A Third Hand! – Why Should I Even Care What People Think?

Why am I writing a third entry on this theme? Because, man, it’s easier to write about writing than it is to actually write!

Just kidding! (Well, not about the relative ease thing – that’s true. But the implication that I’m not working on my regular stuff isn’t.)

So far, I’ve danced around the idea that anyone who wants their work published is pretty much obliged to take criticism in order to achieve their goal, despite the fact that ethics often enters into it. Today, I’d like to ramble about a much less obvious aspect: why should writers want their work to get published?

There are obvious reasons, of course. Like, 1) money. Last time I checked, nobody paid you for writing a novel and storing it on your hard drive for the rest of your life. But hang on – you don’t get paid all that much for writing. In fact, if you consider the hours put into one short story and the average payment you’re likely to get for it – well, you’re better off getting a job at McDonald’s.

The point of getting paid for your writing doesn’t seem to be the actual cash. In fact, I know writers who have framed their first cheques – obviously, getting paid for their work matters to them, but just as obviously, it’s not because of the money. What matters is what that money symbolizes. When you receive money for your work, it means someone thought it was good enough to pay for. In other words, your work has value.

This whole “value” thing is reason number 2 why a writer might want to be published. We all know our attitudes toward our own work are (maybe… somewhat… sort of…) biased. And some of us know would-be writers who think their work is the best thing since pagination, when most of the rest of us agree that we’d rather be hit over the head with their MS than forced to read it. (Most of us have been those writers at one point or another… anyone like reading their own stuff from over ten years ago? Me neither.) For the rest of us, though, reading and liking our own work is absolutely no guarantee that it’s any good in ways that matter to us. (More on that later.)

You might think that we could solve this problem by just showing our work to other people. Trouble is, it’s difficult to find other people whose opinions we can trust. First of all, some people lie to us. They don’t want to hurt our feelings, so they say our work is great when it isn’t; they’re jealous and petty, so they tell us our work sucks when it’s actually okay. Second, others may not lie, but they might not be able to articulate exactly what we want or need to hear. If a friend likes both chocolate and burnt things, you may be pleased he enjoyed the cake you made, but you can’t take that as evidence your cake tastes like chocolate. Third… well, even if our friends and relations and random people we meet on the Internet do have an honest, positive, well thought-out opinion of our writing, what gives them credibility as a judge? Are they an expert? Probably not.

That’s where editors, agents, and other industry professionals come in. But don’t editors and agents have the exact same problems as regular readers? Aren’t they also just individuals with individual tastes and feelings, too? Well, yes. But unlike most casual readers, they’re in the business of reading for a living. So they just plain have way more experience reading and critiquing things than most people. If I’ve eaten hundreds of different cookies, and I say your homemade butterscotch double-chip fudge bonanzas are the best, it probably means more than if I’ve only ever tried Oreos and arrowroots. It probably also means that I can better describe exactly what it is about your cookie that makes me like it so much. And, although industry professionals’ personalities factor into their judgment of our work, they have different motivations than laypeople. To stay in business, they have to not only judge whether they like a work, but whether other people, like their colleagues and readers and critics and librarians, might like it, too. So their standards are different.

Which brings me to the third reason writers might want to have their work published: audience. Writing is essentially an act of communication, after all, in a way that thinking or imagining is not. True, sometimes the person with whom we want to communicate is ourselves – who hasn’t had that feeling of not really knowing what you wanted to say until you put it down in words? – but in general, the goal is to share one’s ideas with other people. You can’t change the world, make someone happy, or create an imaginary mental playground if nobody’s reading your work. And as much fun, challenge, and hard work as self-publishing,  POD publishing, or starting a novel-sized email forward can be, it’s very unlikely that you’ll find an audience of the same size without going through the established publishing conventions. For traditional fiction, this means finding a publisher.

What’s important to note about these three reasons is that 1) and 3) are really a matter of taste. If you want to write a novel just so you can curl up with it after school or work, who are the rest of us to judge? No one considers a daydream to be a failure because you can’t convince anyone to pay you for it. Reason 2, however, is a little trickier. What exactly is “value”? What does it mean to say writing is “good”?

One of my high-school drama teachers once told us that if an actor’s working, he’s good. What he meant wasn’t that every working actor has a sublime mastery of his or her craft or brilliant technique; what he meant was, even if you have an awesome combination of talent and experience that allows you to bring any audience member to tears, if you’re uncast and Talentless Q. Hack over there has a part, he or she obviously has something you lack. That “something”, whatever it was, got Hack the part and got you cut after callbacks. Some have the same attitude toward writing: even if Stephenie Meyer’s book takes a couple hundred pages for the plot to start, or if J. K. Rowling overuses -ly adverbs, you can’t dismiss their writing as “bad” because it was published, and people buy it in droves.

I think most people who make this argument would agree that, say, Franklin W. Dixon isn’t writing on the same level as James Joyce. It’s not that we can’t recognize that one piece of writing has a more complex theme, thoughtful plot, or exquisite writing style than another. What I think arguments like this are really trying to get at (and maybe I’m putting words into other people’s mouths here), isn’t that you’re wrong to say, “Man, the sentence I just read in The Great Gatsby was poorly written” or “Jeez, Brad Pitt didn’t convince me at all that he was Benjamin Button”. Instead, they mean that you can’t a) use “bad” elements of published authors’ writing as an excuse to avoid improving your own.

What do I mean? You can’t say, “JK used lots of adverbs, so I can, too!” Or “Twilight was a giant success even though it had flaws. Why should I fix my cardboard characters and awkward phrasing when Meyer didn’t fix her pacing?” Or even “The fact that books like that get published and succeed shows that there’s something wrong with the publishing industry. It’s not my fault my book won’t sell, it’s theirs.”

They also mean that you can’t b) completely dismiss popular works that you consider to be flawed. Something in that book made people pick it up. I know people as a group like a lot of stupid things (don’t we, guys!), but you can learn a lot even from soap operas. Things like pacing. How to raise tension. How to hold your reader’s interest. Stuff like that.

Publishing isn’t a perfect process. It’s not like crawling around on your floor and picking up every bit of dust by hand – perfectly clean surface. It’s like vacuuming – sure, there might be some dust left on your floor, and you might accidentally pick up the kids’ toys or the cat’s tail, but, in general, it works.

Similarly, it’s obvious that not every published book is great. But if you sample ten published books and ten unpublished books at random, I think you’ll find way more quality in the published ones than in the unpublished. A particular unpublished book might be better than a particular published book, but that doesn’t change the overall features of both groups. So, while we can all agree that being popular or published isn’t the same thing as being good or great , it does mean that at least two people think it is, and that there’s a much better chance of everyone else thinking so, too.

One last point. Aside from this little… well, aside, I’m not really dealing with fanfiction writers in this blog entry. Online writers have an entirely different set of worries than “original” writers (not that there aren’t people who write both online stuff and more traditional fare, but their different works present them with different problems). This has more to do with the fact that fanfic is published and appraised differently than, say, novels. Anyone can and does publish stuff online – reason 1) doesn’t apply and reason 2) takes a different slant: if your work is popular, you’re getting approval from people from your fandom, who are “experts” on the characters, the world, and fanfiction in general, not editors or agents. It’s up to every author to decide whether one of these communities matters more to him or her than the other.

In other words, unless public approval of and exposure to your work don’t matter to you at all, and unless you don’t care about the literary quality of your work (or refuse to accept anyone else’s opinion on the matter), then you probably do want to pursue publication (whatever form that takes).