For the last year, I've been mentoring
a very bright young writer. This student is preternaturally skillful
and desires a career as a writer of entertainment novels, and I
believe this writer can make it as a commercial novelist. This writer
has also been accepted into a great writing program and possibly
doesn't know of a potential conflict between the writer's goals and
the program's focus.
This presented a dilemma. Prestigious
writing programs almost universally teach writing as art, not as
entertainment. Writing as art - what we call literary writing - is
instructive, helpful, worthy, and generally wonderful. And the
stellar examples of literary writing will be studied forever.
However, literary writing comes up short in one significant area. It
generally doesn't sell very well, which makes it difficult for
literary writers to ever quit their day jobs and pay the bills with
writing alone. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this
generalization, literary novels that find a wide audience and make
their writers financially comfortable. But they are rare exceptions.
In contrast, the vast majority of
novels that earn much money fall into the category of writing as
entertainment.
Thus my dilemma was whether or not I
should tell this young writer about the usual writing program focus
on literary writing, a focus that sometimes disparages the very
writing that this young writer hopes to pursue for both
emotional fulfillment as well as financial success.
Both categories of writing are
valuable. Learning all one can about literary writing could only
benefit an entertainment writer and vice versa. The problem comes in
the attitude with which literary writing is taught. Many literary
writers feel that their calling is loftier and worthier than the
calling of entertainment writers. At best, some literary writers are
indifferent and believe there is some value in most writing. At
worst, some literary writers are condescending toward entertainment
writers. As an entertainment writer, I've personally experienced this
condescension many times, from universities to community colleges to
writing conferences to poetry slams to support groups.
I decided that the writer I've been
helping should know of this possibility in advance of attending the
writing program.
So I wrote the writer a letter. Because other writers may be interested in this subject, I print much of it here:
Dear Young Writer,
Once again, you've impressed me with
your story. Great characters (some of whom we cheer on and some of
whom we love to hate!) and great plotting. I'm eager to see where
this story goes.
I've done my usual scratchings all over
your pages, mostly finding nothing to fix other than fussy copy
edits. All the important stuff, the characters, the plot, the
storytelling, is really good.
Many congratulations are deserved for
getting accepted into such a famous writing program! I expect that
you will receive a marvelous education and benefit from it for the
rest of your life.
While I want you to be enthusiastic
about all that your university has to offer, I also want to give you
the caveat that many if not most writing professors in MFA programs
have a strong bias toward literary writing, and they celebrate those
stories and styles that garner National Book Awards and Pulitzers
etc. Although there are numerous and notable exceptions to much of
what I'm about to say, these literary works are often realistic
stories with beautiful sentences, strong characters, purposefully
weak plots, and bleak endings. Many professors are suspicious of
strong plots, and are especially uncomfortable with stories that end
well and hence are not realistic and true to life.
Your professors may well love your
writing, and I'm certain they will like you. But if you should find
that your teachers are not as enthusiastic about your storytelling as
you'd like, please remember that they are generally not enthusiastic
about the writing of most successful writers of popular fiction,
especially the ones who have found the greatest audience. This has
been the case for hundreds of years, and there are many writers who
were successful in their day who were considered hacks by the critics
and the professors. Some of those writers are celebrated now. Even
Shakespeare was considered to be nothing notable during his lifetime.
There is a frightful snobbishness in
some circles that equates popularity with bad writing. Of course,
many popular novels are bad writing. But there is no
causality. To dismiss popular writing simply because it's popular is
absurd, yet many in the literary community do just that. The contrary
also applies. To celebrate writing simply because of its literary
pretensions is equally absurd.
There is a catchphrase in the online
writing community that says that just because Big Macs are popular
doesn't make them great food. This is a silly straw man argument. It
is easy (especially for a good writer) to twist the discussion such
that a pejorative judgment about entertainment writing seems obvious
and appropriate, ignoring the fact that no one is saying that popular
writing is inherently good any more than popular food is inherently
good. This applies across many arenas. For example, everyone knows
that more people frame and hang prints of typical pretty pictures or
contemporary pop art in their homes than hang prints of art that has been endorsed by art critics. But that doesn't make all pretty pictures bad. The list of
visual artists who painted pop art and were once scorned by critics
and professors but now take up wings in museums is as long as the
list of writers who were once dismissed or ignored but are now
considered good or even great. Some of those very writers are even
studied in graduate writing programs.
