This is a big day for me. I feel, in a certain way, I have finally arrived as a blogger. You see, last week I received the following email:
Hi,
Nathalie here from Bozo Media and I wanted to drop you a line and just compliment your site http://victoriamixon.com/. Nice layout, good info, good resources. I was looking around at a few different sites relevant to Washing Machines. I definitely thought yours was one of the best. That being said, I also noticed you guys have some great content related to them.
I currently work for a company that maintains website that offers best deals and information about Washing Machines – http://www.wtfwashingmachines/fakeurl. We are a nationally recognized, reliable source for Washing Machines and I was wondering if you’d be interested in giving us an opportunity to write guest post relevant to your site. I can assure you that our article will be very informative to your visitors and also drive more traffic. I would be very pleased if you allow me to add a link to our site in the article.
Looking forward for your reply.
Regards,
Nathalie.
Wow. Nathalie. I just don’t know what to say.
Because the truth is teaching the craft of fiction is exactly like teaching people to use Washing Machines.
But how did you know?
Nathalie, you are my new best friend. There is simply nothing I love more than sinking my teeth into a good, rambling post about the essential link between great fiction and Washing Machines. So I will save you the trouble of writing it for me. That’s how much I like you, Nathalie. I’ll write that darn guest post for you myself.
This is the honest, unvarnished truth, people: modern contemporary American fiction is, from many angles, as Dirty as Hell. And it’s in desperate need of a really good Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine.
My job is to teach you people how to clean up your fiction. Go ahead—write it, thrash around in it, have a fabulous time, make a big old fun muddy mess. Get it all over yourself. You don’t need me for that part. Anyone can do it, and hundreds of thousands of people do. It’s a blast!
Then go back and write your story again more honestly. Go down through the layers of superficial uniform dirt that get all over everybody when they truly relish a big, hefty, messy, magnificent first few drafts. Find underneath those top layers the story that’s really there. Find the real people living inside the characters, of whom you have barely scratched the surface. Find the details of their lives that make them three-dimensional in exactly the way your reader’s life is three-dimensional. Find the universal themes of comedy and tragedy out of which they’re been created and the complex interweaving of those elements that your characters must navigate on their way to enlightenment. Uncover the fabric of your characters’ unique lives that your reader needs to touch in order to reach the heart of what you’re doing.
Then write it again even more honestly. And write it again. And again. And again. . .
Every time you let your manuscript go cold and take it out later for another revision, you’re sending it through the Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine. Every time, the structure of your story gets a little clearer, the humanity of your characters gets a little truer, your reason for writing this novel gets a little more significant, to you, and to your readers too. Eventually—if you work hard enough, with enough dedication and soul-searing honesty, for long enough—it will be beautiful, vivid, shining. Clean. It will be a new definition of meaning.
And you will be proud to wear it around in public for the rest of your life.
But if you rush out and insist it be published while it’s still even sort of dirty (much less as dirty as it is when you first stand up out of rolling around in all that mud—and, yes, you can get stuff published in that condition, it happens all the time) then, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, the dirt will become ever more and more obvious as the years go by and your craft improves.
As your understanding of the meaning of life deepens. As your reasons for living make more and more sense in the overall universal scheme of things, as seen through your own unique, vivid, unforgettable lens.
Don’t do this to yourselves, folks. I say this with all editorial love for the writers in you and compassion for what writing your novels means to you. I know. I write novels too.
Develop a sincere, lifelong, humble respect for the Great Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine.
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