Failed Writer's Journey: Random Opinions on Writing That Will Slightly Annoy People
I’m too nice a guy to be anything other than slightly annoying, something I can say because hardly anyone who knows me in real life reads this. But I do have some opinions that run counter to some of the, let’s say mindset, in the writing community. So let us slightly irritate people in a manner that they can easily forget.
Most of the time your book is rejected, it is because it’s not good. A lot of writing advice points out that agents reject people for all sorts of reasons. The book is not marketable, it’s too close to something they already have, they just don’t like stories about space vampires running gin joints on mars (wait, need to write that down. Back in a second) no matter how good the writing. And all of that may in fact be true. But a lot of the time, the writing just isn’t good enough. And that is fine. No, it’s better than fine. I have written about this before, but no one ever got better by being told that they were good when they were not. And a lot of reassuring people that there are many reasons a book is rejected, while well meaning, can have the effect of stifling growth. That fact that I know I am a shitty writer helps me, I think, hopefully, improve. I know that I have things to work on, and the drives me to be better. No guarantee that I will ever be good enough to publish, mind you. But if I did not acknowledge my failings, I certainly would never have a chance.
Self-publishing, overall, does not have the quality of traditional publishing. I am not saying that all self-published books are bad. That is self-evidently not the case. Nor am I saying that all traditionally published books are good. That is, also, self-evidently not the case. I am saying that the lack of gatekeeping in self, or indie, publishing leads to more poor works. Gatekeepers do generally provide at sanity check on the quality level. It is easy to convince yourself that your own work is good enough, especially if you believe books are rejected for unclear or bad reasons (see point one). That way leads to putting out poor work. The pressure to put out several books a year probably also lowers the general quality — less time to polish usually means less polished works. I suspect that the people who do put out good works as self-published works do so because they have a group of people they trust to tell them when a book is crap and because they are very good editors themselves or hire good editors. Gatekeeping has its problems — too much racism, sexism, classism and timidity, for starters — but gatekeeping does help raise the overall level of quality, I think.
We shouldn’t call self-publishing indie-publishing. This might be my most pedantic opinion of all my opinions on anything. But traditional publishing has two tiers — the big five, and a host of smaller publishers, most of which come and go. Those smaller publishers are independent — indie — in that they serve all the functions of a publisher for the writer but are not beholden to corporate dictates. They can publish more based on their sense of good rather than the need to keep this quarter’s line going up. Self-publishing is not the same thing, in my opinion. As I talked about above, the lack of gatekeeping makes it its own thing, separate from what independent publishers do. And conflating the two seems like special pleading to me.
Romance should get more attention in the literary world. This is odd coming from me, since I do not like romance and do not read it, but romance is the single largest genre in publishing. Sure, a lot of it is crap, but Sturgeon’s Law applies: 90% of science fiction is crap — but 90% of everything is crap. Romance obviously speaks to something in people, given how much of it is read in this age when reading is lower than it has been for past generations. We should respect that something more. Jane Austin, after all, wrote romances. Somewhere in the romance aisle there could very well be another Jane Austin that the larger society knows nothing about because she is in the romance aisle. Seems silly to me.
I hate Save the Cat and all its imitators. I have written about this before, but Save the Cat irritates the piss out of me. First, any book on writing that claims that Memento is bad is off its medicines. Second, it hardly has anything helpful to say about massive parts of the story. According to it, the second act is half the story and it just kind of hand waves at what you are supposed to accomplish in that vast expanse of words. Third, there is no formula that guarantees success. Lots of books and movies do not rigidly follow any structure, structure by itself without characters and/or stakes is not a story, and there are plenty of other structures that help you ensure that your stakes accelerate, and your character moments have places to breathe. Structure is good — I plot out using a three-act structure, though I experiment with five acts occasionally — but Save the Cat implies more than that. It implies that there is a formula, a way of doing things that will ensure success, or at least is a prerequisite to success. And I am sorry, that is nonsense. You know from your own reading/watching that a story just needs some combination of a good voice, characters you relate to or love to hate, and stakes that people can care about. There are lots of ways to structure a story to bring those elements to life. You can let the cat die and still have a great book. Though, I mean, you shouldn’t — cats are awesome.
See? Not too annoying. You can put the rotten fruit down, thank you. You’ll just ruin your screen anyway.
Weekly Word Count
Basically zero. Still working on the re-plotting, trying to get the mechanics of moving the characters through the thriller plot — person A must get to place B for the story to work, kind of things — to line up with the rising stakes and characters’ emotional beats and it’s not quite working. Hopefully I can have this beaten into shape soon and get back to words on the page.
I am also starting to plot out another novel — a fantasy about necromancers and automation (see? Ideas are easy, they really are. You don’t need a word calculator to generate ideas for you. They are all around in this messed up world). I find that having multiple projects is helpful. When I am stuck or frustrated with one, the other is around to work on, resetting my creative brain. I suspect it would be better for me to have a long project and some short stories instead of two longer projects, but I am such a terrible short story writer that the frustration of the short story process drives me away from them, defeating the purpose of multiple projects.
Have a great weekend, everyone!