Our Neighborhood
It used to be really quiet around here. Then they built a huge, stupid apartment complex behind our house, in a field that had been a great place to fly kites and watch cats hunting fieldmice.
Now there’s broken glass everywhere. It’s like some sort of epidemic. The tenants at the apartments throw garbage over the back fences of everyone on the street. And kids who should be in school are riding stupid crotch rockets up and down the street at all hours of the day and night.
I don’t mind the new people in the neighborhood. I DO mind the broken glass, the rubbish, the noise, and the thumping of jet-takeoff-decibel music at 2AM.
*sigh* Do I sound like a crotchety old woman, or what?
In other news, wolfinthewood dug up this absolutely hilarious medievalVictorian piece on Onanism, and Caitlin Kittredge has some good advice to give about just buckling down and doing the frocking work.
Now, there’s an attitude among critics and a certain strata of readers that fast=hack and slow=literary geeeenius. But they’re wrong. That’s blunt, but they’re wrong. You write at the speed you write, slow or fast, flurry or steady pace, many words a day or a few hundred–and if you’re earning a living solely from your craft, guess what? Learn to write faster, slowbie. Discipline yourself to put down 2-4k words a day on the page. It’s rough at first, and you feel like you’re drowning, but a steep learning curve will improve your sentence-level craft like nothing else. Rather than poking out those few hundred golden words, put down 2,000 words that actually move the story. Then, in the evening, you can sit down and edit if you’re that OCD about first drafts.
This isn’t just me railing against litfic, although I do plenty of that. This is the same advice agents, editors, and seasoned pros give. If you don’t meet your deadlines, you have no currency with publishers, because you’re unreliable. This goes for you if you’re a debut author, midlist or bestselling. Sure, if you’re bestselling they’ll still renew your contract, but they’ll be talking about you around the coffee pot down there in NYC, mark my words. They probably put your author photo on the dart board, too. (from Caitlin’s blog)
Amen, grasshopper. I always roll my eyes when I hear, “But wordcount is so HARRRRRRD!” Jesus wept. Just do the goddamn work. If you’re really squeezing to get those words out, figure out where you’re wasting your time elsewhere and quit it. Do a time-log, and find out where the timesucks are. Then get rid of them and use that extra time and energy for writing.
This is a job. It’s not a wave of the magic wand to automatically get fame, prestige, critical acclaim, and a fat check. This is hard work, and you don’t do it because you’re going to get rich (unless you want to be disabused of that notion in a hurry and end up bitter and nasty.) Writing is a job, and it’s a lot less difficult, dangerous, and nasty when you love it, but it’s still a JOB. It requires WORK.
Go ahead and get out the pitchforks, because a lot of people don’t want to hear that writing is work and should not automatically garner praise. A lot of people who call themselves writers never seem to get anything done because they are allergic to the “work” section of it. These people want all the social cachet (however much there is, I guess) of being “artistic” or being called a “writer” without doing any goddamn work.
Not too long ago, during a group meeting of writers, the Beethoven Blonde showed up. This was a woman who talked and laughed loudest when it came to the social part of the gathering, literally grandstanding and steamrolling over everyone else in the room. When it came time to read some pages, though, she had a ready excuse, flipping her long blonde hair back over her shoulder with an affected laugh.
“Well, I suppose I’m still developing. It just takes so much time, you know. I have to go upstairs to my room, where I can have absolute quiet, and then I turn on Beethoven and I struggle to create.”
No sh!t. It’s this kind of “writer” that gives the hardworking midlister–and creatives everywhere–a bad image.
The hideous thing is, I’ve seen this type of behavior over and over again, from the epic-fantasy people who didn’t want to accept critique (and who wouldn’t listen to their editor because he reads Proust and “Proust isn’t fantasy”) to the “writers” with streaks of entitlement a mile wide up their back (they are Speshul Snowflakes and deserve attention not because they’ve finished a manuscript, but because they’re working on one.)
That being said, you’ve got to learn–once you’re disciplined and producing sellable work–to stand your ground and agree to the deadlines you can reasonably meet. Production schedules, once they’re decided, are there for a reason–because bringing books out is a business. If you can’t make the deadline, don’t set it in the first place. It’s that simple. It’s hard to do, because if you consistently produce sellable product editors and publishers will want you to do it regularly. The writer’s natural desire to please (sharpened by constant rejection during the first however-many-years of their careers) and the idea that a publisher could go for someone faster works against this, but don’t let it. You are responsible for the deadlines, and responsible for making them far enough apart that you can meet them.
And Caitlin is absolutely right. If you want to make a living, you need to find out how to work reasonably quickly. There is just no two ways about it. Producing sellable writing in a reasonable amount of time can be done. It requires discipline and hard, hard work, but it can be done. It’s the writer’s job to do it.
That’s just the way it is.
I now close this rant. I’ve got some pages to knock out. *wink*
Related posts:
