I used to play a lot of poker. Took it pretty serious, as well: serious enough to make the trip to Vegas in 2009 to play in the World Series of Poker.
I played regularly for about ten years, every week for all of those ten years. I kept detailed records, 
and can say I made a profit every year of that decade. Sometimes a few hundred bucks, a couple of times I broke five figures (you don’t pay tax on gambling winnings in Australia; one of the few upsides of a culture where gambling is the national religion).
Let’s be clear – with these numbers I was the smallest of small fry in the poker world; but, in my defence, I was never in a situation where my income depended on it. I treated poker as an intellectually stimulating and occasionally profitable hobby (albeit one I expended a considerable amount of time and vocal chords over). Something I did in my spare time outside my profession as an aid worker.
As I gave away poker to focus on raising my son and writing fiction (all three are huge time-sinks, and one of them had to go. Easy choice to make), it became apparent to me that there are a lot of commonalities between cards and writing.
Like poker, writing has lots of rejections. In tournament poker, you can expect to cash (make money) between about 11 – 18% of the times you enter a tournament (if you are a winning player – most cash less than 11% of the time). In terms of short stories, I’ve heard many pro-level writers talk about aiming for a 10% acceptance rate. I currently have a 12% acceptance rate, though it is early days and – as with poker – you need to build a statistically significant sample size before you can start making claims about success.
From discussions with more experienced writers, there are often long stretches where no sales are made at all. I know of an excellent Australian short story writer (with a bibliography as long as your arm, including sales at the most prestigious venues), who didn’t make a single sale in an entire year.
In poker we call this ‘variance’.
Like poker, writing requires persistence. I mentioned sample size above – that’s true of words as well as submissions. I’ve heard it said you need to write a million words before you know how to write. Seems like one of those arbitrary numbers someone plucked out of their cornhole, but there is enough truth in it.
There’s not a great author out there who hasn’t felt the sting of rejection hundreds of times over and who doesn’t have a trunk full of unpublishable dross. C. S. Lewis was rejected over 800 times before he sold a single piece of writing.
Like poker, writing requires skill. The reason you write a million words for zero sales, or play a million hands for a loss, is that this is all nonetheless a very good thing. It’s good because you’re improving your craft.
Writing is hard. Writing fiction is bloody difficult. After years of writing non-fiction for publication, I thought my craft was pretty good. Wrong: it was shithouse. The learning curve of the past 2.5 to 3 years has been precipitous, to say the least.
Like poker, writing is a skill game. A willingness to admit weaknesses and hone craft is essential.
Like poker, writing requires luck. This may seem contradictory to the platitudes above about hard work and persistence, but in the end, the cards still need to fall your way.
Your novel might be the exact thing an agent is looking for on the particular day they happen to look at your submission; or they’ll get to your novel the day after they’ve just bought one with a very similar theme, and have to reluctantly say no.
After a certain skill level, publishers are going to have to choose between several bloody good stories and novels. At that point, catching the right card is in the hands of the gods.
And yet, as the overused quote from Thomas Jefferson goes: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” Overused, yes, but it has the virtue of being true. First you have to be good enough, and that takes hard work. Second, you have to keep sending that good stuff out there. Every time you do is the equivalent of buying another ticket in the publishing lottery.
In the stead of luck, of course, you can be rich and connected. Wealthy family, private schooling, and parents with connections in the publishing industry – this is another tried and true method for breaking through as an author. You could always try that.
Oh, and as with poker, almost no-one makes a living from writing. As with poker, you have the ballers like JK Rowling or the luck-boxes like that Fifty Shades of Grey woman. As with poker, everyone else is grinding out less than minimum wage, and relying on loved ones and friends to buy them electricity and prescription medication.
I take writing a little more serious than poker. For all their similarities, they have one key difference: poker has no social value. It is largely a predatory activity, where those with superior skill take money from the weak players; where unwashed men sit around a felt-topped table for long hours talking about ex-wives and bad beats.
It must be admitted that writing has very little social utility most of the time, too. A million new self-published memoirs every year by angry, grey-haired suburban cat ladies aren’t going to change the world, nor are thinly disguised rape fantasies masquerading as sword and sorcery tales by sallow-skinned basement dwellers.
And some writing makes the world a worse place to live: anything by Ayn Rand, the Twilight series, Russell Brand’s ‘Booky Wook’, for example.
But there’s has an upside: writing can change minds and books can change the world. That’s a pretty big upside. I don’t know where I’d be without Orwell, or Philip K Dick, or Vonnegut, or Camus, or Dostoevsky, or Shakespeare, but it’d be a worse place than I am now. And the world would be a smaller, harder, more ignorant place without them.
So roll the dice: write.
Part 3 of the Writer’s Training Regime is here: 500 / 500
Part 2: The Short Story
Part 1: The Convention
