On Abject Failure

While I harbor no illusions about the profitability of writing professionally (as in, writing enough to sustain myself financially: I think it highly improbable, at best, and utterly impossible, at worst), I can think of a couple of book-length endeavours of mine which, provided I had a good editor, adequate promotion/publicity, and proper management, could potentially do well; while I’d like to think they could do great, all it takes is a quick glance at what the majority of people consume these days for entertainment and I involuntarily begin regurgitating mangled Mencken quotes (such as how no one ever lost money underestimating the taste or intelligence of the American public), and how well some things do which are utter trash, while truly literature-quality gems languish in obscurity, and by this point, any vestigial hope of having anything I write become popular is flensed from my thoughts like blubber from a whale. A whale which is still alive, and writhing in agonies the likes of which would make Torquemada proud (at least if the whales were heretics, which from his point of view, they undoubtedly would be considered so).

Anyone reading the above will be -- at best -- rendered dubious of my claim, given the delightfully Byzantine sentence structure I seem inclined to favour, so lest there be folly, I’d like to state, once again, I have an innate tendency to overwrite; in addition, I often tend to write incredibly twisted sentences - a direct symptom of my own oftentimes hyper-abstract thought processes.

So...I’m bright, and have complex thoughts, and can get them down on the page. Big whoop. If the majority of people can’t easily grasp what I’m saying, or my style of writing is boring/too convoluted, well...as a writer, that’s a sure route to the bottom of the Thames, now, isn’t it...?

There’s a reason most journalism strives for such a disgracefully mediocre grade level (per, say, the Flesch-Kincaid, for example); it’s the same reason why Hemingway will, most likely, always eclipse John Updike or Vladimir Nabokov in the halls of Great Writers [tm], as the former wrote in a way which even a fourth or fifth-grade student can easily understand.

Given that the fundamental point of language is communication, I’m not arguing against writing so that one’s words can be understood by all; I mean, that’s great, and grants one a wider potential audience, at the very least.

And this is not to say that one absolutely must (to be an oft-read author) hobble oneself for the lowest common denominator, either; there is a middle ground, of course, and I’m aware of that.

While I over-write, digress, meander and wander, these are all things which can be addressed in one or more revisions of my own words [N.B.: nothing here on this blog is edited, or even proofed, to be honest, as I began it as an experiment in just simply writing stuff up free-form, without any thought to making it ‘acceptable’, much less ‘perfect’, which means it’s straight from my brain onto the page – ehr, well, the screen, I suppose...And, as always I digress yet again...]. Of course, fast-forward past a half-dozen revisions, and throw in a good editor, and I can actually write some stuff which is actually damned good.

Brevity being the soul of wit, I learned early on the easiest way for me to write was just to spill it all out onto the page, and then, if I wanted what I’d written to be *any good*, I’d promptly start to cut, cut, cut (hence my reference to six+ revisions). For me, writing is easy (I type slightly slower than I talk, and MUCH slower than I think), so blasting out kiloword after kiloword isn’t the issue: tightening it all up, bringing it together, ‘sanding off the suck’ (to purloin a phrase) -- now THAT is where the time goes, and that is what takes up the most CPU time for me, mentally.

As those who know me in real life are aware, it takes me less time to write a longer email/text/letter than it does a *short* one, for the reasons stated above. I generally don’t give the TL;DR nature of what I write much thought, given how easy it is to read: I mean, I haven’t timed myself lately, though I can say my optical information ingest rate hasn’t diminished significantly since primary school, which means I can still devour ~200 pages of a mass-market paperback in an hour (I can say this because I recently read three books which I enjoyed so greatly I did everything I could to slug myself: I kept my reading as slow and even as possible, savouring each word as if it were a drop of water and I were in a desert dying of thirst, and I *still* finished off the second in a few hours, and the third in under two). I suppose to be more rigorously scientific about this, I ought to take something I’ve never read before which is of a known word/character count and time myself, though honestly, I’ve better things to do with my time.

Back on-point (at least marginally), I know I am capable of writing in a way which is far better than that which is displayed here; it simply takes me a lot more work, which is why I reserve that effort for my actual fiction writings and essays: that is, my ‘serious’ writings, as opposed to what I’m spewing out here on the Internet without an actual care in the world as to who reads it or what they think of it.

While anecdotal, as a token proof of what I’m saying, I’ll say this much:

When I first began to cast about for beta-readers for the book I’m currently revising, I spoke with my friends, asking if they knew of anyone who’d be interested in reading what I’d written, and who, ideally, wouldn’t know me at all, and would know little to nothing about me.

Of course, I value my friend’s feedback, as well; I am also acutely aware they are the worst possible fill-ins for the beta-reader demographic, due to friend bias (hence my interest in finding others who were at least a degree removed if not more).

