First, some background.
I was probably a writer before could write. There have always been imaginary characters living in my head, telling me their stories. My parents used to assure me that when I was young, I would regale them with stories of impossible people doing impossible things, telling them with the straightest face and the most serious tone.
In high school, I took every English class and creative writing class I could get my hands on, where I was known for always doing it my way and ignoring the grade. I learned the rules so that I would know how to break them. I learned every technique they tried to teach me, but I wouldn’t necessarily cough them back up on demand. If the voice the assignment said to use wasn’t the voice the story demanded, I followed the story and not the assignment. Get a teacher like Mr Greaves, and that’s a good thing. (Thank you, Mr Greaves, wherever you are.) If you get Mr Babcock, then not so much. (Mr Babcock, I’m pretty sure I know where you are.) But I believe I managed to learn what I needed to learn.
In high school, I thought I was going to pursue writing as a career, but I allowed the people around me to talk me out of it. In order to write for a living, you have to go to college. In order to go to college, you have to be rich. In order to be rich, you have to be born into it, and you weren’t. Go learn a trade, and toil for the rest of your life.
In 1978, I met the most perfect woman on Earth, and we were married in January of 1981. Kids (lots of them), cars, roofs, groceries, doctors, schooling for others instead of myself, illnesses, injuries, and all those other things that we call life became the fabric of my thoughts, and the stories began to whisper, instead of shouting, but they never went away.
One story in particular refused to subside. Feeding solely on the time it could wrest away from my life in those moments before sleep, it flickered in the edges of my mind for many years. What if life had do-overs? What if you could go back? What if you could relive the moments of your life in which you made the off-hand decisions that became so important?
Early one morning, driving an eighty-mile paper route that had been my second job for way too many years and listening to Brian Adams sing The Summer of 69, I heard the line “standing on your Mama’s porch, you told me that you’d wait forever” for the zillionth time, and something clicked in me, somewhere. What if she did wait forever?
When I got home, I sat down at the computer and began to write. Some weeks later, I had completed my first novella, The Back Porch. In the almost three years since then, I have written eight more novellas, five novels, and a handful of short stories. They’ve been favorably reviewed in various places. They’ve been widely read and widely enjoyed, although there have been a few people who’ve said “Oh, that was ok, I guess,” and that’s fine, too.
But apparently, I’m not a writer.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation I had the other day:
Friend of a friend: “You’re a writer? Who’s your publisher?”
Me: “I am. I publish my own books.”
FOF (somewhat disdainfully): “They’re, uh, self-published?”
Me: “Yep.”
FOF: “Oh… So, you shouldn’t call yourself a writer.”
Me: “Why not?”
FOF: “Well, you’ve never sold a manuscript.”
Me: “I never said I was an agent. I said I was a writer. A writer writes. That’s what I do, so that’s what I am.”
FOF: “No, a writer, in the sense that a person can call himself a writer, is a person who writes something and sells it to a publisher.”
Me: “Suppose I took photographs and posted them to any of the dozens of websites that will host photographs, take orders, produce prints, and ship them. I take the photographs, the host handles all aspects of production and order fulfillment. Am I a photographer?”
FOF: “Well, yeah, I suppose.”
Me: “Why? If you would argue that a writer is a person who writes a manuscript and then sells it to an industry that will treat it as raw material for editors and other manipulators, then why would you not also argue that a photographer is a person who takes photographs and then sells them to the commercial art industry?”
FOF: “Well, it’s different.”
Me: “Why?”
FOF: “Well, it just is. Everybody knows that.”
Me: “Why?”
FOF: “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Me: “Mmm. Ok, take Jane Doe and John Doe, brother and sister. Last November, they both participated in NaNoWriMo [which I had to explain]. They each wrote a novel of 65,000 words. Jane published hers through CreateSpace. John sent his off to a dozen agents. Jane sold a few copies. John got rejection letters. Jane gets a few emails from people, telling her how much they enjoyed her book. John sends his off to a dozen more agents. Jane starts a second novel. John gets some more rejections. Life goes on. Let’s say John lucks out, and eventually, he sells his book. Initial print run, 10,000 copies. It gets reviewed and the critics love it, but only a few hundred copies sell. This takes three years, during which time, Jane writes and publishes three more novels. She has only sold a few hundred copies herself, but she has scores of avid fans, pestering her for her next book.
“So Jane has written and published four novels, well-received by nearly everyone who reads them, while John has written one, which got him scores of rejection letters, half a dozen good reviews, and a few hundred sales.
