There's making good art, and then there's being part of the ongoing conversation. Life's happier if you can manage both.
Depends what makes you happy.
It's hard to see (well, from the short summary it's hard to see) what the writer of this novel could have done to it to make it "sellable". When what you want to write isn't sellable, then you can either write what you don't want in order to sell, or write what you want... and learn to ignore the nagging voice that says that the joy in writing isn't real, it's only real if someone reads it. Which is not so. They're two separate pleasures, and it's best to figure that out early on.
Tina wrote: Meanwhile, what JRW doesn't know -- but with the prescience granted narrators, I do -- is that the second, third, and even fourth agents on JRW's list would not have offered representation, but the fifth one would be interested enough to consider the whole book and the sixth one would take JRW on...
Or not. That's the point, isn't it?
I figured out a long time ago that I could either be desperate about getting professionally published, or be enthusiastic about what I wrote - because what I like to write is not going to get professionally published. The window is narrow: mere quality won't get you through it. Enthusiasm is a hell of a lot more fun than desperation.
It would be neat to be professionally published, more than the odd short story here and there. But it seems to me that I had the choice of wanting to be read (and writing accordingly) or wanting to write - and not giving a damn if what I write ends up being read by five close friends, a couple of hundred acquaintances, or nobody at all.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 3 |
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