Just Getting Started in Creative Writing?

We at Slough Press feel that we have a few thoughts to share about getting started in writing because the press has worked for over thirty years with many emerging and established writers.

Looking at writing from a publisher’s point of view, we advise authors to develop an audience first by publishing work in magazines and by giving public readings. The reactions of people to your work at readings or in the magazines can give you tips on how to improve your work and make it more accessible to an audience. You can also develop some name recognition.

Many of the writers we’ve published attended creative writing classes and workshops at colleges or universities, and later in their careers organized and sponsored workshops for beginning writers.  If there is a writer’s organization in your area, join the organization. Many such organizations provide for members contacts with agents and publishers.

Slough Press has been in operation since 1973. The kind of writing we are interested in is literary writing, especially short stories and poetry. Some of our writers, like Pat Littledog and Marion Winik, have gone on to be published by major New York presses, or have supplemented their incomes by receiving writer’s grants and fellowships, but to be honest not one of our writers has ever made a living from writing. A person has about as much chance of making a living from writing, we’ve decided, as a he or she has of earning a living from acting by going to Hollywood.  It does happen.  A few get fabulously rich, but the odds, as in playing the lottery, are not in your favor.

If you want to make money, go into real estate or financial investments, not writing. If money is your goal, there are so many easier ways to get it.

Why get seriously involved in writing?  Because you have to, and because, as the poet Auden said, you love to make sentences.  Get involved because you care passionately about something and must have your say.  Get together with others who share your passion for writing and make books.  That’s one of the reasons we have freedom of the press in America. That’s what Sylvia Beach did in Paris at Shakespeare and Company Books when she published James Joyce’s Ulysses, and that’s what Ferlinghetti started in the 1950’s (and is still doing) from San Francisco at City Lights Books.

Enough said!  Good luck!