two, definitely pay someone to make a nice cover (if you can). Look at covers you like in your genre and try to find the artists who made them. They'll probably make a nice cover for you for a few hundred bucks. Pre-made covers are also an option, but most of them look like ass. People do judge books by their covers. Think about the last time you looked at a book with a shitty cover.

• There are all kinds of abstruse techniques you can use to sell shit on Amazon, but like I said, it's ultimately a black hole. The best I was able to do was break even, and I worked like a maniac on that shit for months. There are keywords and book descriptions and ads and "front matter" and "back matter" and mailing lists and all kinds of annoying shit to think about. Amazon's advertising services seem like just another way for Jeff Bezos to suck up money. The entire process is pretty opaque. You basically have to throw money at Amazon and hope that they not only show your ad to people, but that those people click on that ad. It's a pain, to say the least, and I never trusted Amazon to deliver. My suspicion is that their algorithm only shows ads from authors who are proven sellers—and that they kind of just pretend to sell ads for everyone else, as much as possible before those other writers get suspicious and then give up. There are a lot of guides out there with extremely specific information on how to work with this system, but I got into writing because I just loved telling stories—not because I wanted to spend four hours a day experimenting with stupid fucking keywords on Amazon.

• I have found that it helps to exercise to deal with stress. I jog and do bodyweight fitness.