![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "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?
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This is now pissing me off. I looked to Paul as my shining hope that it was possible to retire from being a writer. One day I’m going to stop selling enough to live on, and my intense dread is that I’ll keep writing and calling myself a writer, examples of which horrible fate abound mightily. Paul was my shining hope that I could stop.
If he continues in this folly I shall be hot-footing my way to Texas with a Stout Stick, there to render bloody execution on the knave for dashing my hopes.
When I taught sailing at the University of Washington, there were three types of students in the class: those who got it and really made it a pleasure to teach; those who didn’t necessarily get it but listened and learned enough not to kill others due to incompetence; and those who were hopelessly clueless, who were either biologically unable or willfully stupid enough not to listen and apply the lessons learned.
The last group of studens showed a remarkable ability to consistently ignore the lessons learned by humanity over four thousand years of experience with sailing vessels that were now being passed along to them. They insisted on doing things their way, nearly always against my advice. They tried my patience, and even gently worded warnings along the lines of, “Okay, let’s try it your way and see what happens” didn’t work. Frustration at the action / reaction combination never stopped them; they kept doing it their way, expecting a different result. It never occurred to them to try it the way they were being taught.
The distribution of students into those categories followed a standard bell curve. But it was the lower group that caused the lion’s share of problems on the water and persisted in doing things their way despite exhortations not to.
Sadly, I know from experience that these students are the same ones who went out bragging they were “sailors” and were statistically probable to cause naval disaster on a boat, either their own or someone else’s.
In the writing world, and it seems most common in genre (e.g. sf / fantasy) writing, there are an inordinate number of soi-disant writers who insist on doing it their way. If I had to guess, it’s due to the typical sf / fantasy reader considering him or herself of vastly superior intelligence and thus inherently knowing they can produce profound works of art, despite a steady diet of Star Trek reruns and Penthouse letters to the editor.
It’s that lower distribution of writers I’d like to see discouraged from ever submitting works to editors. The middle distribution contains people who may not know how to produce solid writing, but are willing to learn, and some will go on to do quite well. But the lower distribution is safelhy locked inside its Fortress of Ignorance, and only a bunker-buster bomb of enlightenment can crack through. My hope is at least one of those “writers” reconsiders. After all, my doctor says bad writing makes me homicidal, and we don’t want that now, do we?
Heck, this isn’t writing…unless you’re sending me that million-dollar advance right now…
*aHEM* I’m waiting, and don’t give me that “I’m attaching the check with my e-mail” trick. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me nine times, give me a job at Science Fiction Eye.
have you read the exceprts from the latest card novel? I’m an SF reader of 30 years experiecne, and if I catch you reading it I will personally shove a pineapple up your ass and pull the trigger.
Orson Ccott Card should be asked to stop writing with a pair of bricks.
Lee, back some fifteen years ago, Misha Nogha of Science Fiction Eye used to do some interesting “special reviews”. In her case, she started by taking a copy of Card’s Xenocide and reviewing how well it came apart when tickled with a chainsaw. No review on the book itself: just a review of the chopping. That review demonstrated the only reason I’d ever have a Card novel in my possession: as a fire starter whilst camping.
Oh, and Andrew? Don’t worry. This was just a temporary relapse, set off by being unable to garden. Considering how our current weather in Dallas this close to Christmas is comparable to our normal weather in March, though, that dead spot in the calendar may be filled before Groundhog’s Day. I’m not going back to writing for pay, unless someone gives me a surefire payment-in-advance contract for a gardening book, and even then…
Paul, I’ve sent the million dollars as a wire transfer, as requested. It’s not my fault if it takes 3-4 months to ship that amount of wire over the Pacific. Besides, as per the going rate, you owe me another 49,998 original articles.
Sean, don’t make an offer like that which you won’t be able to keep. The last time I took someone up on that sort of deal, I found myself with an FBI record for allegedly selling government secrets to the Daleks. (And yes, that’s a true story.)
a) I don’t think a contract negotiated in the comments section of a blog is legally binding.
b) I think you’ve just blown the last shreds of your credibility.
Mike– cracking up re: sailing. I taught sailing for several summers and I know well this third group of which you speak!
Here’s a question, though… shouldn’t talented writers who are submitting want the lower group on the bell curve to keep submitting their crap because it makes them look better?
Or wait. We should all just give up. Right. I forgot. (This is my first time commenting here. I continue to be an aspiring writer– sorry– but this blog appeals to my sadistic elitist nature.)
Sadly, Sarah, the crap writers don’t make the good ones look better; they make it harder for the good ones to get their stuff out to a potentially adoring public. Those wannabes are the reason why so many potentially good editors give up after being stuck sloshing through the slush pile for months or years. They’re the ones that take time out of editors’ schedules by calling and writing every few minutes with demands of “Have you read my story yet?” They’re the ones who fill bad editors full of hubris by kissing their asses with the expectation of a reward for the repeated rim jobs. (You’ll note the number of magazine editors, particularly in science fiction, who fell off the face of the world after they quit/were fired, because their lifelong chums no longer have any reason to put up with them.) They’re the ones who demand that editors make drastic changes “to even the playing field” but who refuse to buy what’s being offered. They’re the literary equivalent of tapeworms: they contribute nothing, they drain the resources of their host, and they reproduce via infecting new hosts through contact with feces.
Sean:
Credibility? From me? Why, you flatter me. I know that I don’t have any credibility, which is why I stopped writing. (And yes, I keep writing for you, but I look at it this way. Better to be on methadone, with the promise of getting off the shit entirely, than to go back to shooting black tar heroin into my eyeballs, right?)
“I keep writing for you”
That sounds so … sexy.
Sarah, bad writers are just a tax on the system. The 5% of writers whose work is passable, and could be publishable with encouragement and constructive criticism, aren’t getting it because of the time wasted on the 95% of writers who are beyond help.
Lee, back some fifteen years ago, Misha Nogha of Science Fiction Eye used to do some interesting “special reviews”. In her case, she started by taking a copy of Card’s Xenocide and reviewing how well it came apart when tickled with a chainsaw.
A couple of years ago, local SF fan Grant Watson recorded, on video, the tensile strengths of several SF novels based on how long it took him to kick them apart.
A William Shatner novel won, proving once andd for all that shit is harder to destroy than genius.
Sarah:
I forgot that there’s a word for the lower tier of sailing students that insist on doing things their own way:
Powerboaters.