101 Reasons to Stop Writing

It was one year ago, yesterday, that the (still) most famous of literary agent bloggers decided to hang up her stilettos and retire, ending a three-year run of advice, rebuke, clarification and consternation. (Granted, in the first year she only made a couple of posts, but the last two years were much more fruitful.)

At the time, I posted a farewell message, which had the distinction of being one of the last outgoing links on her blog, before the lights went out and the dynamically-generated archives were cached for the last time. The sentiments I expressed are still true.

Patricia Wood’s blog yesterday hosted a virtual get-together of old Snarklings, which was virtually attended by Miss Snark herself, in the comments.

While the “Snarkives” are still of immeasurable value, both to unpublished writers looking to understand the submission process, and to social researchers looking for a corpus of whiny protestations from hapless rubes convinced that the process will magically alter itself to accommodate them, Miss Snark’s voluminous advice can essentially be reduced to two simple principles:

• Follow the damn directions
• Don’t be a nitwit

It was the general inability of the unpublished writers of the world to understand and apply these principles that drove most of the content on Miss Snark’s blog, and ultimately led to its abrupt conclusion.

With the glorious advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that Miss Snark fell victim to what should be known as Blogger’s Ennui — the tipping point where the demands of maintaining a blog outweigh the pleasure of it. In Miss Snark’s case, though, she was essentially a victim of her audience, and the narrowness of her topic. There are only so many issues relating to queries and submissions that can be discussed in general terms, and as her audience grew, so did the number of nitwits (a proportional constant in any population) — who would ask either the same questions again, demonstrating their inability to grasp the simple concept of search, or ask essentially the same questions frustratingly modulated from the original by some absurdly trivial point of contention.

It takes a lot to crush the spirit of someone who purposefully armors themselves with sarcasm, but the hapless rubes managed it. I imagine that by the end, her gmail account must have become a slushpile in itself, yet another accumulation of inane and unremarkable queries to sift through looking for a question worth answering — for no pay, no commission, no hope of reward other than the dwindling, and eventually non-existent fun of it.

It’s fitting (though entirely coincidental) that the anniversary of her blog’s closure falls in International Slushpile Awareness Month. If the divine Miss S had managed to hang on until the comforting catharsis of International Slushpile Bonfire Day (May 31st), she might still be blogging.

Things I Missed Last Week

• Nathan Bransford ran a contest called the Largely Indispensable First Paragraph Challenge. Like the Crapometer contests Miss Snark used to run before she retired (surprise!), he was deluged with entries. Next week, I’m running a Take A Crap On My Front Lawn competition, and I can only hope I get the same standard of entries.

Striking Writers: Less Funny Than You’d Think

If you’ve heard nothing about the Writer’s Guild strike in Hollywood, that means two things: you’re not a TV writer, and you never will be. As of now, the strike is on, and its most immediate, most pernicious effect is that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are on hiatus. (You American bastards won’t appreciate this, but these two shows debuted on Australian pay TV this year.)

Last time this happened, back in 1988 (I was in high school; some of you probably weren’t born), the strike lasted six months, but the industry took longer to recover. Stephen J. Cannell, who was King of the Cop Show back then, reckoned he could get new shows on the air in one month: one week to write, one to prep, one to shoot and one to edit. Most shows couldn’t ramp up that quickly, so it was months before TV schedules went back to whatever normal was at that time. Back then, what we got was repeats. This time around, there are apparently a lot of reality shows being rushed into production. No writers, no actors, just Joe Public and a camera crew. Who knows, maybe Book Millionaire will be greenlit.

WritersWrite.com has some background and commentary on the week leading up to the strike. Dead Things on Sticks has a terrific article on the issues driving the strike, and the situation for TV writers in Canada (who are like serfs, compared to their American counterparts).

