LITERATURE & WRITING: Publishing

With so many weblogs and websites devoted to writers and legions of hopeful writers clicking out stories on their keyboards the market is being flooded with bad writing as much as good.  It’s a sword that cuts both ways.  While the good may finally be encouraged by the ease and less painful and time-consuming methods of getting their work read, they’re finding themselves in amongst an ever-growing ocean of mediocrity as the hitherto impenetrable icebergs of publishing know-how melt away.

Over at Miss Snark’s, an agent who has graciously dedicated much time and knowledge into helping new writers present their best and answer many of their questions regarding the publishing process, there’s currently seventy-five query letters and first page offerings for critique.  But something bothers me and I’m starting to zero in on it.

For new writers, it seems the most important thing is to get noticed by the agent and the standards may be very different than what we’d think them to be.  Writers need, I think, to think of their audience as the agent–not the ultimate reader–in order to ever get close to being published. 

The most common critique that is offered is to get action going within those first 500 words.  But these are novels we’re talking about, not necessarily run by the same rules as short story where compression is necessary and narrative is minimal.  It sounds as though if there’s a murder, it had better be done by page two at the latest.  Without action, you’re dead in the slushpile. 

While I would think that crime fiction in particular would benefit from this–as this is what readers are reading it for–I’m not so sure that "hitting the ground running" is a must-do for all story, but rather just one of several techniques.  As far as writers are concerned, anyway.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker; that’s got to start off with action, no?  It’s one of the best horror novels written.  Read Chapter 1:  Dracula

Or how about this, from Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles:

Chapter 1

I Go to Styles

The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as "The Styles Case" has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the world-wide notoriety which attended it, I have been asked, both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves, to write an account of the whole story. This, we trust, will effectually silence the sensational rumours which still persist.

I will therefore briefly set down the circumstances which led to my being connected with the affair.

I had been invalided home from the Front; and, after spending some months in a rather depressing Convalescent Home, was given a month’s sick leave. Having no near relations or friends, I was trying to make up my mind what to do, when I ran across John Cavendish. I had seen very little of him for some years. Indeed, I had never known him particularly well. He was a good fifteen years my senior, for one thing, though he hardly looked his forty-five years. As a boy, though, I had often stayed at Styles, his mother’s place in Essex.

We had a good yarn about old times, and it ended in his inviting me down to Styles to spend my leave there.

"I will therefore briefly set down the circumstances which led to my being connected with the affair."  Christie herself is announcing that she’s going to give us the backstory first.

(Links to literature from Literature Online–an excellent site where many of the classics can be read in full online.)

I’m beginning to think that while technology has aided the writer tremendously by casting light upon the heretofore mysterious publishing world, it has the ability to change what’s being published as well.  Of course, this is only one agent’s preferences, and that’s why many, many must be solicited before that one that happens to love what you happen to write is found.  It can be no other way–your agent has to believe in you and vice versa.  But with the undergrumbling about the MFA in Creative Writing and Programs and seminars that are beginning to dislodge the creative from creative writing, this knowledge of how to please an agent might have the same effect.  No more just galloping off into the sunset; we must now gallop into the dawn.

What may turn the market for better or worse, is that so many writers are misguided into thinking that what they need to learn is how to get published, instead of learning to write.