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.
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