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what do I know?
Over at Making Light, TNH has a longish weblog post about the proliferation of massive amounts of bad advice on writing and publishing fiction. She went to Amazon and found twenty-eight pages of books on fiction writing. She also observes that a good proportion of people writing books about writing and publishing fiction have had little or no success at it themselves. She says:
Not all of those books are awful, but far too many are, and the latter always seem to have an aggressively self-promoting author attached to them. For instance … …I couldn't disagree with her assessment of the situation, but I do wonder about a different but related question: why do these books get published? That's a rhetorical question, of course, because we all know the answer: they get published because they will be purchased, and there's a profit to be made from them. And why is that? Why do so many people buy books on writing? Because they want to publish a novel, preferably a novel that will make them loved, famous, and rich. Not necessarily in that order. Many people are so convinced that they have such a novel within themselves just waiting to get out that they spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to release it into the world.Huh. Okay, a weird thing just happened to me. I looked at the paragraph I’d just written, and found myself wondering whether I really wanted to get into arguments with four or five combative fuggheads at once. I don’t know where this is coming from. Is it possible that I’m finally developing a sense of prudence?
There are people who want to write and there are people who do write. Only people in the latter category actually have a chance of being published. And if you've been to a megabookstore lately, you'll see that quite a few of them succeed. So here's the thing. There are people who want to write, and pursue books on how to write, but never do. There are people who do write. Some of them produce awful, some mediocre, some good, some great work. Some of them will be published. Some of them will fail to publish. Some subset of all these people will write how-to books. And so the cycle perpetuates itself.
TNH finds it disconcerting, which it is. It also makes me wonder what in the heck I'm doing here, writing down my thoughts about writing. I hope I'm not doing any lasting harm. Not because my advice is good or bad, but because I'm just one more person encouraging people to write. TNH threatens to write a book to reverse this trend:
Contemplating this universe of bad advice makes me feel at once curmudgeonly and appalled. It makes me want to put out a book called The Oppressively Real Guide to Writing and Publishing. Sample chapter titles:Sounds like fun, but here's the question: If aspiring writers were made to read this, would it make any difference?Why You Shouldn’t Write.
A Taxonomy of People Who Are Out To Get You.
Myths and Legends of the Author Tribe.
Ever Wonder Why They Call It Submission?
Things That Won’t Happen.
Some Mistakes We Have Seen.
Recurrent Episodes in the Life of the Writer.
You Can Still Escape.
January 30, 2005 03:30 PM
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Comments
I sent Neil Gaiman's mention of TNH's warnings as advice to a friend who's been talking about writing for years. Lately they're taking those mail-order courses that imply success. I'm worried for them, but then I realized that they probably didn't even look at TNH's comments as a warning. They probably looked at her warnings as a "that won't happen to me - I know better." Whereas I looked at that and put off "the novel" almost for good. Really. This time, I don't think I'll think of writing for until I think of it again. Is it a gentle form of madness? Compared to some, I think the delusions may be worthwhile.
Posted by: Pam at February 1, 2005 09:03 PM
Jonathan Yardley for the Washignton Post wrote a scathing review of Bret Lott's BEFORE WE GET STARTED: A practical memoir of the writing life. You can read it at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25176-2005Jan20.html if I got the html tags right.
Posted by: Anamaria Anderson at February 2, 2005 10:06 AM