What Is Your Mission?

by Katherine Pickett

Defining your mission as a writer is a powerful exercise. It’s not enough to have an idea of what you want to accomplish with your book or other writing. You need to be clear with yourself, and the sooner you can get that clarity, the better.

In the past I have thought the act of writing down a mission statement was needless work. I knew why I plugged away at my editing company. I knew what my business goals were. I knew why I was writing a book. Why should I go to the trouble of writing it down?

But my attitude has changed.

After reading a fellow freelance writer’s argument for why mission statements are so important, I decided to give it a try. I suppose having it come from someone I knew gave it more weight. I wrote up a mission for my editing company and placed it on the homepage of my website.

I was blown away by the effects. Writing down my mission forced me to give my company the attention it deserved. In return, it gave me direction I didn’t know I needed. I also began getting clients who were better suited for me.

That was for a business. What about a mission statement for a book?

When it came time to write the proposal for my book Perfect Bound, I thought a mission statement would make a good marketing tool. Agents would love it. It would make my proposal stand out.

Well, I never found out what agents thought of it. What I learned instead was that having a mission statement gave me clarity and direction. I had a concise paragraph stating what I wanted to accomplish and why. That influenced how I wrote my introduction, how I presented myself at public events, how I approached my website, and more.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of a mission statement for a book, here is one example:

My mission in writing Perfect Bound, as it has been throughout my career, is to help aspiring authors achieve their dream of publication. Armed with the knowledge contained in this book, authors will be more confident in their approach to book publishing in general and the book production process in particular. Further, they will save time and money when they avoid the common pitfalls every author faces.

Importantly, this mission statement is particular to the book I was writing and is concrete in naming what I really hoped to accomplish. It is outward-facing—that is, I can share it with my readers—yet personal, so that it has meaning for me too. The statement appears on my website, and I have often referred to it when I needed encouragement.

In one of the exercises in my class Choose Your Best Book-Publishing Path, I walk students through the process of crafting a mission statement. I provide a simple formula to get you started, and we generate ideas for how you can make yours meaningful to you.

Ultimately, however, what you put in your mission statement isn’t as important as the act of writing it down. Publishing is a long road. When doubt starts to settle in, a writer’s mission statement is a touchstone that reminds them why their book is worth the struggle.

Katherine Pickett is the owner of POP Editorial Services, LLC, where she offers copyediting, proofreading, and developmental editing to writers and publishers across the country. She is the author of Perfect Bound: How to Navigate the Book Publishing Process Like a Pro, winner of two book of the year awards, and Freelancing as a Business: 7 Steps to Take Before Launch Day. Find her online at www.popediting.net.

How to be a Writer

Here's a fun post by member Laurie Lesser Chamberlain.

Ever since you told your fellow second-graders how you spent your summer vacation, everyone’s been telling you what a great storyteller you are. Even your e-mails get praised. You know you have talent, and true genius doesn’t have to follow rules. Being a great writer comes naturally to you. But just to be sure you succeed in this dog-eat-dog world, here are a few small tips you should keep in mind as you go down that road to becoming America’s next Hemingway. And have fun doing it.

First, act the part. Appearance is everything, for a writer. Nothing says “successful writer” more than a beret on your head and a baguette under your armpit. And sprinkling your speech (and your prose) with obscure foreign phrases adds that little je-ne-sais-quoi that people will just love, even if they know you’ve never been further east than Brooklyn Heights. Don’t worry about sharing anything you’ve actually written (or actually writing anything), as long as you talk a lot about being a writer and “living the writer’s life.”

Don’t try too hard. You’ve got a natural gift, why sweat it? There’s no need to search for a clever, witty way to express yourself when there are so many tried and true expressions out there already. Clichés become clichés for a reason – use them. To your heart’s content and with gay abandon. And don’t worry about seeming pretentious. Throwing in technical words that no one will understand will make you look smart – and the odd foreign word or expression can only add to your cachet (see above). And don’t bother to proffread your work or worry about grammar. That’s what editors are for.

Don’t worry about making sense. If someone complains that your heroine, who was a brunette in the first chapter, gets her “golden locks” chopped off in Chapter 3, shrug your shoulders and ignore it. You shouldn’t have to compensate for your readers’ lack of imagination. And if you find yourself dragged into a sentence that is so long and convoluted that even you can’t find your way out of it, don’t worry. Think of Faulkner. Or James Joyce.

Write only when you feel like it. Discipline is for athletes, you’re an artist. You don’t need practice, or training – all you need is an agent. Writing should be fun, not hard work or drudgery. Remember, writing is a gift you were born with, not a skill that can be learned or developed. And stay away from formal writing programs and workshops – they will only stifle your creativity.

Forget about writing only about what you know. The sky’s the limit when it comes to choosing your subject. Sometimes just changing the label is enough – you added a few juicy incidents to your memoir? Just call it fiction. The action in your story could never happen in the real world? Sci-fi. Don’t worry about accuracy or consistency. Any publication worth its salt will have fact-checkers who will correct any minor “inconsistencies with the truth.”

Finally, don’t listen to your critics. Ignore them, please. They’ve got their own agenda to push and never have your best interests at heart. If, once you are published – and you will be! – you should get a bad review in a major newspaper, then do the thing you do best – write. Send a letter to the editor complaining about the review, leave comments on every blog you can think of about what a moron and how incompetent the reviewer is, and most important of all, don’t take any of what he or she has written to heart. You know best.

Follow these simple rules and you won’t go wrong. Leave the classics like The Elements of Style or On Writing Well to other budding writers, less gifted and less confident than you. And for those of you who are saying that rules are made to be broken, I wish you luck. If you ignore my suggestions, writing will be full of hard work and responsibility. And that’s no fun, is it?