A couple of readers were kind enough to ask me to elaborate on a point I made in My Last, Best 10 Tips On How To Make It As A Writer, about how talking and writing are “exact opposite uses of the language.” So here’s my case for why writing is no more like talking than mime is like opera:

Spoken language is very much about maintaining societal mores; it’s basically about not offending people. Speaking to others is (duh) how we get along with them, so it’s deeply grounded in ancient, at-this-point-instinctive ambiguity.  The core, formative idea when you’re talking to people — especially in any kind of group setting — is to keep things friendly, to accommodate the thoughts and feelings of the others in your group, to be … well, social.  Talking is about cooperative give-and-take, sharing, keeping things open-ended in such a way that no one involved in the conversation feels too threatened or challenged.

Talking is about mostly about equivocation, inconclusiveness, changeableness; it’s about an ongoing, manifest, subtly communicated sense of demurral. Talking is grounded in serving and supporting the idea that everyone’s point of view and experience is as valid as everyone else’s. That’s what being social means — and talking, of course, is our primary socializing tool.

Talking is about keeping things subjective. It’s about relativism.

Well, writing is exactly the opposite of that. Writing is about keeping things objective. It’s about absolutism. It’s about keeping everything absolutely un ambiguous. It’s about explicitness, certitude, precision, clarity, transparency. Writing is about very purposeful precision, utter decipherability.

The kind of maniacal, measured exactitude that defines good writing doesn’t go with socializing. It goes with no one ever inviting you anywhere because you always come off like such a conversational Nazi.

Anyway, that’s why thinking that being a good talker makes you a good writer is like thinking that being a good swimmer makes you a good cruise ship pilot. They’re completely different — and even opposing — uses of the same Basic Medium.

So that’s the core of my own personal pet theory about why people tend to be so wrong when, knowing themselves to be tactful and engaging conversationalists, they assume they’ll also be good writers.

This is slightly off-track, but connected enough to say: The trick to good writing — the challenge, the monumental difficulty, the freakin’ nightmare of it — lies in the brain-splitting alchemy that is changing something that’s subjective into something objective.

Hi, guys. This little series on writing I’ve been doing here has been a blast for me, and I appreciate your indulgence on it. (Uh, let’s see; so far we have: How To Make a Living Writing; How To Make a Living Writing, Part Two; Writing: Don’t Get Me Started; How To Write, Part Three, and the not-entirely-popular How To Write, Part Four: Why You Should Give Up Trying to Find Your Own Voice.) Before I stop boring everyone with this stuff, though, I thought I’d offer these final Top 10 Tips For Actually Making It As A Writer, since … well, since I sure could have used this stuff, once. Anyway, here are those tips, in no particular order:

Take it seriously.  It’s just about impossible to make a living writing, so doing so means Fanatical Focus. When I decided to start making a living a writing, I wrote (for free, for all kinds of local publications) every night after work for four to six hours, and throughout every weekend. Six months into that I was offered my first job as an editor; three months after that, I was making a great living as the main entertainment features writer for (then) new website of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Lesson being: Sweat pays. 

Decide right off what kind of writing you want to do. Journalism? Fiction? Nonfiction? Magazine articles? Plays? Poetry/song lyrics? Each of these fields has its own rules, outlets, primary players, processes — and each is filled with talented people who are totally dedicated to only that form of writing. Decide what you want to write, and immerse yourself in that kind of writing. You can really only swim in one pool at a time.

Learn to think before you write. So many writers think that beautiful thoughts come from beautiful words. Wrong. First have the clear, beautiful thought, and then let the only words that can express that thought naturally attach themselves to it. That’s how you get a style. Put developing a style first, and at best you’ll end up as a writer with a nice enough technique, but nothing to say. The world has plenty of those. Never forget that the only point of writing is to serve thought.

