Skip to main content

Writer Beware

I don’t know about you, but the I’ve always been told that publishers don’t want novels that make readers do the work.  We, the writers, must accommodate them, explaining ourselves, “writing to the end user,” and dumbing down intellectual content.  My novels are intelligent, I hope, but accessible, I pray.

Clearly this bit of publishing boilerplate doesn’t apply to everyone.  I recently finished reading Empty Space: A Haunting, by M. John Harrison.  I do enjoy ghost stories, and this may have been one, I think.  I’m not really sure what it was.

I had to work for this novel.




The book had been recommended to me on a list of scary books.  It’s hard to be scared when you can’t figure out what’s going on.  My confusion settled in almost immediately.  Lingo, jargon, and the use of words in ways I didn’t recognize made the action, if any, difficult to discern.

The characters were interesting—memorable even.  It was depressing when one of them died.  Still, I kept wondering as I made my way through, what is going on here?

You see, I’ve written six novels and haven’t found a publisher for any of them.  I’m not the world’s greatest writer, but the stories are coherent, entertaining, and, dare I claim it, intelligent.  Not the kind of thing people pay money for.  Perhaps I should try for a bit more obscurity.

I spend a lot of my life reading.  I feel like I’d like to give back a little.  My published stories I’ve never been paid for, but I’m not getting any younger and I’d like to earn a little bit for my efforts.  I just wonder what makes a book that defies a somewhat educated reader more publishable than a book that’s just good fun?


Well, I know I’m naive.  The writing advice I read hasn’t led to a single cent for my thousands of hours of writing.  At least I know that I have to do the work.  Will anybody else find out, however, if no one publishes what I write?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creative Righting

  Rejection of my writing is a rejection of my imaginative world.   That’s why I was cheered by the acceptance of one of my stories this week.   That makes number 31. I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately, even as nonfiction book number 6 is going to press.   The ideas are still there, and bizarre as ever, but publishing venues just aren’t welcoming. The other day I had lunch with a professor whose wife is also a professor.   She just had her first novel published, and so he pointed me to her indie publisher.   I went to their website to learn that they’re closed to submissions.   I have to admit that my latest accepted story, “Creative Writing Club,” was probably given the green light because I know the editor.   That seems like a pretty dicey way to get any notice, doesn’t it?   You have to know the right people even in the low circulation world. My fiction is difficult to classify.   It’s got speculative elements to it.   ...
Post a Comment
Read more