I’m going to be in San Francisco next week—my husband, Jeff Osier-Mixon, will be presenting at the 2010 Embedded Linux Conference, and I’m taking my son to see the King Tut exhibit for the second time before it goes home to Egypt forever—therefore I won’t be trawling the Internet much for writing and publishing news to discuss.
So let’s get philosophical now.
What are you doing here? Not here on this planet, but here in the fiction-writing community, thinking about your stories and pressing your hand to your heart.
What does the creation of fiction mean to you?
A lot of people write in order to be heard. I get a certain number of manuscripts every year that are the stories of traumatized children, battered partners, abandoned lovers, just-barely-disguised autobiography cast as fiction. It’s not fiction—it’s real. These are real people. They have really been traumatized, in these very real ways. Their pain is not imaginary.
Most of these manuscripts are in early drafts. The need to be heard is far more immediate than the need to create art. These are the cries of the voiceless injured, channeled into the surface elements of what they’ve read in published fiction. The plodding, often frustrating, interminable, years-long work of crafting words into literature is beyond the pressing needs of these writers. They just want to know their story isn’t a secret anymore.
They write to be released, not immersed.
I also regularly receive more of a manuscript than the amount I’ve been hired to work on. The yearning to be read and acknowledged is intensely palpable. The desire to be recognized by someone in “authority,” a professional in the industry, is so huge that it occasionally wins out over the intellectual knowledge that I don’t have time to read everything, I’m approaching these manuscripts as work projects, not casual reads, and my opinion doesn’t help, anyway, if I can’t add significantly to the quality of the manuscript. Will I love it so much I just can’t stop reading, even when my time is up? It doesn’t matter. I’m not an agent. I can’t get anyone published. (Well, myself.)
And sometimes I get manuscripts of amazing talent, from writers who have already dedicated themselves to this craft for years, who have practiced and practiced and practiced with words, who have sketched and drawn and fleshed-out multiple imaginary worlds of varying themes, varying premises, varying purposes. Some of these writers are serious, no-nonsense, and practical. Some are emotional and easy to throw off balance. Some are a little of both.
My favorite manuscripts, though, come from writers who, no matter what their original agenda or skill level, are no more or less than respectful apprentices. They don’t come to this craft only because it offers them something they need, because it’s easy for them, or because they just want that desperately to come to the attention of a professional and an audience.
They might come to it for any and all those reasons, sure. But mostly they do it because they love fiction and, by god, they’re going to learn how to DO it. To do it RIGHT.
They’re my favorites because I know these people will make it, with or without me. I’m no fool—I know I’m an excellent editor, but I also know I’m not the only one in the world. And I know “making it” doesn’t always mean publishing. It doesn’t always mean earning one thin dime, even if you get published. It doesn’t even always mean gaining an audience.
It means creating the literature you long to create, getting down in just the right words the story that only you can tell.
And knowing you did it.
Myself, I’m a sort of platypus of all the above: a writer who absorbed very young just enough excellent literature to miss it when I overlaid it with a blanket of terrible crap in my teens—the type of writer who’s teetered precariously for decades between hiding my nose in the entire history of English literature and daydreams of what I’m going to spend all my loot on. I have not yet written the novels I long to write. But I’ve discovered that all my years of professional writing and editing and the intense analysis of literature have given me this wonderful ability to help others do exactly that.
What kind of writer are you? What do you want from fiction?
Why are you here?
