The novice writer who is trying to get published is prone to developing a persecution complex. I know I did. After all, I had spent my high school years being told what a terrific writer I was – so why couldn’t these idiot editors recognise my talent? “A fresh fish just can’t get a break in this incestuous industry,” I would think in my darker moments. “The established players just publish each other’s work.”
Only in 2005, after I had been regularly submitting fiction without success for close to four years, was I in a low enough place to begin properly questioning myself. “Are you honestly applying what you learned in On Writing and The Elements of Style to your own fiction? Are you trying – really trying – to make your second draft 10% shorter than your first draft?”
The answer was no, and it was an epiphany in my career as a writer. Total editorial disinterest in my work became a thing of the past almost overnight. The first step to becoming a good writer – as I once wrote in a blog post for the now-defunct Asylett Press – is realising you’re not one. I only wished someone had pointed it out to me four years earlier.
Subsequent to the moderate success which followed that epiphany, a 21-year-old would-be writer approached me for advice about becoming an author. Suffused with the sort of evangelical zeal that is usually the preserve of a reformed smoker, I wrote him a long email, which read in part:
Now, here's one other thing no one ever tells you: writing the novel is the easy bit. Drafting the novel three or five (or more) times to get it right is harder. Sifting it down to a synopsis and then editing that synopsis is tedious and time consuming. Formatting the manuscript, the synopsis and the cover letter to suit a particular publisher is tiresome monkey work.
As if that's not depressing enough, maybe five per cent of all published writers out there actually make a living solely from fiction.
What I'm saying is this: You don't write fiction to get rich, or get famous, or even so you can work from home. You write fiction because that's what you love to do. Ghost Kiss is about 85,000 words long; I have written six other novels totalling 600,000 words that will probably never be published. I've shopped most of them around in Australia and overseas and received endless rejections. It is a soul-destroying exercise, so if you don't love it - if you're only doing it to turn a buck - give up now. You won't last the distance.
The email wasn’t all as negative as that, and we did have some more pragmatic back-and-forth that covered things like passive voice, editing (see image) and cover letters. But in a later email I also wrote:
This is an ongoing process. Some writers are good enough to be published in their early 20s, but not many. I've been writing fiction in earnest since I was 19, and I didn't really 'turn the corner' until I was 27 or 28. And I'm still learning.
At the time I thought I was doing him the favour no one had done for me – making him aware of publishing’s harsh realities. But the guy never, to my knowledge, submitted a single story to a single market and we eventually stopped corresponding. I suspect he just drifted away from writing fiction because he saw it as a black hole.
While reflecting on this recently, I felt a bit ashamed. It occurred to me that maybe a novice writer needs to be oblivious to the realities of publishing in those embryonic stages. You don’t tell a kid playing Under 7s soccer that only the tiniest fraction of would-be athletes will ever play professionally, do you? No, you let him enjoy the game and develop his talent. If he’s good enough, he’ll find out for himself how competitive it is in the world of professional sport.
In other words, a budding writer – even more so than an athlete – needs hope to keep him going. Even if he is churning out unpublishable crap (as I was in those early years), the writer is still learning and developing his craft. Had my older, more learned self gone back to the younger me and pointed out how far he still had to go before his writing was any good, he might have given up, too.
Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, for sure, but there’s no point being so cruel you end up killing the person you’re trying to help.