Skip to main content

The Search

The search for an agent is entering its fourth month and I often wonder just what classics we’d have to live without if Herman Melville or Charlotte Bronte had received email after email saying “it just doesn’t have that ‘have to have’ feeling.”  We’d be literary beggars.

The true irony of this is I know people who work in the publishing industry.  They say that someone with my background should be a no-brainer for an agent.  When I was a young man a friend accused me of writing too much like Melville.  “Nobody writes like that anymore,” he said.  His father-in-law was a writer.

Melville was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Their works are endlessly remade in a more modern idiom.  Electrum may look like gold, but it’s not the same.  Why not search for the real thing?

People learn how to do things from watching the masters.  While it may have been the glib Doc Savage and Dark Shadows pulps that led me to reading, I soon fell into the classics.  Edgar Allan Poe was the first, but after that I started to realize why classics were called classics.  I read them.

It was like learning to paint from Rembrandt.  But nobody paints like Rembrandt any more.  Those who do don’t sell.  I can write stream of consciousness material.  I have, in fact.  But I want my first published novel to explore deeper issues.

Recently I was reading about a legendary architect.  He was described as a troubled man, and as I read (note, I was reading a book about an architect!) I began to sync with his emotions.  He was a creator, experiencing what I do.  Yet he had a marketable skill.  People pay architects well.  Writers not so much.

I do read modern writing.  Much of it is okay.  Some of it even good.  But then I go back to the classics to see how it’s really done.  There’s a reason we’re still reading these authors centuries after they’re gone.  Only don’t try to write like that now.

My friend, who disappeared long ago, has a father-in-law who’s a published author.  I read his book.  It wasn’t that great.  “Write like that,” I was told.  Agents now tell me the same thing.  I want to lift my glass with Melville and ask him what he thinks.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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.   ...

Maybe Okay

  A couple pieces of encouraging news, perhaps, dear struggling writers.   I had a couple short stories accepted for publication in recent weeks.   As a fellow writer recently said, “You've got to keep trying.  Somebody will like what you wrote.” That’s a bit of sunshine.   And it’s likely true.   But the stories:   “The Crossing,” about two men in a boat trying to cross the Atlantic, was accepted by JayHenge Publishing.   JayHenge is a small, but paying publisher.   I was flattered when they wanted it for their Masque & Maelström: The Reluctant Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe anthology.   Being associated with Poe in any way feels good. The second story, “St. Spiders’ Day,” had been brewing in my mind for years—yes, this is a long game!   A friend pointed me to The Creepy podcast.   Since the story hadn’t been written, I followed their guidelines of what they wanted.   It worked. I recently heard a successful wri...