Some snarls, growls, and facts to be faced without fear.
It’s not that you write, it’s that you publish that matters.
In the digital age this leads to a torrent of amateur work that floods the market, gluts the browsers, and drowns the small stream of publications worth time and attention. No one can predict what will appeal, or sell, so any try to grab market share seems worth a shot, except that it diffuses quality.
When bad books push out the good, it’s Gresham’s Law imposed on publishing. It’s like one ounce of fine scotch in fifty gallons of swamp water. Diluted, the good stuff goes unnoticed as you choke on the bad.
Quality of published work, however, is of secondary or tertiary importance once word is out via publishing.
After publication, it’s who finds and likes the work, not how good it is inherently.
Storytelling counts more than writing good prose.
Acclaim from critics and academics means nothing. Same with awards, which affect only established professionals and advertisers.
Style is clothes, not who’s wearing them.
It’s who wears the clothes and what they do that makes a mark and gains status for them.
Eschew style in favor of blunt storytelling.
None of this means you should shoot for popularity alone. Improving skills and expanding abilities are basics of craft, which lets you build a stable foundation and continue to improve, while popularity is a fluke that can’t be predicted or exploited by algorithm. It’s like jumping off a cliff hoping there’s water, not bare rocks.
Yet popularity can boil off too. Work once best-selling and widely discussed, even celebrated, can evaporate soon after the writer of it dies or stops producing more. Those examples are of their time but usually don’t carry any core human aspects that would make them last over generations.
Thinks of reader attention as a cursor. It skims along, allowing anything inside its brackets to be seen.
Anything to either side of its brackets, however, is forgotten, neglected, ignored. It remains unseen unless and until the cursor again moves over it.
Attention span refers not just to how long concentration lasts, but how many items can be noticed at one time.
Existing things get bumped out of the cursor when a new item is added.
There is only so much room in the spotlight, on the public’s mental stage.
This is why news stories are often considered Ten Day Wonders. That’s the maximum number of days they can be milked for stories before interest wanes and the next sensation comes along or is manufactured. Stories with more lasting appeal are said to have legs. They keep running.
Like the blood keeps running. If it bleeds, it ledes. What’s garish draws looks.
This means good work that might last generations sometimes needs to be rediscovered. To rekindle interest it must be pointed out by someone currently in the limelight of the cursor. Awards are supposed to shine a spotlight on work deemed worthy of attention but cynics reduce them to means of leveraging sales and cutting better deals. As with most things, people being involved means we can’t have nice stuff.
If a contemporary writer cites a forgotten work or name, there’s a chance others will dig for it, find out what the referral means, and enjoy anew something they would ordinarily have missed. Without that mention, there’s no chance at all. No one knows to go looking for it.
Finding a filter to sift out work you’ll like, and thus niches and categories your own work might fit into, is vital if any kind of gratification or success matters. Curators on Book Tube or in reading groups, reviewers on your wavelength, proprietors of local bookstores, even friends and relatives can all contribute to cutting down the percentage of sewage and increasing the nutrients in the publishing gush.
Reassessment is also possible. Work once dismissed as crap is seen in a new light from a new perspective as having been meaningful all along, or as newly meaningful as style, fashion, and tolerance changes.
Writing isn’t a profession, it’s a vocation.
Professionalism counts, though. Without it you’re just a schmuck banging on keys or making scratch marks, hoping for an unrealistic fanfare. And without publishing, you’re singing in the shower hoping to be noticed by people who are entirely unaware of you or your work.
“Anyone who can be discouraged from being a writer, should be.” – Harlan Ellison.
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