Question: which one can say, in all honesty, ‘I’m a writer?’ ”
FOF: “John can, obviously, because his story was good enough to sell to a real publisher, and Jane’s wasn’t. Maybe some people like it, but if it isn’t good enough for a real publisher, then she shouldn’t call herself a writer.”
Me: “Jane never sent hers to a so-called ‘real’ publisher.”
FOF: “Well, then, she’ll never know if it’s any good, will she?”
Think about that: “She’ll never know if it’s any good, will she?”
One of the sixty-six jobs I’ve held was as an industrial designer, working for a company that manufactured cooking equipment for the food-service industry. The company ran a restaurant-grade test kitchen, and chefs and cooks came from all over the world to test our products. Yes, I said “chefs and cooks.” It seems that you can cook for a living, and have your food loved by everyone who eats it, but unless you’ve graduated from the right sort of school, you’re not a chef. But there’s another definition, given to me by the man who runs a national chain of restaurants (yes, you would recognize the place). He worked his way up from the lower end of the chain, eventually going to one of the right sorts of schools and earning the right to call himself a chef. He continued to call himself a cook, though, and he told me something that I think can be applied to a lot of situations in life.
“Suppose you have a person who cooks a meal, working for hours to make everything perfect. He stands in the kitchen and watches through the doorway as the customers begin to eat. He sees that they’re not enjoying his food. A chef is someone who says ‘Those people have no taste, no class, no culture. Look at them, not enjoying my food!’ A cook is someone who says ‘What can I do differently next time, to make food that they will enjoy?’ ”
I don’t mean to disparage chefs or the writers who sell their manuscripts to the corporate publishing industry, but I do think we need to keep one thing in mind:
It’s about the readers.
Without people eating the food, there are no chefs or cooks, either one. Without readers, there are no writers. It doesn’t matter if the biggest publisher on Earth buys it or you run off a dozen copies on your inkjet and staple them together. It doesn’t matter if you know the rules or not. It doesn’t matter if you have an MFA or you never finished high school.
If you can take hold of the hearts and minds of your readers and make them forget their own lives to the extent that they laugh and cry and worry and exult and shiver in the dark, living the lives of the people you made up out of whole cloth, then you’re a writer.
I feel as if you have spoken my thoughts aloud.
A writer does not need a corporate, superstore publisher to buy the rights to his/her book in order to be considered a success OR to be christened a writer. Being successful in ANY field requires talent (originality), determination, and the ability to engage others in the discovery of the self and the world.
.-= J.E. Seanachaí´s last blog ..Seanachaí’s News =-.
And that’s about all it takes, really. Why is it that in writing, we face this artificial obstacle?
Levi,
Another angle to mention is that a novel doesn’t necessarily get published right after it’s written. Scores of the most revered and well known authors now went decades with their novels, short stories, poetry etc. written, writing new things. This FOAF would have to have been saying to, say, Knut Hamsun for decades “You’re not a writer” and then might feel a bit of an ass when the other shoe dropped.
I don’t mean by this that eventual commercial success is the thing, quite the opposite. Just that, in support of your statements, one must remember that the publishing industry is not really know for just spotting the most brilliant, wonderful things from a pile of submitted manuscripts and not every remarkable novel is “bestseller” because great writing doesn’t have to be loved by masses. Many marvelous novels I have on my shelf I wouldn’t just go recommending to someone who says “Got anything good to read?” That’s sort of where it’s at, you know? An author writes, goes out and gets their work around. A contract with a publisher—whether it generates sales, profit, interviews, or nothing– is one of a million things that might happen, not the end of the road, not the holy grail.
Cheers for the post.
.-= Pablo D’Stair´s last blog ..Publisher’s Introduction =-.
Pablo,
Not only is it just one of the things that can happen to a good novel, but it can also happen to a bad novel, and clearly has. Many times.
Thank you for your comment!
Levi
Levi,
I’m not sure if I’m allowed to curse on your blog, so I’ll just say Heck Yes!!! Your friend of a friend is no friend of mine and my patience for fools has become markedly less since I stopped surfing(I look forward to regaining it soon!). A writer is someone who writes, pure and simple, and it’s precisely because ANYONE can do it that those vested in writing as a career feel the need to build walls around their industry. And that’s fine, Philip Roth’s gotta eat, after all, but no one should forget that business and art are two separate entities that sometimes happily converge, but not always, and generally not often. Corporate publishing is a business, and everything it does is about the bottom line. Quality is just a happy accident. Write on!
.-= Don Doggett´s last blog ..The.Muse.In.Action! =-.
Yeah, you should probably keep it cleanish, Don. No telling who’s reading this.
As for that happy accident, I’ll take some of that!
Thanks for reading.