News to Know, to Keep Up with the Conversation

• The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media, the essential handbook to climbing to the next rung in your shitty career at the periphery of the entertainment biz, sold less than 250 copies in its first month, according to Mixed Media @ Portfolio. Yeah, but those select few are going to ride the advice like a meteorite to the top of their game, and start a group on FaceBook that’ll be the 21st Century equivalent of the Freemasons. The book fell victim to the (in hindsight) classic website-to-book quandary: if you don’t read Gawker, why would you buy it, and if you read Gawker, why would you buy it? (Via Bloggers Blog.)
• The PFD literary agency debacle continues (see previous coverage), with the parent company firing several agents who had already resigned.

Harry Potter: Still More Famous Than You

• J.K. Rowling is suing the publisher of a forthcoming unofficial Harry Potter encyclopedia, which is based on the collected information at a fan website Rowling has previously endorsed. The usual quagmire of grassroots fanbase support vs copyright infringement gets played out, again. Some people have a hard time understanding that the goodwill, appreciation, support and patience that some authors have for their fans ends when someone tries to make a buck off it. Fairly simple rule. (Via Ron Hogan of GalleyCat, who’s firmly in the Give the Fanboys a Chance camp.)
• Edward Rothstein argues in the New York Times that Dumbledore doesn’t have to be gay. He claims that in the context of the novels, the character’s sexuality doesn’t matter, and cites the tradition of fantasy wizards who are (in his opinion) "above" sexuality — but the intensity of his argument comes across as, well, homophobic. Two great excerpts:
  

  Ms. Rowling quite consciously makes Dumbledore a flawed, more human wizard than these models, but now goes too far. There is something alien about the idea of a mature Dumbledore being called gay or, for that matter, being in love at all. He may have his earthly difficulties and desires, but in most ways he remains the genre wizard, superior to the world around him.

  It’s as if Rothstein thinks that Rowling is saying that Gandalf must be gay too. And the best:
  

  It is possible that Ms. Rowling may be mistaken about her own character.

  That has to be one of the most ridiculous sentences in the history of literary criticism. John Scalzi has a more detailed critique of Rothstein’s point of view, even quoting Neil Gaiman, if you’re not inclined to believe me.

From the Blogosphere

• Big Bad Book Blog has a denial-friendly article on how and why books get remaindered, for people too chickenshit to face the truth.
• The Rejecter talks up the job ladder at a literary agency, perhaps the only employer in this crazy thing we call the entertainment industry where the word "job" isn’t preceded by hand- or rim-.
• Write Stuff argues that people are still scared by the bad words. The words in question are not mentioned, so you have to guess exactly which bad words they mean, which is more fun than it ought to be (Hint: F, and C). Begs the question: if you assume that people know which bad words you’re talking about, why avoid saying them?
• Tod Goldberg writes an open letter to someone who wants literature turned back to 1953.
• John Rickards says, effectively, that the vast majority of crime writers should "quit writing and get another job."
• Reading Under the Covers has a series of book publicity horror stories. My faves are #3, #4, and #6 (Train Wreck!).

Problems You Will Never Have

• Jessica Faust explains what it’s like for an agent, waiting to hear back from an author after offering representation.
• Jonathan Lyons explains what actually happens in a book auction. Sadly, there’s no gavel, no auctioneer speaking three times as fast as the human ear can process, and no easy way for the author to pose as an editor and bid up the price.

You Will Never Be This Good

• Harper Lee receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her only novel is one of the bestselling books of all time. You’re not even sure the agents read your book before they rejected it.

Stop Writing if You Need This Advice

• The Rejecter explains that a partial request doesn’t mean they like you, they just don’t hate you. Yet.
• Janet Reid explains why "not right for me" is the standard rejection boilerplate:
  

  Once I’ve decided something isn’t for me, and I’m not going to ask for other material, every second I spend composing a nice letter with three nice things to couch the bad news is a half hour I could have spent reading the next thing in line.

  Seriously, if you needed this explained to you, stop writing.

There are still nearly 900 items from last week in my feed reader, but it’s now Saturday, and enough is enough. This week’s Update will also be late.

A year ago Monday, I started writing about reasons to stop writing. For those of you who don’t know the story behind this site (and that means all of you), I thought I’d mark this anniversary by making up a story that is similar enough to sound plausible.

