Cold hard facts for lazy writers
I added the Miss Snark blog to my "best" list over there on the sidebar a couple weeks ago, but let me stress: if you are a writer who wants, one day, to have a book published, you should be reading this blog every single day. The advice she gives is invaluable. It is short on false encouragement and long on realistic appraisals of the publishing industry and why your book hasn't been published yet and probably never will be.
A writing conference is just a walking slush pile. 75% of the work there isn't publishable and probably won't be. Ever. Not even with all the seminars, classes and pitch meetings. That's just a cold hard fact.
There's a big difference between her attitude, by the way, and that of author Lynn Freed, whose essay "Doing Time" lambasted creative writing programs and students (and which I satirized in a fictional blog). Freed's attitude was snobbish, elitist, bitter and frankly spiteful, while Miss Snark (despite her pseudonym) is simply realistic. She calls people fools when they come up with a really stupid idea, not from a sense of superiority as Freed did, but because she's in the trenches every day trying to separate the good stuff from the crap.
That's what we need more of -- not just in the publishing business but in modern culture in general -- more crap detection, without the hauteur.
1 comment:
Speaking of Lynn Freed, there's more evidence for your theory behind her odd attitudes to teaching (that's she's inherently a bottom, stuck in a top role and wondering why her non-bottomy students don't treat her the way she'd treat an authority figure. A review of her new book in the Sunday NY Times points out that Freed had a "histrionic" mother who was "often cruel" in her criticism, as were her older sisters. "'Dreadful!' someone would shout, 'Miles off!' my mother would add...Fail, and you died on the spot." Your x-ray vision into the very nature of her sould is reaffirmed.
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