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A Chicago area girl born and bred, I've lived in Mississippi, Montana, Michigan, and...ten years in the wilds of northeastern Indiana, where I fought the noble fight as a book editor. Now, I'm back in Illinois once more...for good. (At least I intend to make it that way!)

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Who’s REALLY Your Reader…Part 2

So you’ve written something wonderfully intelligent, witty, canny, and clever. You know it is, because your writing group loves it.(!) Your critique partner loves it. And it’s gotten to that point because you’ve targeted it…tailored it…refined it…until you know—you know, as in “wake me up at three in the morning and ask me, and I’ll tell you”—your marketing niches and who’s going to be the audience for your book. You have a polished synopsis. You have crafted your query letter. You’ve meticulously formatted your manuscript. You’ve edited, revised, gotten critiques, entered contests…you’ve even been invited, several chill-inducing times, to submit complete manuscripts to those Gate Keepers of the Fantasy—the editors of your dream publishing houses.

But that’s where you’ve stopped.

You’ve gotten the “good” rejection letters and received helpful guidance from authors who write for aforementioned Dream Publishing Houses; you’ve tallied myriad score sheets, gone to workshops, tried to decipher author blogs or agent blogs or publisher blogs to “read between the lines”…you’ve listened to inspiring speakers, visualized, affirmed yourself, thought positive, indulged in aromatherapy, courted your muse, and even considered hypnosis…

…everything, in fact, except sold this wonderfully intelligent, witty, canny, clever piece of fiction.
And now, you want to know why—before you take a brutally sharp, finely honed, and carefully aimed blade and slash either your pages or your wrist.

(Have I used enough paired adjective/adverbs yet, d’ya think?)

The tragedy of this is, in the end, apparently no one can really tell you why one piece of writing sells and one doesn’t.
But in my particular case—in the case of one particularly fine piece of fiction over which I have done my share of bleeding—I think I’ve discerned a possible factor.

Several people in my world love this particular story. When I sent them sample chapters, they clamored and pestered me to send more and more and more. One of them, in a contest, gave me a perfect score.

(I didn’t even get a perfect score the year I won a Golden Heart. Just sayin’.)

On the other hand, several other people in my world have read parts—or all!—of this manuscript, looked up at me, and said, “Huh?”
Some of them have said, “Oh, wow, this is really good writing…but where would it sell?”
Some of them have said, “What kind of book is this, exactly?”
Some of them have said, “Well, you’ll have to take out the ______ (name your element), or this won’t sell at all.”
One of them, in an especially memorable encounter, said, “This kind of book doesn’t sell, and I’m not wasting two years of my life trying.”
But a great many more of them have said nothing at all.

Three guesses which group was composed of “publishing professionals”—authors, editors, and agents—versus which group was “readers.” Not that some of the “readers” weren’t also writers, or people who enjoyed good writing. One of them is a crit partner, one of them is a bookseller, so it’s not like they’re totally out of the loop. But of the “publishing professionals” I’ve sent this book to, over the years—people who had the power to help get it sold, or to buy it themselves—not one has found in my story the combination of elements that would prompt them to take it to an editorial committee meeting and plead its case. I can’t help but wonder why.

Maybe the answer’s as simple as the old adage about “a little knowledge.”

“Publishing professionals”—if they’re at all human—are among the first to tell you that they really have no idea what they’re looking for, sometimes, in a story. That they only “know it when they see it.” But as aforementioned “professionals,” they have to tell writers something when they’re besieged by questions about how to go about “getting attention” in the slush pile.

So…they tell us things. Some of those are helpful. Most are not—unless the only audience we’re aiming at is that comprised of other writers we know, our critique groups, or the teachers in our MFA programs.

Publishing professionals can certainly tell you how to write correctly. You’ll know how to analyze your characters, how to write a conversation that does double or triple duty, how to foreshadow and presage and drop hints and integrate backstory and wrap it all up with a tidy bow at the end into a “satisfying conclusion.”

