The ideal writer is probably a former reporter for a big-city newspaper, like Michael Connelly or Linwood Barclay. Barring that, he is an English teacher like Stephen King was.

The ideal writer works and lives with words. He is marinated in them on a daily basis over long periods of time. Words are the medium in which he lives. Even a lawyer deals with words (like John Grisham) and has at least a tenuous hold over the field.

Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer was a freelance writer before embarking on his fiction career. That’s another good path to take.

Charles Dickens, in the 19th century, worked as a reporter before becoming a writer. Are you beginning to see a trend?

Even television uses words. Lee Child of Jack Reacher and E.L. James of Fifty Shades of Grey fame each worked in British television before their breakout books.

It is not easy to be a writer who is entertaining. Elmore Leonard, while he was in the land of the living, contributed many books to the Western and Modern Crime genres. He said you write a book by leaving out the boring parts. But what is boring to you may be interesting to me.

George R. R. Martin, who wrote Game of Thrones that the television series is based upon, writes slowly. So does the author of the Hannibal Lecter-oriented The Silence of the Lambs. It is not good to be a slow writer. This is a handicap one has to overcome.

Dean Koontz, by contrast, has written over 100 books. Now there’s a writer whose fingers fly. He has half a billion books sold to his credit because he keeps churning them out. Another prolific author is James Patterson, who has turned writing from a cottage industry to a factory-production-model assembly line by amassing a stable of “co-authors” who write the books that he sketches out. Now that’s smart!

Patterson got his start by winning the Edgar Award for The Thomas Berryman Number. That got him nowhere financially, so he started changing his style to suit the times. When he had a novel he was happy with, he advertised for it on television (he was a former CEO of an advertising agency in New York and hence a believer in the medium). It worked. His nursery rhyme books — from The Big Bad Wolf to Kiss the Girls — got him started.

Then there’s those who serve out their apprenticeship in the world of short story magazines, like John D. MacDonald, who during the postwar period and later years honed his craft by submitting to collections in magazine format. He got to be a good writer by concentrating on the interplay of word and thought. Stephen King also took the same route to success by getting good at short stories before he expanded their length to full novel size.

Nowadays, there’s few enough places to place a short story and you can’t make any money doing so. All the money’s in novels. And only for those writers who are in the top tier.

Writing… is a convoluted maze. A giant maze. You have to be a smart mouse to get good at running the mazes. You have to have a low threshold for boredom and an instinct to entertain yourself. King says if you’re entertaining yourself as a writer, you’re probably going to be entertaining the reader as well.

There’s a lot of money to be made in the world of novels. Take a medium-successful top tier writer like Michael Connelly. He has sold 85 million books since the early Nineties. The easy math of a dollar a book going into his pocket gives him 85 million dollars, minus taxes. He’s still rich.

Thoughts of wealth can be distracting, though. The thing to do is to concentrate on writing the funnest, most vibrant book you can and following it up with others in the same vein. Build up a name and a fan base.

How much money do you need to be happy as a writer? I would argue the $10-million USD threshold is enough to make anyone happy. You spend $2 or $3 million on your home, and have enough money left over to kick ass with life.

Do writers write for money? Stephen King and John D. MacDonald claimed they would be doing the same for free. But King’s day job as a teacher tired him out, exhausting him mentally. He needed to provide for his young family in the Seventies. And he couldn’t write for free, practically speaking. The $400K he got for his first published book, Carrie ($2.3 million USD in modern terms), was enough to emancipate him from the soul-deadening work of teaching. In the early years he thought in terms of having enough money made to write the next novel.

King grew up in poverty. That’s all he knew. This fucked him up as a writer of true high-brow literary fiction, because he was hard-wired by circumstance to write to entertain on the low level. But it meant that he was set to become a big-name writer from a history of being driven to succeed.

The most exciting quote I ever read was by King. I tried to find it once again but was unable to. It goes something like this, I always had the feeling I was standing at a safe full of money, and I was turning the combination lock and when I had the right idea all that money would come pouring out. I feel the exact same way about myself. If I can come up with a good novel for a horror-lite novel, I’m rich. And it’s as exciting to be rich as it is to be working in the world of publishing as an author.