We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Richard Sweitzer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Richard, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
I was lucky enough to land a good job at a young age. In my early 20’s I became the host of a popular morning radio program in central Wisconsin. Each morning was filled with fun and games, interviews, live remote broadcasts, and music. But while it was a good job, it was not a great job. Everything about it–the pay, the hours, the small-town fame–was just good enough to keep me hanging on for another year, but never enough so that I would ever be satisfied. I wanted more. So at the age of 30, and while still hosting this daily show, I enrolled in college. I would work at the radio station every morning from 4:30am till noon, then drive 30 miles to the nearest school. And while striving for a degree, I stumbled upon something else altogether: my calling. It was in my sophomore year that I randomly took a creative writing course. I had never had an interest in writing, this was merely an elective class I needed to fill out some semester credits. Yet this one class changed my life. I remember reading the syllabus on day one and seeing that the final project would be a short story of three to five pages long. I panicked! I had never written anything longer than a grocery shopping list before. I truly considered dropping the class out of fear. But I needed those credits, so I stuck with it. I ended up learning so much in that class that one year later I had won my first nationwide writing contest and was working on my first full-length novel. Now, a few years later, my debut novel is selling well all across the globe, and I have two more books that will be coming out soon. I still work at that radio station, and I still love my morning show, but I have supplemented any of its shortcomings with a growing and successful writing career. So if one can glean any advice from this story, it’s to try something new even if it’s scary. Take that course, make that change. Be afraid, and do it anyway.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I had always wanted to publish my books traditionally, but after three false-starts working with literary agents, I decided to publish it myself. I knew this would mean a lot more work, but it also afforded me much more control over the content. The agents I had worked with had offered some great editing advice, but I had felt the story was drifting away from the adventure I had created. Self-publishing solved this, and I couldn’t be happier. My debut literary fantasy ODE: The Scion of Nerikan came out in February of this year. I knew it would sell locally as I am very lucky to have a vibrant social platform via my morning radio program. What really surprised me was seeing sales come in from around the globe. That first month I would wake up every morning and see sales in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Poland, Australia, and more. I couldn’t believe it. And not much later came the reviews. The readers were able to pick up on key points that I had fought to keep in the book, which confirmed in me that it was the right decision to self-publish the book as it was intended. These days I spend my time working on continued promotion, while also working on an audiobook version, and a much-requested sequel.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
People are always surprised when I admit that I have no God-given talent as a writer. I didn’t just randomly sit at my computer one day and pound out a 140,000 fantasy adventure. Any skills I have as a writer I learned from some the best teachers around. From that very first “Intro to Creative Writing” course I took in college, to the final project that earned me my master’s degree, I was guided and taught by the best. I could name them all, but I will focus on just one. One course I took in college was titled “Novel Writing” which was taught by a (then) up and coming author named Benjamin Percy. Percy was the first teacher I had met who taught writing as a “learnable craft” instead of a “natural talent” that just needed to be expressed. To this day I still have the charts and graphs and hints and rules that he taught us to use to create compelling storylines, and you better believe I used them in my book. I truly believe this can be true for nearly any skill or scholarship: don’t think you can’t do it just because it doesn’t come naturally. Trust those that came before you. Look up to your teachers and others who have succeeded in the industry you are hoping to enter. Take the courses, read the books, and watch the videos. By trusting that you are a learning machine, you can learn the skills you need to succeed in anything you do.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
Anyone who is just starting out learning about creative writing should start with Stephen King’s “On Writing”. One part memoir, one part skills lesson; this book was exactly what I needed when I was first writing. King gives great advice throughout the book, but the most important section was his inclusion of one of his first drafts. When it comes to famous authors like Stephen King, we only see the finished product. We see the 500-page hardback novel stacked up high on the New Releases shelf at the local bookstore and we assume that the author hacked out another flawless first-draft best-seller. But by showing us the rough-draft pages of his latest book, we see all (and there were several!) flaws and errors and wrong words and dead-ends that we see in our own work. He then followed up that with a heavily edited version that his editor had returned to him. It was truly transformative to learn that a master of the craft such as King is not flawless. We are all the same writers, him, you, and I, he just has better editors.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.RichardSweitzer.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rick.winters.92
- Youtube: @richardsweitzer4952
- Other: tiktok: @odescionofnerikan
Image Credits
My main headshot against brick-walled building: Chris Pruitt
