Last summer, I started an experiment on my blog. Instead of long, opinionated thoughtful posts on events going on in the publishing industry, I started posting numbered lists. Just goofy ways of saying, “Write with your brains, folks.”
Wow. My stats doubled the day I started and tripled a couple of days later. And they kept on rising after that until they took an exponential leap and I went into blogosphere hyperspeed.
Who would have guessed? People love lists.
I was particularly impressed by the response to the first one, in which I claimed to know 107 Things You Should Know About Being a Published Author. Now, I don’t know 107 things about being a published author. Nobody knows 107 things about being a published author. Even Stephen King doesn’t know 107 things about being a published author. But people are willing to believe someone does!
“Hot dog,” they’re thinking. “The whole instruction manual! I can now plan my life. Finally.”
Granted, those of us who are so into such things are writers, not readers. We’re just a tiny bit gullible because we’re striving so hard to get somewhere, not simply looking for a temporary escape. It’s our intense need to become something that drives us, not our intense need to stop being quite so much ourselves for just a little while.
Those really are different needs.
Because working in fiction makes us a little crazy. I know this. You know this. When we’re concentrating, we’re concentrating, we’re concentrating on something we want with our whole souls—to be really good writers—we lose track of little things like perspective and, you know, maybe our native horse sense. It becomes quite easy to believe someone has figured out all 107 things we need to know about what’s going to happen to us when we get published, thereby simplifying our lives down to just this part, the part about creating something to publish. And that is a huge gift in this day and age, when absolutely everyone and their grandmother is on the warpath toward publication, and we’re just running along with the herd hoping we don’t get trampled under their thousands of little cloven hooves.
Besides, what can writers not believe? Our greatest joy is hanging out with imaginary people. We like believing things we know for a fact aren’t true.