Apr
21
Tough Love for Would-Be Writers
"Calm down, Leela. You can vent about it tonight on your blog."
It is a truism that everyone can be a writer. Indeed, this optimistic notion seems to explain why bookstores and the Internet are lousy with mediocre media gurus and authors dispensing hackneyed literary wisdom in thousands of books and Web sites on “How to Be a Great Writer.” But is the truism really true?
Certainly each of us has a story to tell, but how many of us have the skill to tell it effectively, beautifully, compellingly? We don’t all expect to win the Nobel Prize in economics, and we know that the neighbor kid’s chances of being an NBA star are astronomical, so why should we expect that just anyone can be a writer? Is it possible that, despite all their good intentions and striving, some (maybe even most) of those with heartfelt writerly aspirations might never, ever be great… or even good?
Some of the typical writing and publishing advice described below strongly suggests that there are indeed plenty of would-be writers who are unlikely to produce anything of enduring literary value. Maybe it’s time to cut through the “you are special and unique” bullshit and give some tough love to those who think such advice will really make them great.
Grammar Guides and Vocabulary Builders
I recently came across a site for would-be writers that provides helpful explanations of such confounding grammatical issues as the difference between it’s and its. Though the site is perhaps an extreme example, similar grammar guides aimed at writers (like Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Woe Is I) litter the literary landscape.*
Basic English lessons are fine for the uninitiate, but shouldn’t anyone calling himself a writer be beyond them? Isn’t one of the defining characteristics of the author the fact that he is “good with words”?
*There are, however, plenty of books that explore the finer points of English, rare and archaic words, unusual turns of phrase, etymology, etc., and these are all fantastic resources for writers. The best include Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage, The Chicago Manual of Style, and Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference.
Tough love: I might be willing to concede that any literate person with a story can write a book, but can any semiliterate person?
Language skill and a large vocabulary can be cultivated and refined by serious study alone; quick fixes for the lazy student are unlikely to improve anyone’s writing significantly.
If you require remedial grammar and spelling lessons, you are not probably not a writer. If years of reading have not taught you basic mechanics and punctuation, perhaps you just have a different calling in life. If you read half a dozen “Build Your Vocabulary” books and still bombed the Verbal section of the SAT, you might not be a wordsmith. And finally, if you don’t have a natural passion to research the hidden gems of your mother tongue (or to distinguish a contraction from a possessive pronoun), you are simply not enthusiastic enough about language to claim writing as your vocation.
Advice on Basic Narrative Techniques
Perhaps even more popular are the guides to narrative techniques. These provide would-be writers with definitions of mysterious concepts like “point of view,” “scene,” “dialogue,” and “denouement.”
When they go beyond the basics (which “how-to” guides rarely do), such resources can be quite useful. The most instructive are books about books: Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse and Figures III, Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, James Wood’s How Fiction Works, E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, and the like.
My beef with Writing Fiction for Dummies* and other “how-to” guides is that they treat writing as though it were a dieting fad, a get-rich-quick scheme, or a 12-step program. They are intended for dabblers and hacks with delirious dreams of making their fortunes by writing commercial fiction—people who want to be the next James Patterson. And, really, how many people who read dieting, get-rich-quick, or self-help books end up healthy, wealthy, or wise?
*The title says it all.
Tough love: If you haven’t learned from your favorite stories and novels the basic techniques of fiction writing, then you are probably not a writer. If you’re unable to improve your work independently by emulating your most beloved authors, then no amount of easy-breezy how-to advice is going to make you grow as a writer: you’re simply not engaging enough with your craft.
We wouldn’t suggest someone who’s unfamiliar with the hippocampus take up brain surgery after skimming a Complete Idiot’s Guide. Why then should we encourage someone who can’t identify dialogue to write a novel?
Writing Prompts
Writing prompts are a great tool for helping beginners to develop their voice and think beyond their own first impressions, attitudes, and experiences. But for those who identify themselves as serious writers, there should be little need for prompts.
Before you get pissed off, let me clarify this point: Just as an artist sketches before turning to the canvas to paint his masterpiece, so an author must ask herself questions about her characters, experiment with various plot structures, or draft several descriptions before committing to a final narrative strategy. But an author should be able to generate her own ideas from the first, rather than relying on agent Donald Maass’s tweets or an article in Writer‘s Digest.* It’s not like Picasso entered his Blue Period because it was suggested to him by a piece in Portraits Weekly.
*Writer’s Digest‘s motto is “Write Better – Get Published – Be Creative.” I sense something is out of order there…
Tough love: If you don’t already have a dozen ideas for stories, novels, and characters, you are probably not a writer.
Yes, prompts are useful for getting through writer’s block, but if you can’t generate those prompts yourself, based on your own original stories, you’ll never have enough material to fill a book.
How to Market Your Book (aka Mistaking Salesmanship for Literary Talent)
I’ve read dozens of books and Web sites that provide practical advice to writers on how to sell their work. Most of these are straightforward and realistic, and all of them stress that authors must devote a great deal of time to self-promotion.
So much of this advice is sound precisely because writing and marketing are distinct skills. My quibble with such resources is that nearly all of them assume that the book you’ve written is either the next South Beach Diet or a commercial novel à la Dan Brown, and they pander particularly to the aforementioned would-be writers (the ones who also need writing prompts and grammar assistance). To put it a tad more bluntly: nearly all of this marketing advice is geared toward hacks who write commercial schlock.
That the book market includes so many opportunists, shills, and jaded purveyors of literary dreck should come as no surprise.* Publishing is, after all, a business, and any market is always on the lookout for the flashy and vapid since these are an easier sell. It’s always been this way, and it always will be. Still, it’s unfortunate that salesmanship—rather than raw writing talent—should be the most highly regarded skill in the literary marketplace.
*So I am not misunderstood on this point, let me add that there are also a great many talented and dedicated agents and editors out there who look beyond the profit margin and produce excellent books.
Tough love for writers who believe the marketing mumbo jumbo a little too much: Marketability does not equal talent.
If your writing relies on formulas and gimmicks, you are probably a hack. If you pay no attention to your style, if you do not attend to every word you write, you are still a hack. If you are simply writing a film treatment in the guise of a novel, you are almost surely a goddamn hack.* You might follow all the rules of the game, and you might be very successful at it, but you will still be a hack.
*Soon I’ll post on how many commercial authors are actually writing film treatments instead of novels—to the detriment of the literary marketplace and the future of the novel.
I’m not arguing here that every book has to be “Literature” with a capital L. There’s plenty of room for all types of books, and there are many great “genre” authors out there—Daniel Silva, Douglas Hulick, Stephen King (well, every third book or so): people who write marketable fiction but who are also dedicated craftsmen. There are also a good number of “literary fiction” writers who regurgitate the modernist models of the past, in a voice honed by the platitudes of the MFA program they attended… But at a time when book sales are down, it is frustrating to see truly talented authors (again, not just the soi-disant literary types, but talented genre writers, too) get swept away in a tide of hacks who were only published because we, the reading public, do so often judge a book by its cover rather than its content.
Maybe all of my complaints are nonissues. The truly great writers out there probably ignore all of this nonsense anyway. After all, exile in Siberia didn’t deter Dostoyevsky, did it? So why should it deter you if you are a writer of genuine talent?