101 Reasons started, essentially, as a way to have a conversation about writing with my good friend Lee Battersby, who lives on the other side of the Great Southern Continent, and is thus unavailable for the kind of meandering, caffeine- or beer-fueled conversations writers are prone to share. We’ve been friends half our lives now, and we share a marvellous synchronicity: our IQ’s and our final high school scores (out of 500) are within a point of each other’s, and somehow we’ve both been lucky enough to meet and marry a fabulous woman (each!), and have a large family. There are more similarities, but a full list would just be creepy.

However, despite meeting in a University writing class, our writing careers are wildly divergent. Studiously adhering to Heinlein’s Three Rules of Writing, Lee has become a successful writer on the Australian SF short fiction scene, with over 50 published stories and a short story collection to his credit, whereas I have barely bothered to finish a story, let alone submit one. He has taught at Clarion South, helping to train a new crop of Australia’s most talented SF writers, whereas I have taken it upon myself to try to reduce the world’s writing output.

I have described Lee as the inspiration for 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. There are two ways to take that, and I mean both of them.

When I wrote the introduction to 101 Reasons, just one year ago, the publishing industry and my life were quite different. Back in October 2006:

• We only assumed there was a link between really bad gore-porn horror fiction and mass murder. It hadn’t been proven.
• The SFWA had only demonstrated its incomprehensible ineptitude to its own members, not to writers everywhere, and the Internet at large.
• Kurt Vonnegut was one of the greatest writers alive.
• I entertained the faint hope that Dan Brown would be punished for plagiarising borrowing the plot of The Da Vinci Code from Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
• No-one at a major publishing house thought a “wiki novel” was a good idea.
• OJ Simpson was still looking for the real killers.
• Miss Snark was balancing professional optimism, personal cynicism and an obsessive dedication to her readers.
• Teenagers the world over hadn’t yet faced the sad realisation that they were too old to be excited about the last Harry Potter novel.
• I didn’t know who the hell Paul Riddell was.
• And I believed people when they said that four children wasn’t all that different to three.

It’s been an amazing year. I’ve learned that there are almost as many reasons to stop writing as there are bad writers who need to. When I began I had no idea if I could come up with one hundred and one reasons to stop writing, but now I wonder if I can restrict myself.

I’d like to thank the growing circle of publishing industry bloggers, who make my job easier by opening their office doors and letting us see just how insane the business really is. Credit is also due to the exploding field of blogging writers, both the professionals who let us see the realities of being a writer, and the (vastly more numerous) unpublished writers, whose arrogance, ignorance, denial and pseudo-profundity is an inexhaustible stream of good material for me.

A big thanks to everyone who’s linked here, or posted a comment. It’s your belief that you “get it” that provides the most amusement.

A tip of the hat to the inimitable Paul Riddell, who could run this blog by himself, if he’d thought of it first. He brings an unique combination of experience, philosophy, and a deep, world-weary resentment to his contributions that I have so far been unable to fake.

I love Ms Reasons. You would too, but she’s mine.

Here’s to another year (at least) of making the whiners cry. I’ll get to you eventually.

101 Reasons finally has a search box, in the sidebar.

Now you can find out how many times I’ve lambasted James Patterson or Dan Brown, read all the Miss Snark advice I linked to, revisit Paul Riddell’s posts about Cat Piss Men, or do what everyone else does on the Internet and search for porn.

The Weekend Updates are making a comeback, after a few lineup changes. Soon people will be talking about how they’re not as good as the old Weekend Updates, then they’ll take another long break, followed by a reunion tour. Along the way one Weekend Update will launch a solo blog with a more serious, experimental style, which GalleyCat will call “pretentious and dull”, one of the Weekend Updates will die in a tragic revision accident, another will be caught sleeping with a Weekend Update from another site. Yes, I know it’s five days late. If you remember the old Weekend Updates, you know this is pretty good for me.

I get to open this installment with the best quote I have read this year:

Stephen Page, the head of Faber & Faber, tells me that they closed their fiction ’slush pile’ (of unsolicited manuscripts, the only agent-free route to a publishing deal) a few years back.

