"The thing is," said the wet blanket, "no amount of beating the bushes and contacting everyone remotely connected with the publishing world is going to make up for a lack or talent and craftsmanship."
I want so much to be able to make my living from my fiction, but I know that if in fact I am incapable of producing commercial quality fiction, I'm not going to, not ever. And that's just the hard cold truth that will not change, not even with all my wanting it to.
I've written in this group before about the education of a writer, and when I've suggested a bachelor's degree as the standard degree for a writer, I get tomatoes thrown at me. Why? Because people want to entertain the lotto-style fantasy that even without any academic preparation, they might be able to write a book that the vast majority of the reading public will love.
And now that I've brought up the horrible taboo of "talent," God knows what's going to become of me. But it's true: writing is an academic endeavor, and popular writers are the talented storytellers that are also academically inclined toward making those stories into novels.
I could be completely wrong here, but I don't think publishing success is a matter of luck. Fiction publishers have to publish books every year. They are desperate for interesting, page-turners written by talented writers. I used to be somewhat involved in publishing, and I can tell you this. The year you put out the same catalog you put out the year before is the year you go out of business. Publishers are desperate for material. I honestly believe that's why you see so much crap published in fiction. If a novel even begins to hold together as a minimal story, if it can just barely get people to turn the pages or be minimally interested in the characters, it's probably going to get published.
The truth is. Most people who write fiction cannot write with the minimum of craftsmanship required for fiction stories to work. Their characters are cliche' or unbelievable. Their actions are not motivated. They bore people with stupid description that goes on forever. And the dialogue, Oh Gott, der Dialog; they'd do better to write in a foreign language.
Look, I bought a book by an author. I knew, just by looking at her picture, it was going to be bad. I got the book and it was so bad, I actually used it to make a 50-point paper on fiction mistakes. It was a story. That is, it had characters, it had a beginning, a climax, and a denouement, but it was so unoriginal, so cliche, so unmotivated, so...stupid, I wouldn't have read past page three except I wanted to analyze it for all the poor writing. It was published by a very small publisher. I would be surprised if it earned a hundred dollars in roalties. But that's how most so-called writers write.
I got another book. This one was published by Harper-Collins. I got to page ten before I realized, I couldn't care less what happened to the characters. But it was put together minimally as a story, and was somewhat original. But reading it was like sitting on a bench watching people in a park. If I want to be bored, I can just close the book and be bored. Damn thing was casebound as well.
Most people cannot write fiction, even those who are published. Even those who are classical writers from long ago.
Now, see, I'm boring myself, which means you probably haven't even read to this paragraph. So I better quit.
Ed
