How Not to Get Hired as a Writer

Last time, we talked about the ways you could preserve your anonymity by keeping your precious novel untouched and unpublished, but what if you don’t write novels? What if you write other things, like articles, press releases, and other types of non-fiction? How can you make sure that they stay unpublished?

Silence is Golden

This one’s simple–If you don’t tell anybody that you write, nobody’s going to ask you to write for them. If you don’t want to be pestered by paying clients and publishers, eager to have your words gracing their promotional materials, simply don’t tell them you could–you know, like a doctor keeping his profession to himself at a cocktail party if he doesn’t want to be asked for free advice.

Declare Yourself

(But do it very, very quietly)

Maybe you have announced that you’re a writer. You like the sound of it, you enjoy the idea of it, you like bragging about it, but you just don’t want to have to do any, well, work. So, this is ideal. By avoiding doing any promotion or any advertising, by not sending out queries, samples, resumes, and business cards, you can enjoy the idea of writing without ever having to prove that you can.

(While you’re at it, feel free to call yourself a designer, too. Or a photographer. Musician. Magician. Whatever you like. So long as you’re never called on to prove that you can, feel free to claim any skills you might want. What harm can it do?)

Lose Friends and Alienate People

If you appreciate the “loner” aspect of writing, you’re going to enjoy this avoidance tactic. If you make yourself as unpleasant to work with as possible, it won’t be long before even those few, hardy souls who offered you a writing gig will be running, screaming, in the other direction, swearing never, never again. Be rude. Be nasty. And if you get the chance in person, blow smoke in people’s faces. Soon, nobody will want to come within 50 feet of you or your cellphone and you will be left in blissful peace.

Don’t Follow Through

What if you have prospects who simply cannot be discouraged by generally obnoxious behavior? The next step is to be thoroughly unprofessional as well as obnoxious. Don’t return phone calls or emails. Never follow-up on a lead. Make promises and then neglect to keep them. If you can manage to add in long trip where you are completely inaccessible, or a houseful of teenagers who are constantly on your phone and computer, you get bonus points for originality.

Be a Bad Writer

This may be too obvious even to list, but if you are truly a bad writer, chances are you will easily avoid the hassle that comes with being successful and sought-after. If you’ve been coerced into agreeing to write something, then hand in truly shoddy, sub-standard work–writing that is not only bad, but is patently nowhere near the word count you promised. Misspellings and bad grammar are particularly useful, here, especially if you use the kind that would easily have been caught by the most basic of spell-check programs.

See? It’s just as easy to be unpublished and unhired in the non-fiction world as in the fiction world. All you need to do is follow these few, simple rules and you will have all the time to troll the internet and play video games that you want. It’s not like anybody is going to pay you to do anything else, right?