The July 27 blog entry of Writer Beware, on “ripening” as a writer before you publish (obviously, trade books, especially fiction, is to what this entry applies), has this among the 32+ comments:
Anonymous said…
It took me 17 years of hard work to get good enough to find an agent. During that time I worked with critique groups, read many, many books on writing, attended conferences[,] and worked with freelance editors to help hone skills I knew I lacked. To me this is important. Fine musicians, dancers[,] and elite athletes have coaches, why not writers? Writing is a skill that has to be learned, just like anything else. Even though I’m a successful non-fiction writer, novel writing is another skill altogether.
I wrote several novels in those 17 years and I’m glad none of them were published! Even though I have an agent I wouldn’t dream of sending these old manuscripts to him. They should stay under the bed where they belong.
The wait was worth it, by the way, [because] early this month my agent sold my novel to one of the Big Six publishers. : )
7/27/2012 2:04 PM
If this person is holding himself or herself out as an exemplar in fiction (or nonfiction) writing, a few things might be in order to have the person be more credible. Maybe most obvious is his or her avoiding mentioning “I…read many, many books on writing….” Really? So many? If you got good at anything, maybe it was at reading such books. If someone wanted to be published as a talented author, this sort of detail would tend to suggest maybe the writer isn’t that talented, but certainly had a lot of will to try to get published as if he or she was talented.
Another thing is the ambiguous first sentence: “It took me 17 years of hard work to get good enough to find an agent.” What does this mean? Seventeen years to become a good enough writer for an agent to take you on? Or 17 years to actually land an agent, after trying numerous agents and getting rejections? Or both?
“[I] worked with freelance editors to help hone skills I knew I lacked.” Really? If you lacked the skills, what exactly were the freelance editors honing in you? I thought being a published author meant talent. Various authors can vary in terms of what talents they show—for glittering language, for characterization, whatever—but I don’t think we value anything of them mainly for doggedness in working with freelance editors to “get skills they lacked”—as if becoming a trained pigeon was good enough.
“Writing is a skill that has to be learned, just like anything else.” True, in a certain vague sense. But usually any artistic status that a person may have implies that that person has some talent—meaning, capacity to deliver the art—apart from being trained, or “learning” over time, that he or she may go through. And as to whether there is automatically an unadulterated genuine bank of helping professionals out there to help this writer “learn,” the actual facts can comprise quite a rocky road: some professionals can help you, some can’t, some are noxious in terms of giving you a bum steer, and so on. And in a sense you learn from them, but one thing you learn about, with all else, is the pitfalls (and those not merely “scammers,” to use that colloquial term) that plague this industry, which anyone with the self-confidence to continue with it has to square with, to one extent or another.
Anonymous writer goes on: “Even though I’m a successful non-fiction writer…”—well then, why are you anonymous? May we see some evidence of your publisher work, if you are reputable?
He or she goes on, “I wrote several novels in those 17 years and I’m glad none of them were published! Even though I have an agent I wouldn’t dream of sending these old manuscripts to him.” Is that so? Again, we have the strong suspicion that this writer is a bit of a hack. How bad were those early novels? If they were so bad, why did you keep writing them?
Stories can vary widely here, for different reasons. Myself, I wrote three novels in the 1980s; the first was a sort of trial run, the middle one was never quite finished, and the third not only met with interest from two agents in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but over several years received personal responses from editors including Gordon Lish at Knopf; Ann Kjellberg at Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Ashbel Green at Knopf; and others. I was learning through tough experience how chancy publishing trade books can be. But the personal feedback was also precious.
But today, I wouldn’t be quick to turn to these books for trying to land an agent (or a publisher, if I approached editors directly) because the marketplace, and even the industry, has changed so much since the 1980s. Today, it seems a field day for genre writers out there. But it’s all up to a writer as to whether he or she believes in a manuscript enough to try to place it, or rework it then try to place it.
It sounds to me if this anonymous writer had such trouble publishing books in the past 17 years and now won’t dare to run his or her old novels past his or her agent, then this person may fit in squarely with the current trend: relatively amateurish writers for whom the goal is an agent = publishing, as if the goal is all, and as if it isn’t a good method for this writer to embrace, without guaranteed success, the process of coming up with some genuine work independent of its marketability—because can it be possible one or more of the novels under the bed is/are this? Maybe this writer has wised up to the following: He or she would only chance getting “favor and success” via the agent with new work built with “skills” he or she had to “hone” when, in the bad old days, they were absent in this writer. The trained pigeon now knows how to peck out salable property.
Hm, we’ve come a long way since Tolstoy.
