Blue Collar Writer

A lifetime in higher education has taught me that connections, not authenticity, make a writer. At least in society’s eyes. If you can afford the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, doors will be thrown open for you. Don’t you dare being born a nobody, though.

I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, unconnected, in a small town. My teachers praised my work but really had no experience with publishing. Stories moldered away in a dilapidated cardboard box stuck in a ratty, unused upstairs room until the bulldozers threatened and I had to haul them away.

I grew up without much. I had an armload of books for friends and I wrote tales that no one ever read. This kind of thing doesn’t get you a job. In a small town with no bookstore—or even a library—I never heard of literary journals; I didn’t even hear of journals period until I got to college. First generation. Thoroughly confused. Nobody has to teach you how not to know anything.

All this reminds me of high school awards ceremonies. The over-performing kids with well-connected parents shine. Those who truly deserve recognition, who pull themselves up by their own metaphorical boot-straps, but who don’t preen and strut in front of others, or fondle balls adeptly, sit quietly in back.

The A-list hires the ghostwriters to make their autobiographies interesting. Writing is a lonely profession, and one with precious little recognition. As the writer moves from job to time-consuming job, only wanting time to polish their art, those who are connected end up on the New York Times bestseller list. Everybody cheer. Cheer for the privileged.

In higher education there is a movement now to hire “authentic” underprivileged academics. Those of us who fit that bill can’t even publish in working class literary journals because we’re too tainted with success. The way it feels to me is that I have hundreds of stories to tell, but nobody’s listening.

Call it sour grapes. Call it sweet lemons, for all I care. Those who have no choice but to write will also have no choice but to be overlooked.

Comments

Working Through It

The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time. Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot. Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group. Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday. I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare. I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run. And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined. One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful. They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only. Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away. They also met on Saturdays. Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...

Patterns

There’s a pattern I’m noticing. For fiction publishers. Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle. Part of the reason is the pattern. Lots of websites list publishers. The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in. That’s the kiss of death. Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested. I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns. This too is a pattern. Back to the smaller presses. I check many lists. What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic. It’s literary but it’s weird. Publishers don’t know what to do with it. If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it. The pattern includes writers who never get discovered. Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my wor...

Creativity

Maybe you’ve noticed this too. When you step away from fiction writing for a while, your creativity becomes flaccid. I’ve had to step away from this blog for a while because I was writing my sixth nonfiction book. God, I’ve missed fiction! Now that I’ve entered that phase of waiting for publishers to respond, I’ve turned my limited writing time back to fiction. I submitted a couple of stories this week and am waiting to hear about those as well. When you’re a writer, waiting is a way of life. Opening my software where I store my fiction stories, I was amazed by how many I found. Some of them are bad—so bad that they’ll never (rightfully) be published. Some are surprisingly good and have been sitting around while I finished up my nonfic. The vast majority, however, are unfinished. Some years back I realized that when I’m writing in the heat of inspiration but don’t have time to finish a story that I need to write down where I...

K. Marvin Bruce

Search This Blog