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While the “Snarkives” are still of immeasurable value, both to unpublished writers looking to understand the submission process, and to social researchers looking for a corpus of whiny protestations from hapless rubes convinced that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It was the general inability of the unpublished writers of the world to understand and apply these principles that drove most of the content on Miss Snark’s blog, and ultimately led to its abrupt conclusion.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.