This recent blog post from Mark Malatesta at Literary-agents.com was pretty striking for me to think about, the notion that the book I’m writing, this one I’m putting all this time and effort and energy into eventually producing for people to insult me over, isn’t really mine at all. It actually belongs to you, the reader. Maybe these blog posts do too. Or is that taking this whole idea a bit too far? Let’s look at this for a second.
With the book, I am, believe it or not, hoping to actually sell a few copies. It’s true. As such, once I pour out my blood and sweat for months, then do it again for a second draft, then let people read it and tell me how much it sucks, then finish a final draft, then answer a million questions about how to go about publishing, perhaps querying agents/publishers, the title, cover design, genre categorization, printing, price, and where I last saw my phone (pretty sure it was on the side table by the bed … hmmmmm), I’ll set out to sell the book to people. People who read. People who can’t read will be of little use to me, but I wish them well in their journey of life.
With that in mind, I need to focus on writing something that these readin’ folks will, like, want to read. This isn’t a vanity project … OK, it’s not just a vanity project. This is something I’d love to make a modest living doing, though I know the odds of me winning the “I get to sit at home and write pretty much whatever I want for a living” lottery are probably infinitesimally small. But a boy can dream, can’t he? But this dream certainly isn’t going to happen just because I want it to. No, not even if I want it to really badly. I, in fact, have to produce stories that people enjoy reading, or at least stories that scratch some itch inside of them. What do my (currently non-existent) readers want to read? Well, to be fair, that’s a tough question to answer when I haven’t written anything yet, so my readers are basically an imaginary set of people within what I think is a target market for my work.
But, still, it’s something I have to keep in mind. It’s certainly OK to write because it’s some sort of compulsion. And, perhaps, if you’ve already won the aforementioned lottery and are at the level of somebody like Stephen King, writing about whatever weird shit pops into your head is OK, and people will buy it, because you’re a brand they trust. You’ve earned that.
Shockingly, though, I haven’t quite earned that with my 500-word newspaper articles on high school football, or my 2,000-word feature on some women’s basketball coaches, enticing as that work may be to my mom. I may be a brand to her, but I’m just a name in a massive ocean of names to everyone who doesn’t know me. And, even if my mom buys a copy of my book for every one of her friends, that’s probably not quite enough to make me a NY Times Bestseller.
So, I need to let go a bit. I need to think of myself as a conduit between the reader and story, allowing the reader to experience it through the words I’m writing. I’m a means for the reader to learn about the characters, to become enveloped in this new world I’m creating. If it’s just my own story, I might as well just print out a few copies for my mom to brag to her friends about, and be done with it. If I want to get it into the hands of lots of people to enjoy, though, and do the same for future stories, I need to be the connection, not the owner.
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