This Weeks Blog OR How to be an Unsuccessful Writer

“Let’s start a blog,” I said to my mate Lance. “œEveryone’s doing it; we can be rich and famous without breaking a sweat. I can write, you can do the tricky posting stuff. What could be easier?”

I’ve always wanted to be a writer ever since I learned how to read. Writing stuff is great. It’s cool. You write stuff and then people read it and you become like Charles Dickens or Agatha Christie and when you die your words live on. Who wouldn’t want that?

I wanted it. So I wrote. I didn’t write a lot but what I did write was very definitely written with the attitude of being a writer. I was writing.

Later on I had an idea “I couldn’t be bothered writing a full length novel, just to have it rejected” so I decided to win a writing competition. That would get me started. I found an SF competition where you could win a few thousand dollars and the winning stories were published each year in an anthology. I’d stopped reading SF when I was 20, but that didn’t stop me. I got started again and wrote a story.

Then another and another, and five years later I was wondering what could possibly be wrong with all the stories I’d sent in. Were the judges a bunch of assholes? I read a copy of the anthology and thought, “My crap is better than this crap!” So I sent in another story. And another.

After three more years I realized it had to be me. Maybe my stuff was good “people told me it was” but maybe it wasn’™t good enough for me to think I deserved to win. Now I was far up my own existential rectum without a candle.

I bought a book about writing, called Sol Stein On Writing. It was really good and it told me lots of stuff; some I had already learned and some stuff I hadn’t. “I should’ve read this book twenty years ago,” I said.

It showed me there was actually a technology of writing: if I got the technical aspect of writing right I would have to win somewhere, at some time. It stood to reason. Didn’t it?

I went back to my stories and read them through again. At first I wanted to delete them all off the computer. I couldn’t see what anyone had liked in them. Maybe my friends just liked me and therefore liked my stories even though they sucked.

Outside of my circle of friends they obviously did suck, in the naked light of day they could be seen sucking like huge chest wounds or vast mud springs where whole villages had been consumed.

I realized that that was a defeatist viewpoint so I dropped it and went back to the stories. After all I’d been writing now for many years, and I’d obviously learned something. I must have learned something. What I needed was a story that had an okay plot, and then I’™d fix up the technical side of it based on the sensible rules in the book.

I found one with a plot that wasn’t too bad, in fact I could easily see what was wrong with it. I fixed it and sent it off to an SF webzine, just for variety. I’d read some of the stories on the webzine site and thought, “Hmm, this is not very good writing” my stuff is better than this.” A week later they rejected my story.

I dug up another story, one that had scored the best in my little circle of readers, applied the book to it, fixed it up and sent that off. They rejected it.

I found another story, fixed it up, and sent it off to a different webzine site. It was rejected. I sent it off to the first webzine site where it was rejected again. I found another webzine site and sent off two of the already rejected stories. They rejected them. Now I was not only being rejected by a paying SF contest/magazine (for 10 straight years) but now I was being rejected by sites that didn’t even pay when they published. (I didn’t really care about the money anyway, I just wanted to be READ. That’s what writers do – they get read!)

How bad a writer was I? What were the odds of not even fluking one acceptance? Who were these “first readers” who gave me the thumbs down with such unanimity?

What, I wondered, were the odds of failing to find at least one first reader who was in a charitable mood that day and he/she let my story get through? Maybe the answer lay in the stories the first readers were accepting instead of mine.

I went back to read more of the stories on the webzine sites. I couldn’t finish most of them. The stories had faults that were worse than my own faults. Most of the stories were corny, many of them were of the Krggzlik school of SF (where you give your characters names like Krggzlik or Zzzzgyfack and set the plot on planets called Bronchial 12 or Omega B8, or whatever); all the plots were highly derivative. Mine were at least original. Were my stories too good? No that was ridiculous.

What the f**k?

One day I met a professional writer. I sent him a story. I told him to please be honest as I needed to know what was WRONG with the story (and of course what was right). He liked the story; he said it was well-written, vividly described, well-plotted and very entertaining. “˜The only thing I can see wrong with it is that I didn’t really care very much about the characters.”™

Wow. That threw me. Should you care about the characters in an SF short story? I immediately went to my library and took down ten of my favorite books by my favorite authors. I glanced through them again: did I care about the characters?

I had to confess that it’d never occurred to me to ask this question before. I didn’t read stories or novels to care about the characters but to be amused or entertained. Once I liked the story or the plot I usually liked the characters who were in it. I tried reading some of my own stories and found that I cared somewhat about the characters. But maybe this was it “maybe I was too involved in the technicalities. Maybe I needed to let my hair down, get into the people not the plot.”

Grrrr.

By this time I was seriously considering turning to origami as my primary hobby provider. I went for a long walk.

“Listen,” I told myself, “you’re supposed to be doing this stuff because you like it. You”™ve spent thousands of hours punching away at keyboards. It”™s all been totally pointless if you don’t even enjoy it. Write something you enjoy writing.”
“Nah,” I replied. “I’ve been there and done that. I liked writing ten years ago. Then the game became “Win the contest” “that game is not winnable apparently. Now I am not liking it no matter what I write.”
“œOkay then,” I said, running out of patience. “œSo you failed. At least finish with a sprint and a laugh.”
“Fine, but this is the last story I am going to write. After this, I don’t care what happens, I’ll take up water colors or teach myself head-shrinking.”

So I sat down and started a story that I wanted to write. It was a story about two guys, an obnoxious Australian and a spoiled Englishman; the Englishman gets abducted by aliens and the Aussie gets him back. It was called The Very Last Of His Line. It took me two months in between work and other things to finish it. I laughed a lot while I was writing it. As a matter of fact I chortled so much I even forgot to tell my little circle of readers that I was writing it.

One night one of them skype’d me and asked why I hadn’t sent him any more stories. I fed him an extract of my laughfest. He said he fell on the floor gurgling. Hmm, I thought, that’s a good sign. I tidied it up and sent it off to my other readers. One thought it was very good but very Australian; one thought it was screamingly funny; one found it slightly amusing but didn’t like it much, and another one said it was “cute”. I was about to take that reader off my list – it was 14,000 words long – when I remembered that I wasn’t going to write any more stories anyway.

In between all this, a year or so earlier, I had said to my mate Lance: “Let’s start a blog. Everyone’s doing it; we can be rich and famous without breaking a sweat. I can write stuff, you can do the tricky posting stuff. What could be easier? We’ll call it Captive Brains.”

As Lance explained at the time, and I disbelieved, blogs have to be fed regularly and successful ones take a long while to get off the ground. I thought that feeding a blog when you’re a would be writer like me would be as simple as falling off a log. Actually they seem to be quite hard work and not very rewarding. A bit like trying to win an SF competition or getting published on a webzine for no pay. No one reads them! Anyone out there??

Hence this week’s blog entitled “This Week’s Blog” OR “How To Be An Unsuccessful Writer”.