101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Ordinarily I’d save this for the recently established tradition of Weekend Updates, but this is just too good to make you wait for.

Rejecter, literary agent’s assistant, slushpile marauder and 101 Reasons interviewee, told an aspiring POD author to stop writing.

Not “slow down”, not “revise and resubmit”, not “not for us”. Stop writing.

‘Twas a beautiful thing, to see those words together on the blog of a publishing professional.

Hopefully this is not an anomaly, not simply the frayed nerves of someone pushed a POD too far. I see this as a new backlash, a trend towards blunt honesty, the emergence of the Stop Writing movement.

(The admonition came as a result of a POD author appearing in the comments of another post, exhorting that traditional publishing was an “old nag” and that in the new world order, “there’s going to be no pre-press filters, only post-publishing, so get used to it”, and then posted a link to his PDF, which in this case stand for “Pile of Dog Faeces”. Rejecter, and many other commenters, examined the finished product minutely, and pronounced it shit. Not shitty, but just plain shit, incomprehensibly awful navel-gazing prose poetry. Said author proceeded to chew through seventeen flavours of huffy, while comparing himself to Joyce, TS Eliot and e.e. cummings. Sound familiar?)