‘We were getting 6,000 a year which we had a work-experience girl reading a page of once every so often. We had only discovered two books on the slush pile in the previous however many years. It was just unfortunate that one of those was Lord of the Rings so we felt a certain obligation to keep looking.’

‘It’s carnage …’ Inside the genteel world of books Carole Cadwalladr, Sunday Observer, Oct. 14 2007

The article discusses the Frankfurt Book Fair, the annual publishing industry meat-market, attended by 100,000, 180,000 or 300,000 people, depending on who makes up the statistic. It (the article, and apparently the fair) focuses mainly on the fallout and rumour-mongering following the disintegration of powerhouse literary agency PFD (after a change of ownership and leadership, the entire staff resigned, leaving a huge roster of writers represented by an agency with no agents). Of course the article degenerates into another “sucks to be a writer” whinefest. The journalist tries to interview agents before the fair, but the only agent who responds is already her agent. That’s the industry, right there.

For me, though, it’s a paradise of quotatery:

Unless you come with a letter of recommendation signed by Martin Amis, you might as well as forget it.

What becomes abundantly clear from Frankfurt is that if you’ve got a book inside, it’s really not a bad idea to keep it there.

‘No writer should ever go to Frankfurt. It’s soul-destroying. You see writers being traded like pork bellies.’

‘You look around and you think the world needs another book like it needs a hole in the head.’

If you read only one linked article from this Weekend Update, I’m wasting my time. (Via Justine Larbalestier.)

Truth is Stranger Than (Bad) Fiction

Let’s see if I can do this story justice:

A person, who may or may not be a writer (by any reasonable definition), who claims to be (but is not) named Lanaia Lee, believed in her writing — and in her conviction that she is the reincarnation of “Alexander the Great, Imhotep, Napolean [sic], Einstein” — so strongly that she paid a scam artist posing as a literary agent $400 a month to represent her first novel.

Months later, the writer begins to suspect she is being scammed — especially after being contacted by another scam victim who tells her the agent is a scam artist — and immediately signs on to have her next novel (first of a five-book series) represented. The scam artist says the novel needs work, and offers to ghostwrite this work for her.

After at least six months and several thousand dollars more, the writer achieves some dim level of awareness and changes to a different literary agent, a fan fiction author who may or not be a scam, who promptly closes a deal for the (ghostwritten) novel with a vanity press. The writer then sets out to promote the release of the novel in various places on the web, both genre-appropriate and not.

So far, this all-too-common story would only generate a few commiserating comments and what-were-you-thinkings at Absolute Write. But for this interesting wrinkle: The ghostwritten novel contained (at least) an entire chapter plagiarised word-for-word from a novel by late author David Gemmell.

The cry of Shenanigans has echoed for days. The writer and her agent are hysterically denying responsibility, claiming its all the scammer’s fault that they never revised (or re-read) the novel after the “ghostwriting”, and threatening lawsuits against those who uncovered the plagiarism.

The story was broken by Jane Little at Dear Author, in the brilliant post Top Ten Tips for Plagiarists. More can be found at Making Light and Writer Beware. The comments on all three blog entries reveal still more information, if you’re prepared to wade in. Comments from the (second) agent are particularly amusing, as they read like they were dictated in German to a five year old, then translated in to English via BabelFish.

If you skim-read the above, you should still read Top Ten Tips for Plagiarists.

News to Know, to Keep Up with the Conversation

• Bookseller.com reports that Orion Publishing won a “landmark” libel case, establishing (in the UK) that a published allegation is not libellous, if backed by years of research. Phew. If you can explain the implications of this to others, you’re well on your way to becoming a consummate bullshit artist.
• Doris Lessing wins the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Washington Post reports on her bemused reaction. Salon.com provides Cliff Notes so you can pretend you know who she is.
• Lee Goldberg explains that Mystery Writers of America is not telling you to fsck off, they’re just telling shitty publishers and self-published writers to fsck off. That probably includes you, but Lee doesn’t know that.
• Variety reports on the possibility of a strike by the Writer’s Guild of America, which is putting extreme pressure on Hollywood’s scripted TV industry. This last happened in 1988, when even talk shows went dark for months. (Via Writers Write.)

From the Blogosphere

• If you’ve been wondering why those heartless bastards at the New York Times Book Review didn’t gush over your self-published opus (even though you sent them twenty-five copies and a bunch of IOU-a-bribes), Janice Harayda of One-Minute Book Reviews suggests it may be because they receive 500+ books every week — and that’s just from real publishers, all competing for the one remaining square inch of review space. Of course, it may be because your badly-pixilated do-it-yourself clipart cover looks like you drank paint for a week then took a shit through a flour sifter.
• EW.com reports that George Lucas is looking for “writers of real significance” for his upcoming Star Wars TV series, marking the first time the phrase “writers of real significance” has ever appeared in the same sentence as “Star Wars“. Apparently he’s not finished destroying your childhood memories, and wants to sell you cola and insurance too. (Via Writerswrite.com.)
• Someone called Terry Gerritsen discusses the importance of having a cool name.
• James A. Moore waffles on and on about what it’s like to get 49 pages of edit notes from your publisher — along with a long digression on Halloween, and an entire short story, included in the same post. Can’t imagine why his editor thought his novel needed so much work.
• Teresa Neilsen Hayden at Making Light posits an interesting rule of Internet debates, which really should be distilled down to a catchy Law.
• Fans of Knight Rider are insane.
• Readers Read reports that the reports of book burnings have been greatly exaggerated.
• Agent Kristin misses Miss Snark. We all do.

Problems You Will Never Have

• Lee Goldberg observes that if you write for a TV show, you may develop an attachment to the theme song that far exceeds its quality. But how can you trust a man who not only wrote for Baywatch, but still has the theme song on his iPod? He also discusses convention burnout.
• Joe Konrath has been conducting a long-term, single subject, no control, doubly blind experiment into how long it takes a midlist author to realise that he should be getting paid for speaking engagements he’s invited to. The answer? Four years (and four books), or approximately one second after his wife starts insisting on it. Further research is needed into why the spouses of writers put up with their self-sabotaging instinct for financial failure.
• Author self-publishes his backlist of novels? Not news. Successful series author mortgages house and launches own small press to publish his backlist of 17 out-of-print novels, to coincide with Nos. 19 through 21 being picked up by St Martin’s Press? News.
• Jay Lake explains the editorial machinations of closed (invite-only) anthologies.
• Jobbing Scriptwriter journals what it’s like to write a feature script in five days.

You Will Never Be This Good

• Reading Under the Covers recalls that Charles Dickens used to do three-hour public readings, night after night, unamplified, to packed houses, and still had enough energy to kick your adverbial ass.

Reasons Why Comics Suck Four-Color Ass

1. The New Costume.
   Fiction writers kill off major characters because they are tired of being known as a successful genre hack and want to be an unsuccessful serious writer. Soap operas kill off major characters because the actor shagged the producer’s wife at the post-season wrap party, or it comes out that the actress did some “artistic nudes” in her youth. But comics publishers kill off major characters to “re-invent” the series with a new “secret identity” and a new costume, so they can make the cover of Comic Buyer’s Guide, and sell the same toys repainted to the same fanatical geeks who buy two copies of every issue (one to red, one to “collect”). The latest victim of “Pimp My Superhero” is Captain America, who now looks like he gets dressed every morning by running through a freshly painted American flag. He’s now packing heat (again), Geraldo Rivera style. (Via Readers Read.)

Stop Writing if You Need This Advice

• Do not take your research too seriously. (Via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)
• The Rejecter explains that Yes takes a lot longer to write than No.
• Jonathan Lyons says that agents should be on your Do Not Call list. Imagine you’re a restaurant critic with an impacted bowel. You spend three hours a day on the can, trying to free up six months and forty pounds of review material. You go to get a colonoscopy, and while you have two surgical residents taking video footage of your rectum like it was the Grand Canyon after an earthquake, a chef whose restaurant you dined in five weeks ago call you to ask what you thought of the fish.

Preparing this Weekend Update was made substantially easier with FeedGhost, an excellent feed reading program for Windows, and the only software I’ve ever encountered where if you have a problem, the developers email you.