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?