101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Back in the days of Web 1.0, the now long-dead humor site Suck.com [Lying in state -- Ed.] used to drop a bon mot that should be tattooed on the inside of the eyelids of every wannabe writer ever to pick up a copy of Writer’s Digest. This little missive, “Anyone can produce shit, but only a farmer can turn it into a meal,” should be the slogan of the Loco composting site in Colorado. This is because, besides composting used tissues, office paper, and other tree byproducts, one of the main ingredients in Caca Loco’s mix of high-carbon and high-nitrogen components is the unwanted book.

Booksellers want to have it both ways: they want to be able to continue to order books that simply don’t have a market and dump them like a spurned boyfriend without any responsibility or concern.

Nobody involved in publishing wants to talk about the ultimate fate of unread and unwanted books. Our popular portrayals of old books are of volumes allowed to rot and thereby preventing future generations from accessing their knowledge, stated as A Bad Thing. The filthiest profanity one can use to describe a novel is as a “potboiler”, suggesting that its best use is to cook dinner, and “bookburner” or “bookburning” are two words quick on the tongue of every proprietor of a Frumpy Fiftysomething’s Used Books and Quiet Desperation Emporium franchise on the planet. Even with the ever-increasing trend of bookstores becoming outlets for remaindered books, the secret hope is that these books will be discovered instead of consigned to the unknown Mictlan that draws in bestseller and slashfic alike.

However, let’s be realistic here. Even with the shell game that is publishing, where bookstores overorder based on unrealistic sales projections from publishers and return those books for credit for more unsellable gibberish, the excess has to go somewhere. Indie bookstore owners regularly cry about how Borders and Barnes & Noble order gigantic quantities of books and then promptly return them for credit, thereby killing off multitudes of small publishers, but when those publishers suggest that books should be nonreturnable, they scream bloody murder. Even though the issue with nonreturnable product hasn’t exactly killed off the direct-market comics industry, which depends upon its proprietors being sane and rational enough to know their market, booksellers want to have it both ways: they want to be able to continue to order books that simply don’t have a market and dump them like a spurned boyfriend without any responsibility or concern. This doesn’t keep them from crying over the fate of those unwanted books when they’re scheduled to be pulped or destroyed: like most Crazy Cat Ladies, they want to save and protect them all, even the diseased and dying ones collecting in piles on the garage.

If more writers saw their best efforts getting dumped into a pit, and then used to grow roses and walnut trees, they might think a bit harder about whether the world really needs another Dune prequel.

The other options for proper disposal don’t actually solve anything. Remember when Print on Demand was supposed to save publishing? Well, it’s saved big publishers from taking the works of mediocre talents, but the self-published aren’t happy unless they can see their books in a real live bookstore. (Much like the australopithecines who own a music CD and then insist that the local radio stations play the hit single from that very CD over and over, it has nothing to do with anyone actually reading the book, but a primate urge to outshout the naysayers. There’s really not that much of a difference between ordering a copy of your self-published book from the local bookstore and then refusing to pick it up as there is in going out in public in your very own Star Trek uniform after Halloween.) Remember how E-books were going to change publishing as well? Same situation: besides “E-book” becoming the publishing equivalent of “direct to video”, writers, reviewers, and readers don’t take E-books seriously unless they’re also available in dead-tree format.

(I fully expect to get a lot of grief from technoweenies who want to argue that E-books are a viable literary form, mostly because they just paid $500 for a device that allows them to read Star Wars novels at work. I also like to point out that the vast majority of available E-books that aren’t pirated are those given away because their authors acknowledge their value. The fact that Cory Doctorow gives away his novels in E-book format in order to encourage sales of dead-tree copies confirms the absolute value of the E-book to anyone other than to Cat Piss Men who want to cast aside the flesh and join the Singularity because they couldn’t get laid in Tijuana with wads of $100 bills in their jockstraps.)

Again, all of these “alternatives” don’t really address the denial about the final fate of books. Just as how most Americans know vaguely that the T-bone steak they just gnawed to pieces came from a cow but have no idea how it got from cow to dinner plate, both wannabe and established writers cry about books being sold or thrown out from bookstores and libraries without understanding that both have only a limited space for volumes in the first place, and making room for books that readers might want to read means throwing out something that readers don’t. Having all of the library sales in the world still means that some books simply aren’t going to find homes, and what option is left other than using the unwanted books as fuel and then suffering the criticism of being a bookburner?

With these issues, composting is the best option. Instead of consigning those books to a landfill, where they could remain preserved for future palaeontologists to base theories on Homo sapiens terra upon analysis of Robert Jordan and Sidney Sheldon novels, they’ll get broken down and used for future growth. Composting means that Rush Limbaugh’s See, I Told You So and Heather Flores’s Food Not Lawns are on equal ground for end value as well as readability and sanity. Best of all, if more writers saw their best efforts getting dumped into a pit, soaked with high-nitrogen effluvia, cooked for three months, and then used to grow roses and walnut trees, they might think a bit harder about whether the world really needs another Dune prequel.

Book composting: the collector’s bane, the bookstore’s enemy, society’s secret friend. And those with issues on how this is “wasting” books … have you considered stopping writing, thereby saving a few more Douglas firs intended for the paper mills and eliminating the middleman?

– When Paul Riddell quit writing to focus on horticulture five years ago, he had no idea that he’d continue shoveling crap. In this case, though, at least he’s getting something of beauty from the effort. Take a look at examples at The Texas Triffid Ranch.