But will you have written a whopping good story?
The kind an “ordinary” reader will pick up and devour?

I would submit, from all the available evidence I’ve seen lately…probably not.

Which can lead us, if we’re honest, to a fairly radical conclusion:

That
editors, agents, and publishing professionals are no more equipped to tell you how to write a whopping good story than an “ordinary” reader with no “qualifications” is.
They know one when they see one, just like we do. but that's it.

So we need to stop writing as if they can tell us how to do this...and as if their evaluation is a true indicator of how well we're doing. Short of The Call telling us they are ready to spend money on our stuff...everything else is just so much guesswork. And should be treated accordingly.

Yeah, that notion is tough to get our brains around. It runs counter to all the “knowledge” we have, all the “sensible” processes we’ve been taught, and can bring us dangerously close to “wasting our time” if we go about things “wrong.”

But is what we’ve gotten from not wasting our time any better?

In the end, it seems, some of us have been led down the garden path into writing for the wrong people. It was done with the best of intentions, surely. And it’s something that many, many, many of us are still doing.

But it seems to me, thinking this over, that writing a really great “yarn” is like losing weight successfully: if good advice could make it happen, you wouldn’t need 10,000 books on the market allegedly “helping” you to do it.

If it were as simple as doing things correctly, it’d be like working with a really good vending machine: you put the dollar in, you get the story elements out.

Unfortunately, whopping good stories don’t come from letter-perfect, correct writing.
They don’t even necessarily come from good writing.
What they do come from—as hackneyed as it sounds, and as amateur as it can sometimes come across—is inspiration.

Inspiration is what grabs the writer and won’t let her go…and what grabs her reader just as hard, so that the two of them together take a glorious ride. But you can’t “learn” inspiration from writing classes, workshops, critiques, or professionals.

You can only get it from within.

You’ll know it when you see it and feel it.

Warning: when inspiration hits, what it won’t be is tailored, targeted, “branded,” or “satisfying” in the end; it’ll go so far beyond merely “satisfying” that it’ll take your breath—and the breath of lots and lots of people—away.
And they’ll tell their friends…
And so on…
And so on…
And so on.

And while they’re grabbing for the oxygen and jumping around the room—they won’t care if you wrote well or not.
They’ll just enjoy the glorious ride.

There’s the only readership you need to cultivate.
There’s
your audience.
And you’ll know them when you find them.

May you all find these real people…these “ordinary” readers…who will make all the difference. And stop writing for the others. No matter how competent they can make you.

Competence is never brilliant. It never sets the world on fire.

My resolution this year is to write for a better audience...and keep the extinguisher handy.

Thoughts?
Janny


3 comments:

Donna Alice said...

A friend and I just had a similar discussion - whether or not to be a writing "sheep" and write something formulistic to get the approval and the contract of a publisher. Or to write what you want to and feel you must and then try to find a publisher.

My thoughts are that if you send a WIP out to ten people, you get ten opinions. Some like it, some don't. It's the same with contests -you can get an award in one and low scores in another.

I don't have any answers either. It's almost as if one has to get a book contract to be validated as a writer and yet, look at all the people who get contracts who can't really write at all.

Deb said...

That's the paradigm that gets many of us writing in the first place: "I can do better than THIS!"

And many times, we can. We all know publishers who buy from the same authors over and over...they don't seem to notice these authors are telling the same stories repetitively, and they never seem to notice they need to reach for magic!

Great & good Lord, if I can't reach for magic, I don't want to write anymore.

Mary said...

I certainly enjoyed reading your thoughts. I have had work accepted for publication that I never thought would sell and then some that I thought were extrodinary were rejected repeatedly. I have no idea why and I wonder sometimes if it is just the luck of the draw? Just one editor who loves the story and goes to work to be sure that it gets into print.

Blessings,
Mary