Cultivate relationships. People in publishing are just like everyone else in the world, and everyone prefers to do business with people they know, or at least people who know people they know. Buy a Rolodex. Get busy emailing, phoning, writing, networking. Be proud; never act like you need anyone more than they need you. But make it so that when as many people as possible do need someone, they think of you.

Believe in your lack of competition. It’s true there are a zillion writers out there, but 99.99% of them have no idea what they’re doing. A decent writer (let alone a great one) is as rare as rare gets. You know all that great writing you see in magazines? That was all done by editors who shaped whatever they got from their freelancers into whatever you read. Writing is freakishly difficult (because it’s so hard to make what’s subjective objective). Very few people are good at it. Become one of those few, and within a very short time you’ll have more work than you can handle.

Start where you are.You’ve got to work your way up. You’d think that you could write stuff so great that an editor will see it and basically pluck you from obscurity and publish it — but boy, would you be wrong. Everyone along the food chain of publishing is already swamped with people and material appropriate to their level of publishing. You can’t just step into an arena you don’t naturally belong in. Start where it’s not at unreasonable to expect you could get a foothold. Get that foothold — and then take the next step. Try to go around, or try to take a short cut, and you go nowhere.

Don’t sweat rejection. There are an infinite number of perfectly good reasons why anything you write might get rejected that have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the rejected work. If someone bounces your work back to you, forget it, and move on. It means nothing. Keep submitting. There’s always another outlet you can approach. And it only takes one to publish you.

Get an agent. Trying to publish a book with one of the larger, mainstream book publishers without an agent is like trying to fly without wings. It can’t happen. Publishers depend upon agents to bring them stuff to publish. If you take your writing career seriously, know that you do need an agent. And as is true in every field, agents are aligned along a power hierarchy. About 5% of them sell 90% of the books. You want an agent in that 5% club. And that means you’ve got to have a body of work behind you that makes at least one of them want to participate in your future. (And forget whatever nonsense you’ve ever heard about agents not being worth their 15% of your money. A good agent is worth twice that.)

Believe you’re a genius. Hey, someone’s gotta be. Why not you? And it’s surely not your goal to be a mediocre writer, is it? Believe you’ve got a unique, valuable, indispensable, irreplaceable voice. Because you do. (That said, though, let me cram this in here: Do not think that just because you can talk you can write. They’re not the same thing at all. They’re exact opposite uses of language, actually. Which is actually a whole other piece I’ll be happy to write if anyone wants me to.)

Write a lot. A lot. For years and years and years and years. And not for yourself, either: For others. For publication. Subject your work to the brutality of the marketplace. Learn to hone it, trim it, shape it, toss it, bend it, maul it, polish it, lose it. Write for so long, and so consistently, for so many different kinds of outlets and editors, that eventually you come to know, without reference to what anyone else thinks, what’s good. That knowledge is your ticket. Costs a lot. Worth a fortune.

Okay! Thanks! I don’t know if I’ll write any more of these How To Write-type posts, since … enough is enough already, I would imagine. Then again, since this stuff is basically my entire life, I could … go on until every last one of you insists I stop. Anyway, thanks for reading them. I appreciate it.

I’ve been astounded by how many people have read my “How To Make a Living Writing,” and “How To Make a Living Writing, Part Two.” The tone and tenor of the comments left on those posts is truly gratifying. (I wish I had more time to respond to them, but lately I’ve been eyeball deep in a 60,000 book that’s due in about a week [!] and has been devouring my time like the Cookie Monster on a mallomar.)

You know what’s weird? I’m in the book business, right? So my life, and the lives of everyone around me, are about book ideas. The Holy Grail of publishers, agents, and authors is The Great Book Idea. It’s all any of us want. It’s what we live on and for. The better the idea for a book, the better that book’s chances for becoming a bestseller. (Failing that, what you want if you’re a publisher is a huge name on the front of your book. But that’s a whole other … trip.)

This is how valuable book ideas are: I’ve had two of them flat-out, no question, bold/bald-faced stolen from me. One was stolen by an agent (who gave my idea and the manuscript in which I’d developed it to one of his better known clients), and the other stolen from a major publisher (who never returned or responded to my inquiries about the 25,000-word proposal I’d sent them, and then, the following season, came out , under the name of a Famous Comedian, my exact book: same title, subtitle, back jacket copy, introduction, chapter headings, chapter content … all of it, just as I’d written it).

In the book business (as in all writing, as in life, come to think of it) ideas are the currency. It took me forever to realize that. I always thought ideas were just … nothing, basically. Insubstantial potentialities. Fleeting inspirations. Fun ways to combine opposing or complementary realities. Acknowledgments of obvious (or, in a pinch, teased out) possibilities. Latencies simply spoken into form. I always figured ideas were utterly … free for the picking, basically.

Man. Wrong. Turns out they’re everything.

Anyway, it’s obvious enough from the extremo response I’ve gotten from my last couple of blogs that I’ve stumbled onto a bonafide Book Idea. How that can be is a complete mystery: If there’s anything in this world I figure there’s enough of, it’s flippin’ books on how to be a flippin’ writer. I hate books on how to be a writer. I just can’t read them. I find them like chewing a huge wad of flavorless gum: bothersome, no nutrition, threatens to choke you to death, can’t swallow it. The whole industry that makes money off of people’s desire to be famous writers drives me crazy. I hate it. It’s so … smarmy and exploitative.

Not all of it, of course. I’m sure a lot of it is sincere and wonderful. I love what I’ve read of Stephen King’s book on writing.

All that said, I have long intended to myself write a book on writing. Like the gay-bashing pastor who secretly dreams of calling 1-800-MAN HANDS, I’ve always wanted to go there. There’s so much I’d really like to say about the whole “I want to be a writer” dynamic. But I always thought I’d write that book at the end of my career, when anyone would have any reason whatsoever to really care what I think about writing.

And yet, here I am. Just on the strength of how many people read my last two blogs, I could now sell a book on writing. ”The Last Writing Book You’ll Need,” might be a title. ”Get Right With Writing.” ”Righting Your Writing.” “Righteous Writing.” (I’m now trained to think first about a book’s title, since a book’s title is about everything to a publisher. Serious business. I’ve had publishers tell me that if a book of mine they’d previously turned down had come to them bearing the same title under which it was ultimately published, they’d have published it themselves. You can sell a book with just a title. Watch: someone will come out with a book called “Righteous Writing.”)

Anyway, just now I’m not going to write a book on writing. You know why? You know why I was always going to write that book at the end of my career? Because the reason people sell books about writing is because such books are grounded in the idea that the people buying and reading them really can become successful writers. (And just what “successful writer” actually means is of course all over the board.) Such books feed on that aspiration. But the terrible, undeniable truth is that almost no one is really good at writing.

Our culture has such a weird relationship with writers. On the one hand we revere our best writers: people get breathless just saying the name “Shakespeare” or “Hemingway.” (I personally get breathless saying “Twain” or “Fitzgerald.”) And yet at the same time, everyone thinks they’re a writer. Our best writers spend their lives as absolute, abject slaves to the genuine art of writing — yet every scarf-wearing, cappuccino-sipping doink you see writing in a journal at a coffee shop thinks the only thing standing between them and writing fame is luck.

Yikes. I see I’m bordering on the Crazed Harangue. Sorry.

And actually, of course, my heart is with the journaling doink. That j.d. is My Kind! I’m with anyone who ever attempts to put clear, compelling thought into words. I’ve spent my entire life learning how to do exactly nothing but that. It’s so stupid. I’m 49, and the only thing I know how to do is construct a decent sentence. Should come in real handy next major earthquake, or whatever.

Anyway, this is what I’m saying: I know that if I really told that person journaling in the coffee shop what they were really going to have to do with their mind, life, heart, and soul in order to become a real writer, they’d slam their journal shut faster than they could say, “Yo, man, you’re hurting my arm. “