In Which I Rant

The Milwaukee Writers Workshop met this past Sunday. As is typical, I got into a discussion with one of the members about something writing-related. That day's topic: the literary elite. Oh boy do I love this conversation - and my opinion on the subject has changed since the years when I was in college.

My basic thoughts:

1. Yes, there is a literary elite.
2. No, they don't sit around discussing how bad your writing is. Nor do they even talk to one another about bad writing.
   
3. There are better things to worry about.

There was a lot of brew-ha-ha surrounding a discussion of the literary elite in reaction to Jason Sanford's essay in the New York Review of Science Fiction. Without perpetuating the argument, I will say a few things in line with what our discussion was at the group.

The "literary elite" that we think of today was born out of the canon that was put together in the early part of the last century with the standardization of education and schools here in the States. It wasn't intentionally meant to drive a wedge between various fiction genre (save maybe for the overwhelming mass of pulp that was being published at the time), but it did, and that mentality has stayed. Unfortunately, yes, there is a sense of superiority with a great deal of scholars in this country when it comes to "literature" and "genre fiction" or any other type of fiction that doesn't fall into their parameters of what makes fiction become literature.

In today's age of marketable fiction (competent fiction with little sense of art to it), it's difficult to see past one's own bitterness about not getting published. For a long time, I was very jaded by the "literary elite" because I felt like my fiction was being overlooked simply for it's status as genre. Well, I was sorely mistaken. My fiction was being overlooked because it was bad. Maybe it's because I'm published now, and I can more fully understand the process of getting published and why the concept of the literary elite isn't as prevalent as most people believe. Yes, that sense of superiority by a lot of authors is down-right aggravating, but it can be overcome.

If you continue to have fiction returned to you with rejections, then it's probably not that the editors at those publications are snobbish twits who mock your writing; it's probably a matter of your needing to polish your work more thoroughly, have it looked at by a good group of writers, and maybe do some studying. Very few people get published right away; even fewer people make a name for themselves as writers; even fewer become obscenely wealthy. Write because you enjoy writing.

"Better to write for yourself and have no public than write for the public and have no self"

-- Cyril Connolly.

No Plot, No Story

So it's 10:00 AM on day 12 of NaNo. I'm nearly 800 words ahead of where I needed to be yesterday, which means my job will be easier today. However, as I write this story, I'm realizing something very dramatic: there's very little plot. It's disappointing, really; throughout the story I have a pretty distinct theme, and there's certainly setting, but there's not much of a plot.

Chris Baty - founder of National Novel Writing Month - says "No plot, no problem". Outwardly, the message of that seems uplifting: just write. Don't worry about the little things as you push through NaNo; just write. At the end of the month, though, if you've pumped out fifty thousand words, and you have no plot, you're going to have the biggest editing headache imaginable. No plot? Great, now you have to go through your entire story and make everything fit to the plot that you decide to stick into it. It's gonna be messy, and you're not going to like it.

That's where my beef with NaNo comes in. The good points: 1) it gets me writing every November in a way that I should be writing every day, all year long; 2) I meet new writers from around the city and sometimes around the world; 3) I'm writing, and I love the feeling I get when I'm writing and when I've accomplished something. However, NaNo does one thing very well. It pulls in all of the people who call themselves writers, who spend very little time at their craft, who don't study the classics or the contemporaries or even the critics. They write because they think it's fun (and believe me, I do, too), and they have grandiose ideas about getting published. I work very hard at what I do; I study, and I write, and I rewrite, and I learn from my fellow writers. One thing I've learned over the years is that if you've got no story, then you have no readers; and if you have no plot, then you have no story.

Now, I'm not dissing NaNo. In fact, I commend its ability to pull writers out of the woodwork. I'm all about creative education, and NaNo is a great example of that. What I'm criticizing are the people who treat my profession like a hobby and think challenging themselves to silly things like adding gnomes into their story at some point where the main character will freak out. Why? What does that add to the story?

I'm sorry, now I'm ranting. And I still don't have much of a plot. At least my main character is a likable guy.