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Writing and Publishing, Part 12:
Creating the content:
Additional Notes on Writing:
In this essay, I simply want to pick up some loose ends which
did not seem to fit anywhere else. Perhaps it is simply supplemental
material. I'll start with some suggestions for writing. These
are things which I found to be useful or interesting.
Let time help you:
If you have suffered rejection or if you are simply not satisfied
with your effort, set your manuscript aside for a year. Read about
the English language and dialect and dialogue. Then read Steinbeck,
everything he ever wrote. Read all of Mark Twain. Read Lawrence
Sanders. Read Edgar Allan Poe. Read Robert Frost to acquire a
sense of poetry and let that affect the way you write prose. Learn
about dialog, dialect, expression, prose, and style from these
very different writers. Then pick up your own manuscript and make
it great.
Intricacy:
Remember, intricacy is not art. My mother used to make beautifully
intricate, crocheted, lace doilies which she starched and pressed
and placed all over the house. They were to be admired for the
effort it took to make them, but one would not want to follow
the path of the threads to get the sense of the piece. You got
that sense of it by standing away from the work and seeing the
Gestalt. If you try to write the way my mother crocheted, no one
will be able to follow what you did and there will be no Gestalt
for them to see.
I remember one writer who was really hyped to the world by Oprah. She wrote so intricately that it pained me to try to read it. I tried to read just one of her books, but I had to quit about 1/3 of the way into it. Following her prose convolutions just hurt too much. There were eloquent words woven atop eloquent words, interleaved to create a sense of a maze within a kaleidoscope. Go back to Steinbeck and Hemingway to see how they wrote, directly and forcefully. Their writing has an eloquence of it's own, which needs no embroidery.
Success:
For every Steven King, there are thousands of writers who cannot
pay their rent through their writing. If you don't love to do
it, it may be best to think about another area of endeavor. You
may succeed in this business, but you will need enormous persistence.
Writing and publishing, after all, are no different than any other trade or profession. Success comes to those who are persistent and who work hard. This will occur in spite of the enormous amount of laziness, dishonesty, obstructionism, and duplicity in the publishing industry itself.
Breaking in:
Breaking into writing is like beating with boorish determination
on a brick wall. You keep beating and beating for months or years.
Then, finally, you see a brick come loose. Someone important is
going to look at your book. Then an agent wants to handle your
book and suddenly the whole wall is collapsing before your eyes.
You know you must force yourself to pick up and stack the bricks. You must carry on and do the routine chores but suddenly your energy is gone. You have no will left. All you want to do is sit down and cry. You realize that you are exhausted. It will have to wait a few days. I had a friend years ago who used to say, "My get up and go just got up and went." Time, we know, will heal this.
About Magazines and Rejection:
Most Magazines will automatically reject your first submission
even if it is excellent and right down their alley. They may even
reject your second and third submission. They want to see how
dependable you are. If you give up easy, they realize they cannot
count on you to produce on a regular schedule. It does not matter
how good your first submission is, it will most likely be rejected.
Your manuscript will be returned with a curt note. They will not
tell you why. They will say something inane like, "not appropriate."
They won't tell you if your work is good or bad. They won't tell
you to keep trying or to learn your trade.
Other notes:
A powerful human drama must be written with intellectual concepts
interlaced with emotional concepts in a coherent pattern to create
a believable whole. The well written drama is a sparkling, dewy,
rainbow necklace, hanging in space with no apparent support.
One problem with being a writer is that you will have a great
deal of competition.
Everyone thinks they know the English language, therefore many
people will be competing with you. Hardly anyone does know English.
There are, literally, thousands of people writing what they think
are good stories and sending them to publishers every day. Most
of them are very bad. This makes it tough for everyone; writers
and editors. Writers should really get an honest critique of their
work before dumping it on an editor. Our mothers just can't do
that objectively.
Writing a book is somewhat easier than writing a weekly column because the book usually has no deadline. It is very difficult to be creative on a schedule.
About the errors in my essays. I know there are errors. If you see them, please tell me. I'm writing on a very tight schedule and posting these with only my spouse's proofreading. I'm just putting them up in the spirit of sharing what I have learned with new writers and publishers. I don't insist that anyone read it. When I collect this work into a book and ask you to pay money for it, you can bet it's going to be proofread by professionals.
Finally, it's important to realize that Wylie, Hemingway, and Steinbeck wrote in an era when editors were actually looking for good writing rather than mass market commodities and twaddle. The publishing industry was about literature, and literary value controlled the decision process. One of my goals is to maintain my integrity and to have Wesoomi Publishing become a throwback to that golden era. However, I am not the bastion of all that is good and pure. That position belongs to the Divinity. I will not attempt to usurp it. My responsibility is to do my best to honor those concepts in my daily behavior. Hence what I will always try to do is what I believe is right and ethical. It is necessarily a long hard road.
After the holidays, I will begin talking about creating the
physical book. This is one of the things the publisher does. As
we go along, I may have to revisit this first part, "Creating
the Content," to fill in the gaps. In the meantime, if there
are things I should have covered and did not, it is up to you
to let me know.
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