1. Invent a time machine, throw handwritten copies of each Harry Potter book into a backpack, go back in time, kill J.K. Rowling and head immediately to the publisher that didn’t reject the manuscript for HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE.
2. Contrive to be born as the heir to a large fortune; earn a reputation as a vapid, if willowy, party monster; and appear in a poorly shot, amateur sex tape.
3. Imagine that the majority of your target audience can — on a good day — identify 12 to 18 letters of the English alphabet. (See James Patterson for the best example of this approach).
4. Write up a list of a hundred things that would be really fucked up to do while on drugs, pretend that you did all of them, and call the result “a harrowing memoir of one person’s struggle and eventual victory against the horrors of addiction.”
5. Know the location of the safe-deposit box in which you will find the only existing copy of a certain 8mm film loop starring a young Oprah Winfrey in the role of “Housewife Who Ordered Pizza.”
6. Grab a copy of your favorite Judy Blume book and imagine what it would be like if the characters were all members of a secret society of nocturnal, living corpses who retained their youthful visages through the consumption of human plasma. Write this down and start counting your money!
7. Earn a reputation as someone capable of throwing together a full-length biography just four days after a young celebrity’s shocking death.
8. Work hard and become a noted expert in a field people are interested in. Then have sex with someone famous.
9. Take what everyone considers to be a universal truth (water is wet, fire is hot, Salma Hayek making out with Christina Hendricks would cause a sex-pocalypse event so severe that only 3,947 people in the whole world would survive it) and passionately argue the opposite. Then shoot someone famous.
10. Spend a decade or so working as stand-up comedian, catch the interest of a network development executive, star in a mildly funny sitcom that gets great ratings because it immediately follows the most popular show on television, write down your old act (which — if you make it to that sweet, 100-episode syndication goal line — you’ll never need again) and sell it to the first publisher who asks (and at least one will).
11. Start writing a blog in which you mock unhappy, famous, young women with obvious personal problems for having the tremendous gall to be unhappy, famous, young women with obvious personal problems (but it’s okay because you’re totally gay and that just makes it bitchy and not misogynist). Get 10 million hits a day and then start mocking those same women on TV. A book deal will inevitably follow.
12. Undergo a gender reassignment procedure and enough plastic surgery to allow yourself to resemble — under the right conditions — a semi-attractive blonde woman. Then get involved in the right-wing conspiracy to take down a popular Democratic president. Write a manuscript that suggests that anyone to the left of Charlton Heston would happily perform a late-term abortion on the Virgin Mary as they recited the Communist Manifesto and danced the Charleston on the graves of fallen soldiers, while constantly complaining on television (on which you appear on one channel or another at least five days a week) that the left-wing media refuses to give conservatives like you a forum to express their views. Then cross your fingers and hope a national tragedy temporarily allows people to confuse your insanity for insight.
13. Do the liberal equivalent of #12. Some commenter will no doubt inform us what that is.
14. Do everything you can to make you sure you are born a 6-foot tall ectomorph with cheekbones you can cut diamonds with, come up with a vague idea for a story based loosely on your glamorous life as a supermodel, and allow a publisher the golden opportunity to hire someone else to write it for you and publish it under your name.
15. Be told at the age of 6 that you have a fatal disease and will not live to see your 12th birthday. Write a bunch of poetry about how you’re not bitter and life is worth living because it’s beautiful and all of that crap (the more commercial, the better).
16. Use your family connections to obtain an executive level job at a Fortune 500 company. Lie, cheat and betray everyone you work with until you’re named its CEO. Waste millions of your company’s money on your own lavish lifestyle while you temporarily raise its stock prices by laying off 40% of your employees. Spend five years praying that no one notices your “revolutionary” new business model is little more than an advanced Ponzi scheme. When they do finally notice, leave the company with a $175 million “golden parachute.” While you enjoy your retirement, write a manuscript about how to be successful in big business.
17. Spend six years as a reporter in a war-torn country, where you witness unimaginable crimes against humanity and document the unmitigated horror of attempted genocide. Then have your picture taken with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
18. Spend three years working at a warehouse until the Sisyphean pointlessness of your labor causes you to quit in a fit of madness. Spend six months unemployed. Finally get a job as a dishwasher at a Greek restaurant. Meet a waiter who’s charming enough to impress a regular customer who happens to own a local publishing company. Seethe with jealousy as that waiter uses his history major to snag a gig writing a book of real-life Western stories for that impressed publisher. Quit the Greek restaurant gig and return to the warehouse you quit earlier. Save up your money in order to facilitate a move to a bigger, more vibrant city. Move to bigger, more vibrant city. Stay there four months before you run out of money and have to come back. Get a job working the graveyard shift at an adult video store. Then get a phone call from your old waiter friend, who’s now working full-time for the impressed publisher as a documenter of “real” ghost stories. Have him ask you if you want to submit a resume and a writing sample to his boss. Agree. Four and a half years later, you will be able to tell people that you have published 12 and 1/2 books, maybe four or five of which are kinda worth reading.
19. Take time to research the current market and see what popular genres best suit the kind of writing at which you excel. Spend a year crafting a well-written, tautly paced novel with compelling characters and an exciting inventive plot. Send it to agents who your research suggests would be interested in handling the kind of book you’ve written. Out of the four who express interest in representing it, select the one who you think will have the best chance of getting it published. Wait two years as it is rejected by every publisher in the business. Grow despondent. Start fixating on a future in which you amount to nothing and spend the rest of your life living with your parents. Buy a shotgun. Do your best imitation of Ernest Hemingway. After your ashes have sat resting on your parents’ mantle for six months, they’ll receive word from your agent that an editor they sent the book to accidentally read it after they initially rejected it and decided it would be perfect for next year’s fall schedule.
20. Do everything mentioned in #19 except commit suicide. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s been known to work! —Allan Mott
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Good list (tempted to try on Paris Hilton one-pieces). You might add, “Write anything Romance.”
Love this, made me laugh on a crappy morning when I didn’t think I would!
#3 is probably my favorite. Great list!
Funny, yet almost depressingly accurate.
You writing sucks. Seriously. It’s not agents, it’s YOU. What you’ve written up here is choppy and messy at best- too damn wordy! Listen, learn how to write first, and THEN you can get mad at somebody else.
Thanks for the constructive criticism, Bully! I’m not quite sure where you got the impression that I have any issue with literary agents, but I’ll definitely take your advice under advisement.
I especially appreciate your note about my overuse of words. Sometimes I forget that some folks on the internet have difficulty following trains of thought that last longer than a picture of Emma Watson accidentally flashing her underwear on a red carpet and it is inconsiderate of me to overload them with so much verbiage.
Then again, I do have to wonder why–regardless of its quality as a written work–someone would take such personal offense to this particular piece. Hmmm. Wait a sec! Paris? Is that you?
Cheesy.