Naturally, I invited some of my closest friends to read what I’d written as well, and invited feedback there as well (while qualifying it as what it was, of course).

While I’ve noticed some patterns emerge, one of the early comments (from more than one person, which is why I’m giving it more credence than the opinion/feedback of any single individual) was the difference between what I’d written and what was expected. I’m aware I can come off sounding like an encyclopaedia; I’ve got a head full of stuff, and most of it is on speed-dial, so for me to recall information about anything I’ve read or done is generally easy, and in a conversation, if someone asks me about something even outside my field (such as "Why do scorpion’s exoskeletons fluoresce under UV?" Answer: Methylcoumarin -- IIRC, and no, I didn’t Google that or look it up elsewhere) I can usually answer it. This is not to say I’m all-knowing, as there are numerous and entire fields of which I have little to no knowledge of, of course, however, I can claim a certain level of erudition and experience in a reasonably broad number of subjects.

Pardon the long prologue, though it was kinda necessary to illustrate the point: people were surprised that I’d written something which didn’t come across as hyper-knowledgy and where the characters didn’t all sound like miniature versions of me :D

...Which is to say, I *am* able to write in a way which is comprehensible to the majority of people, I am able to write credible (even good) dialogue with different characters having realistically different voices, the whole nine; of that, I am confident.

So why I am dubious as to the possibility of success for myself as a writer.


It isn’t because I’m incapable of writing;

It isn’t because of a dearth of ideas on my part;

It isn’t because I don’t have anything to say;


So what then? Let’s pretend, for the sake of charitable interpretation, that of the few books I’m sitting on, one of them is a knock-it-out-of-the-park doozy of a blockbuster; what would stop it from succeeding?

Me.

That is, I suspect, the sad truth of it. There’s no one to blame but myself: I should have stuck with writing back in the days when I was snail-mailing in submissions to magazines, making sure to include an appropriately sized SASE, formatting printed copies out precisely per each editor’s guidelines, etcetera.

While the large publishers take an inordinate cut of whatever one’s work published via them makes, they also -- ideally, at least -- take care of the minutiae which is so vital to the success of a book: things like publicity (without which, the book dies); having professional editors (without which, the work suffers or risks being sub-par); having professional cover-designers (people *do* judge books by their covers -- don't think for a moment they do *not*), and the list goes on.

Simply put, I am talentless when it comes to graphics/visual art; I am in dire need of a good editor (the length of the words here alone should be ample proof of that) and last but most CERTAINLY not least: while I am many things, a salesman is NOT one of them.

I’ve never been in the position of being a salesman in my life. Were I to be one, I’d be awful at it.

"Then how do you make it through a job interview?" I think is the most obvious first question. "One has to be a salesman then: you’re selling *yourself*."

This is true, of course, and, in the course of my lifetime, there aren’t a lot of jobs I’ve interviewed for which I haven’t got; there are a few, of course, but those are actually in the minority, which means, if I make it to an interview, I *generally* get hired. But this is due less to me being a salesman than simply being competent, and being myself. If one has skills, is honest about them, the rest generally takes care of itself. At least in my experience.

Of course, it could easily be argued that I am, at least subconsciously, selling myself, and I’m willing to concede that possibility.

Even if that were the case, though, my issue is most easily summed up thusly: I just simply can’t generate even the smallest amount of excitement at the thought of enduring the required amount of shameless self-promotion which is likely necessary to popularize one’s book in this day and age (a time when SFAs are no longer a joke, and the large publishers are crumbling). I can’t see myself endlessly posting about What I’ve Written on Facebook & Twitter; I can’t imagine playing digital door-to-door salesman amongst friends/acquaintances/unknowns; I *can* see few other ways to render myself an annoyance to the world at large, in fact, than by engaging in just that sort of thing.

Yet without promotion, publicity, even the most promising works of art languish, remain unseen, unread. Enough publicity, and even the most blighted bit of trash can bring in millions of people, curious, if nothing else, to see what all the fuss is about. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, I’ve seen clumsy, artless turds become bestsellers and generate millions of dollars for their authors, though I’m only rarely aware of truly great works receiving the recognition they deserve without a phenomenal amount of effort on the part of not merely the author, but an entire cadre of people dedicated to that end.

Even thinking about the above is discouraging (to say nothing of seeing it). So, much like Rimbaud, I’ve preferred to simply withdraw: I have written, am writing, will continue to write, and remained entirely uninterested in publication...Until it was too late :)

If I cannot serve as a good example, perhaps I can, at the very least, serve as a cautionary tale.

Don’t fall into the same despair-filled mindset as Your Humble Narrator ;D


~J