The Definitive Rulebook on How to Get Published
JA
March 23
I’m using the title of this blog post somewhat tongue-in-cheek here, which probably gives you a good idea of what the rest of it will contain. I’d like to have opened with ‘rules are, there are no rules’ but I’m afraid it’d come off sounding too much like some teenage grease monkey on a BMX bike.
But, anyway, to get to a point – advice for aspiring writers has always been a huge part of literary culture. And let me say from the outset that there’s nothing wrong with that – of course as writers, readers and editors we’re ever curious about the mechanics of writing. We want to know all about not only the beating heart of a story but also its very muscles, veins and spasms, and we’re perfectly willing to take to authors with a knife and scalpel to get there. I’m not denying that advice can be extremely helpful (particularly those on the basics of submitting novels/short stories to publishers), or even assuring when your realise that others have gone through the very same growing pains as you, but I wonder if we’re becoming a little too fixated on writing ‘rules’ and ‘how-tos’.
Justine Larbalestier really honed in on it with this blog post on what seems to be the rise of an online ‘rules’ culture. It may be obvious that we should be mindful of who is giving the advice and steer clear of any self-proclaimed guru, but Justine also writes that advice from establish writers is not necessarily full of truisms either, as chances are much of the industry will have changed since they ‘broke through’ and what works for one person will not always work for anyone else.
Any advice I give about getting published has to be taken with a large grain of salt by anyone who isn’t trying to break in to YA in the US. I have no idea how to get published in Australia—even though I’m Australian. I wasn’t published there until after I sold in the US. I still know far more about publishing in the US than I do about my own country. Nor do I know much about any market in the world except YA in the USA. If you’re trying to break into Romance or Crime or Literachure I’m useless to you.
That said, I’m probably not the most useful person to you for breaking into YA in the US either. I know about half a dozen agents well. There are way more reputable ones than that. I follow all the publishing news, far more than most YA writers, but I still don’t know that much about what goes on in those publishing houses and what all the editors are looking for. I know many editors, but I’ve only worked with a handful. You only really know an editor well when you’ve worked with them.
The Guardian recently ran two articles where they asked a series of writers to list up to ten ‘rules for writing’, among them big names such as Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Will Self, Annie Proulx and Philip Pullman. Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation was less than impressed with Elmore Leonard’s chosen ten, calling them ‘as splendid an example of unhinged dipshitery as I've ever seen’. He went on to demonstrate that most of these rules could be broken, or sound just a reasonable when phrased the other way around: ‘The eleventh rule is: If you come across lists such as this, ignore them. The rules may sound sensible enough, but, with the exception of No 5, each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice’. While I found the list entertaining, I’m more like to agree that no writing ‘rule’ is sacred (this includes ‘write what you know’, ‘show don’t tell’ and ‘always keep a writers’ notebook’ – something I was repeatedly told in creative writing subjects). These lists are helpful inasmuch as you take on what you find helpful, and then do away with the rest.
In fact, the only piece of advice that I’ve found continuously useful is variations of this little nugget from Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah (reiterated by several authors in the Guardian’s list):
A writer is a person who writes.
So, this is the answer in its beautiful and stark simplicity. You can have all the talent in the world, but this is nothing if you do not actually write.
So write. Just write.
… Because a writer is a person who writes.
That is the beginning of everything.
John Steinbeck also had something similar to say to aspiring wordsmiths when recalling his time at Stanford:
The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all - so long as it was effective… So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
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Comments
23 Mar 10 at 9:55
Great post and I tend to agree with you. Everywhere you look online these days there are ten steps to something - most of which I think is the fault of rabid search engine optimisation but also due to the celebrity culture the internet seems to cultivate. A kind of "I can answer that!" impulse.
I do however think there are healthy habits to pick and prompts to respond to that are useful to writers, such as communities with flash fiction challenges, author interviews and networking circles. These things are less about "do this and you will succeed" and more about keeping up your enthusiasm, drive and breaking new creative ground.
For me, this is the value of the internet as a writer - a community of like minded individuals working towards similar goals. I find participation in this, if nothing else, motivates me to write and write more often.
...23 Mar 10 at 10:02
This title is such wonderful linkbait - you are to be simultaneously applauded and blackhatted by Google. I heard a great quote on publication but can't remember it's origin but it was something like: Writers must be thin skinned in order to write yet thick skinned to be published. This is a nice reminder of how different these two activities can be.
...23 Mar 10 at 13:23
Like Mark, I find the best guides to getting published are usually the ones that admit to the fallacy of giving advice about what to write and how to write it. Instead, they give advice about how to maintain motivation, and keep up the very act that makes a writer a writer: writing. So yeah, agree with you on all points, and thanks for putting it so nicely. (:
...23 Mar 10 at 16:04
Hackpacker you've seen into my plan. A part of me wonders whether anyone in search of Definitive Rules will click on this post instead. Here's hoping.
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