I can understand your frustration – yes, a writer is someone who writes. No-one expects that someone learning to play the piano has to have the ultimate aim of appearing at Carnegie Hall, but somehow writing fiction is not considered “real” unless it appears in print.
Unfortunately you only have to look at the home page of a site like SmashWords to see where your FOF is coming from – a lot of self-published books are just plain bad and would get binned by an agent or editor after a couple of paragraphs. Most readers don’t want to wade through the slushpile, they want something that’s been through some kind of QA process. That doesn’t necessarily mean a big commercial publisher, of course, but until there are well-known alternatives I don’t, realistically speaking, see the public’s attitude changing.
Then again, maybe it just needs time, and the younger generation will have a different attitude. In my field (science), it’s a truism that scientists don’t change their minds, they just grow old and are replaced by younger scientists with different ideas
Anne,
Yes, of course, the world is filled with bad writing, and yes, of course, self-published writing accounts for its fair share of that. The world is filled with bad music, bad dance, bad painting and bad haircuts. But if you post a video of yourself singing a song that you wrote, playing the guitar that you built and wearing the haircut you gave yourself, standing in front of a backdrop that you painted, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the reaction to that video would be based on the quality of your singing, guitar-building, hair-cutting, and painting, and not on invalid assumptions based solely on the fact that you did it all yourself.
Self-publishing has been around at least long enough for Edgar Allan Poe and Benjamin Franklin to have utilized it, and it will be around a long time to come, but in its current manifestation, it is just one of the many things the explosion of the internet has brought us. The very ease of placing writing in front of readers will, in and of itself, ensure that people do so.
The oft-repeated assumption that corporate publishing assures quality can be refuted simply by pointing to the books of Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown. Both of these authors are famously bad, and yet look at the volume in which their books are being published. They’re published because they can make money for the publisher, not because they’re well-written, and obviously very little effort was put into improving their quality. Hundreds of famous authors are in the same boat, and I even read and enjoy the books of many of them (although I can’t read either Meyer or Brown without wincing). My point is simply that it is invalid to assume that corporate publishing equals quality, just as it is invalid to assume that self-publishing equals a lack of quality.
Levi
I’m in… “read your old posts and comment on them mode.” (Yeah don’t you hate commenters like that,lol) As cold as it may sound, I just don’t associate with people like this. People this moronic clearly don’t know how to think for themselves and I don’t have time to interface in real time with people with this mentality. I may sometimes argue on the internet where my “voice” can be heard by many and hopefully people will read and re-engage the gray matter between their ears… but for real time in-person interactions, on the rare occasions I meet people like this, I just roll my eyes at them, look at them like they are about the stupidest being on the planet (because they’re close), and just ignore them for the rest of my existence. I love how you can be a real bowler without being in a pro-league, and a real painter without being the in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but somehow you can’t be a real writer unless you’re published by a large corporation.
Also, haven’t these tools heard of indie musicians or indie filmmakers? I guess those Oscars indie filmmakers have won were imaginary awards since they aren’t “real” filmmakers. Sometimes you wonder how people are able to dress themselves unassisted.
No, I don’t hate you… yet. Ha! That’s a joke.
I really love that the “indie” label on a musician or a bookstore is a good thing, while on a writer, it’s a bad thing.
Levi
I think that’s really about to change. Loud-mouthed indies like you, I, and several others out there will MAKE it change. Since we don’t give a toss whether a NY pub or agent “wants us,” we’re pretty much free to say what we think about the state of publishing. Enough of us saying it will change public opinion on the matter. Our time is absolutely coming and within the next ten years (probably much sooner) it will be just as “cool” and “respected” to be an indie author as it is to be an indie musician or filmmaker. And you and I will be able to say we were doing it before it was cool, which will make us even cooler. haha.
Part of the problem as I see it is that all the fundamentalist attitudes within writing has made it such that most good writers who COULD self-publish and be publishing something good, wouldn’t do it for fear of the stigma, so there was a lot more bad self-published work creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. As more and more people are getting disgruntled and disillusioned with the whole way corporate publishing works, as editors and agents continue to be arrogant jerks on the Internet, as the barriers to self-publishing especially in E continue to lower, more and more good writers will self-publish. This alone will contribute to the changing attitudes.
You can ignore one or two good self-published books as the “exception to the rule” but you can’t ignore one or two thousand. The exception slowly becomes less exceptional and no one has an argument to cling to. At that point the only people left screaming will be those trying to prop up the status quo of the old system and trad published authors threatened by their new competition in the marketplace.
Attitudes are already a lot more indie author positive than they were just a few years ago when no one even knew the term “indie author.”