After three years of working on a novel, and about one year of effort of trying to get it published, I am still no nearer to my elusive goal. Thus far I’ve put in about $1000 of my own money and about 2000 hours of time on this project. I am not qualified to write a “how-to” on this elusive subject. Nevertheless, am I qualified to write about the struggles? Perhaps.
A few weeks ago, I reported with breathless excitement about how I had finally found an agent. Well, I have now almost definitely lost this agent, because she quit her LA-based agency. This is a setback. I’ve now sent the manuscript to another LA agent in the hopes that things will turn out better. But in this game, you always have to expect that it won’t turn out better.
You really have to not only love writing, but be pathologically driven to do it, to keep taking these setbacks. When you send a short story to a magazine, the chances of getting it accepted are about as close to zero as mathematically possible. When the rejection is emailed to you, it will be generic. It will not mention the story, nor discuss its strengths or weaknesses. There is therefore no way of gauging your publishability through exposure to the publishing industry. You have to rely on friends — and thank God I’ve got some pretty astute ones — and sheer self-belief, in order to feel that your efforts aren’t totally wasted.
Of course, some would argue that getting published should only be a secondary benefit of writing. If you love it, isn’t that enough? Well, to me, writing is rather like making an argument, and like any born debater, I want to win. I write in a way that I believe is true, and I write because I want my own interests to be taken up by as many readers as possible. I write about things that I think deserve attention; things that warrant a closer look than, say, Britney Spears’ new video. I write because I want people to pay attention to love, life, death, happiness, tragedy, instead of paying attention to Britney Spears. So while the audience is never in mind when I sit down and write, it is always in my mind after I have created a piece of work that I feel is worthwhile. And I don’t feel that’s a shallow goal at all.
Art is subject to whims, fashions, and matters of taste. It is not as concrete as a bridge, and so an artist cannot argue for his right to a living with the same immediacy as an engineer. But still, I firmly believe that we are shells of beings if we live without art. It seems pretty clear to me that humankind has instinctively chosen art since the inception of our existence. We painted on caves earlier than we invented the wheel.
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But I love to read, too, and there is one of the biggest consolations of life. Ever since I started to seriously read magazines — The Believer, Harper’s, The New Yorker — I have come to see that North America has no shortage of talent in the field of short fiction. I’ve read stories that have accompanied me on lonely nights, that have thrilled me with their ingenuity, that have amazed me with their powers of perception.
Coming to the end of a great story, I think, “There is someone who understands life. He/She has lived it, observed it, and survived to tell the tale.”
The experience of living fiction humanizes us. Sometimes it can help make life a little more bearable, to remind you that you are not alone. But above all, it simply gives us more of life. Because I read, I have tasted more of life than I would were I to refrain from reading at all.
