101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Paul Riddell sent long another contribution to the Stop Writing debate (see his first, Slushpile Freakonomics, if you missed it), while completely undercutting his argument by continuing to write. Just imagine that guy at the end of the bar, throwing back shot after shot while opining to no-one in particular, “I’ll tell you another reason you should stop drinking,” and claiming that “Next one’s the last, I swear.”

For a group that prides itself on self-diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, wannabe writers sure have a problem with spotting patterns. Your work lunchtime conversations consist of nothing other than bitching about how everybody else is slacking off and you’re the only one dragging the company out of its inevitable slide to bankruptcy, and you wonder why you aren’t invited out to the bar after work. Your diet consists of nothing but McDonald’s Happy Meals and Doritos served in a 55-gallon drum, and you can’t figure out why your ever-expanding ass is generating its own event horizon. You can’t understand why that hot little number in Accounting won’t respond to your repeated requests for a date when you send them on official Star Wars valentines. Five jobs in two years, and every last one ended with you receiving a card signed by your co-workers reading “Don’t let the gates of Hell smack you on the butt on your way in.” The temps you’re overseeing quit within days of meeting you, and the few that remain talk about getting together to play a little game of “Let’s frag the lieutenant”. Your parents preface Christmas calls with “Let us know if you’re going to be in town, because we won’t be here then.” Your last three ex-boyfriends and your ex-husband promptly married someone else within six months of leaving you, and your ex-husband came very close at one point to leaving you for another man. Oh, and your short stories keep getting rejected by every venue that receives them, many times without the envelope being opened. Naw, it can’t have anything to do with you, can it?

“The reason why your stories, articles, poems, and novels aren’t selling is because you aren’t offering anything that anyone is willing to exchange money to acquire.”

Kids, it’s time to not only to use Occam’s Razor as a diagnostic tool, but to wave it over our heads, howling “Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!” at the tops of our lungs. The reason why you’ve been unable to exchange your dead-end job for the luxury of writing short stories and poetry on a full-time basis isn’t because of some horrible conspiracy intended to keep you down. Riddell’s Law doesn’t apply here, either: yes, a lot of editors demonstrate the Peter Principle every time they trip on the carpet pattern every day on their way into their offices, but those are only the ones who have their jobs because nobody else wants it. Yes, you’ll see writers who might be getting contracts due to a particular ability to schmooze editors or raw sex appeal, but they’re usually flavors-of-the-week that’ll be back to working at Starbucks before you can say “Kristine Kathryn Rusch” when their books bomb.

The reason why your stories, articles, poems, and novels aren’t selling is because you aren’t offering anything that anyone is willing to exchange money to acquire, and the odds are pretty good that you will continue down that sad path for the rest of your writing career. All six months of it.

“If ten percent of the people who flood a magazine with unsolicited submissions actually bothered to subscribe, the magazine industry wouldn’t be in such a mess.”

That’s not to say that there aren’t any editors or publishers who have it out for you, especially if you respond to every rejection with a 3000-word tirade written with green crayon on toilet paper and signed with a dead gopher. (When Harlan Ellison sent a dead gopher Fourth Class Mail to a publisher who was screwing him over, it was a foul but thoroughly understandable response to a situation that could have been resolved peaceably and equitably. When you do it because you read about his doing it, it just means that you get more familiarity with the words “restraining order”, “harassment suit” and “biorecovery fees”.) Ranting to editors about rejections is like arguing with your local Officer Barbrady when you get caught speeding in a school zone. The only thing you’ve achieved is to move yourself from the slush pile to the “Pull Out and Burn” file.

Now, I could give a lot of positive suggestions instead of continuing to belabor the point: I’m just as guilty of ignoring patterns as you. If you wanted to improve your and everyone else’s odds of getting published, you could decide to subscribe to the publications whose slushpile you defile: if ten percent of the people who flood a magazine with unsolicited submissions actually bothered to subscribe, the magazine industry wouldn’t be in such a mess, and you’d actually see what sort of stories the editor is accepting. (This implies that you’d actually read something in the publication other than the Submission Guidelines, but I’m building dream castles and measuring for drapes.) You could do more to get people to put down the TV remote and PlayStation and read. Volunteering at your local public library is a start, as is organizing reading programs at your local bookstores, but the best thing you can do is dispel some of the stereotypes of people who read for pleasure. (As it is, the worst sort of science fiction fans have so badly poisoned the well that getting caught by the boss with a complete collection of Anal Rampage or Chicks With Dicks is less of a career-killer than being caught with the latest Orson Scott Card or Gregory Benford.)

Or-you could break the pattern and stop writing. Right now. Or do you like getting the same response to the same action and getting upset because you’re expecting a different outcome?