Self-Organizing Man

Crawford Kilian’s post at Writing Fiction just leapt out at me this morning.  He responded at length to a newbie writer’s questions about language, publishing and the necessity of obtaining an advanced degree. 

"Embarking on a writing career is like investing in your retirement. You are sending your future self a gift, and you can’t expect to start spending the proceeds right now."

I’ve been reading short stories of late, as that is what I’m writing.  Kilian encourages voracious reading habits, especially nonfiction.  He writes:

What you write is your contribution to a conversation that’s been going on since someone wrote about Gilgamesh and Ut-Napishtim thousands of years ago. You should be reading voraciously in the genres you want to write in, but you should also read widely in other genres, not to mention nonfiction.

This has several good effects: You will be encouraged to see how much crap gets published, so your own crap doesn’t look so bad in comparison. You will also see how storytelling problems crop up and how different authors solve them. And when you read nonfiction to do research for your fiction, it’s not just informative; it’s a hell of a lot of fun to hunt for good stuff you can use in your story.

Let me write one sentence again.  "You will be encouraged to see how much crap gets published, so your own crap doesn’t look so bad in comparison."

Amen!  Many modern short stories called literature are crap.  Bad.  Boring.  Awful. 

Genre (mystery, sci-fi) short stories excel.  I spent yesterday reading Best American Mystery Stories 2004.  Each story is masterful, well-plotted and engaging.  (These three adjectives are ones I cannot use for its sister publication The Best American Short Stories 2004.  I can, however, encourage people to use this anthology as a tool to combat insomnia.)

Daunted and delighted by the mystery stories I read, I thought, "What the hell am I doing writing?!" 

Because I’ve been practicing at short stories, writing, rewriting, gutting, writing and so on just long enough to have been bitten.  I will not turn away from writing. I cannot.  And I am pleased to have these mystery stories as guides, urging me to newer better standards.

When will my fiction be published?  I don’t know.

I have been publishing nonfiction for more than ten years.  Yet fiction is the real deal, right?  For reasons I cannot yet comprehend, fiction is my gold standard.  But who knows when the fiction publications will take off.  They will, one day.  So I just keep at it.

I now know when I am writing crap as I am writing it.  I did not know that a year ago.  Today I keep at it.  No matter what.  More than ever I trust my own process.

As Kilian ends,  "I wish you luck. But mostly I wish you ego, energy, and patience."