One of Michael Perry's claims in Handbook for Freelance Writing is that anyone can be a writer. He goes out of his way to demonstrate this point by consistently using 'imply' for 'infer.' He is a pragmatic writer, a man who makes words answer to him (and refuses to answer to them). As his readers will notice, he doesn't bother with the distinction that we might expect a writer to make between 'flaunted' and 'flouted.' I do not point out these seeming oversights on his part in order to rebuke him for daring to deviate from some arbitrary standard of American English, but to demonstrate that Perry is not a man who luxuriates in the nuances of language.

He is definitely a businessman's writer, not a writer's writer. In his eyes--and in the eyes, he perhaps rightly suggests, of any mature person seeking to earn a living as a writer--the craft must be seen first and foremost as a means to an end. As nice as it might be to rub elbows with Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Perry suggests that the real reward of writing is having the opportunity to work independently and to produce something that we can point to and be proud of at the end of the day.

Perry occasionally becomes rather passionate about the writing experience. As he says, "I learned that writing could transcend the tedious to become sensuous. And there are times, even now, when my fingers find a rhythm on the keyboard and the words roll across the screen like a parade of ants headed for a jam jar, when writing is just that: sensuous." He never loses sight of that jam jar, though. Ultimately, according to Perry, the writer produces text in order to be compensated. And Perry doesn't care whether that sounds very noble or not because he is convinced that the writer's life is a rewarding life regardless of whether we categorize it as noble or mercenary.

Perry's message, in other words, is identical to the message that aspiring writers are accustomed to hearing from everyone who makes a living forging words into sentences: Writing for a living is extremely demanding, but worth the struggle. It's so demanding, in fact, that we shouldn't be surprised to learn that those who want to succeed are willing to abandon any sentimental commitment to the importance of self-expression.

For the first twenty pages of his book--pages that read like an obnoxiously protracted halftime speech from Vince Lombardi--Perry gives us a fairly heady dose of tough love. He is writing for a very specific audience: writers who have dabbled at writing without turning a profit and who are now serious enough about succeeding in their vocation to be willing to make some fairly extreme sacrifices.

We must be prepared to give up sleep, to withdraw from our families, to cut way down on entertainment and intellectual stimulation. We must get to work. We must take any writing job we can get and find time to do it amidst (or perhaps at the expense of) all our other commitments. If we persevere, we will eventually land a job of some sort. Perry can't give us particulars about how to land that job, however, because his came so easily. He worked as a proofreader and was able to convince his supervisor to let him try his hand at writing. I'm not sure his example is terribly useful for potential writers who deliver pizzas or work in video stores or are stranded in academia (where good writing is absolutely frowned upon).

Unfortunately, Perry's 'lucky' proofreading job is only the first of the many poor examples that pepper his handbook. The Perry plan is fairly straightforward (if a bit vague): If we want to be writers, we should luck into having a sympathetic supervisor at a proofreading job. Then we should submit queries to magazines that are put together so unprofessionally that their managing editors will hire us as editors/proofreaders (and why wouldn't they, considering the experience that we lucked into getting as proofreaders?). Then we should try to arrange interviews with famous people for magazines. It will be hard for us to get the interviews at first. But once we get that first break, the second will come more easily.

In other words, perseverance results in luck. If we stick to our guns, everything will work out in the end. And Perry's 'proof' of the value of stick-to-it-iveness is that things worked out for him in the end. After all, he eventually landed a contract for a book that purports to tell the rest of us how we can become successful freelance writers too. It's precisely the kind of book that I suppose most of us vow not to write whenever we read inferior books in this supersaturated niche of the how-to market.

I suppose that we all promise ourselves that once we have attained a certain level of commercial success as writers, we will do a better job of remembering what it was like when we started. We will remember how uncertain things felt when weeks went by with nothing but unreturned phone calls and letters of rejection. We will remember what kinds of strategies we employed in our efforts to make our own luck. But I'm not so sure that we will remember those things any better than Perry did. After all, if Perry is right, we cannot expect to earn a viable (much less comfortable) living as freelance writers until we allow our work to be molded less by our own voices than by the voice of the marketplace that demands it. And so we inevitably end up writing the same handbook for writers that has already proven successful with the target demographic.

If we only remain dedicated, we will eventually land a contract to write a book like Perry's. And in that book we will make the same compromise that Perry does. We will muddle a pep talk with a few insanely idiosyncratic illustrations of success taken from our own lives. We will give a long-winded version of the tried and true (if tired and terse) advice that I got from Russell Banks (who delivered the advice precisely like a man who had not only delivered it hundreds of times before, but had been on the receiving end even more frequently): "Keep writing; keep submitting; don't allow yourself to become depressed too easily; and please don't ask me to read your novel."

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