The slow process of critics coming
around to appreciate successful writers has accelerated just a bit in
recent years. Stephen King is still reviled by many literary writing
teachers, although some have begun to reluctantly acknowledge that he
is quite a good storyteller. Eventually, he will likely be regarded
as a something of a master who wrote some spotty stuff in with the
good stuff. J.K Rowling has undergone a similar trajectory. The
general opinion in MFA circles is that if it's popular, it can't
really be good unless it was written by Barbara Kingsolver or Richard
Ford or Alice Walker or Saul Bellow or... You get the idea. Working
in the thriller and mystery genres, I've always noticed the writers
who were pejoratively categorized as pulp and noir writers years ago,
writers who are now studied extensively in many writing programs (Think James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard).
Among the MFA crowd, there is a deep
mistrust of the preferences of average readers. Much the way "serious" film
critics rarely praise popular movies and instead heap their praises
on “art films,” people in the business of literary writing might
feel foolish if they found anything to praise in a work of popular
fiction. They might even worry that their colleagues would think
they'd gone soft and lost their edge.
By the way, I should point out that
there is nothing wrong with “writing as art.” Writers like James
Joyce are still celebrated even though almost no one reads their work. I
only take exception to literary writing teachers dismissing
entertainment writing wholesale. (I think of the way T.S. Eliot
dismissed Hamlet. It brought Eliot some notoriety, but it didn't seem
to nick Shakespeare's cred.)
It could be argued that any novel that
people eagerly pick up in order to escape the minutia of day-to-day
life is something to respect. It could be argued that any novel that
simply gets people reading - people who otherwise might sit in front
of the TV - is something to admire.
I mention all this because I believe
you have an understanding of story that will, with practice, allow
you to find success as a writer of popular fiction. You know what the
characteristics of successful popular fiction are - a strongly
sympathetic protagonist in deep trouble early on, other distinct
characters, good and bad, a prominent antagonist who is believably
evil, and a pounding plot, rising to a big climax.
Some of the very characteristics that
will help you launch a successful writing career, strong plots, for
example, are characteristics that are sometimes treated as crassly
commercial in advanced writing programs. Never mind that the pounding
plot is one of the characteristics that Shakespeare rode to the top
of everyone's list. (Except T.S. Eliot's) If a contemporary writer
wrote plots as over-the-top as Hamlet, everyone in the business,
including writing professors, would laugh. But of course, readers
would voraciously suck it up and make that writer rich.
So while I applaud your school choice,
and I believe you will find it a fantastic experience, I also want
you to be strong if you get any flack for those aspects of your
writing that will help you to find commercial success. You may see
professors praising well-written stories that are moody and bleak and
not very exciting. They may use as fine writing examples stories that
are so rich with metaphor as to be inscrutable. They may commend
character transformations so subtle that no one outside of writing
classes even notices them. They may fill your studies with complex
discussions of literary theory and aesthetics, all of which are good
but some of which might distract from your focus.
If these things happen, don't let it
intimidate you. Those moody, bleak stories with little or no plot
don't generally sell. Their writers sometimes win prestigious awards,
but most of them have to work a day job their entire lives. There are
of course literary writers who get good advances and find a large
audience. But with “good” advances trending below $30,000
(especially for literary fiction), and with the net after taxes, agent fees, and
expenses being a portion of that, it is very difficult to earn a
living. To add perspective, the average advance on a novel is now
$5000. Divide by the number of hours it takes to write a novel and
you can see that any sane writer would either augment their hobby
with a teaching career or else focus on polishing up their
“entertainment writing” chops.
In contrast, successful entertainment
writers will find higher average advances (because their books sell
better). Research will uncover many entertainment writers who get
$75,000 advances and, by writing multiple series, do that with two or
three books a year. Carry that forward for a 20 or 30-year writing
career, and it adds up.
And in the new world of publishing,
increasing numbers of authors are jumping their New York Publisher's
ships and finding that they don't need a publisher to reach an
audience. So why give a publisher the majority of the income? Many of
the growing numbers of successful self-published authors are making
more money than all but the very top tier of New York-published
authors.
What does this have to do with your
writing school?
This is another area that elicits
groans from many in the literary community. Because the MFA crowd
regards the imprimatur of a New York publisher as the required
indication of approval for any writing, the author who goes it alone
is considered to be trapped in the ghetto of self-publishing, clearly
unworthy.
This critique group also overlooks the
many authors they revere who started out - and in some cases have
gone back to - self-publishing. Or maybe they simply don't know how
many of their favorite authors have a long and/or current history
with self-publishing.
Keep the faith. Stories like yours have
value. Stories like yours provide entertainment for countless
readers. Stories like yours sell. And writers like you - after a lot
of practice and polishing your chops and, usually, multiple books -
get to have the greatest job in the world. Your commute is from your
desk to the coffee maker, you can stay up as late as you want, sleep
in as late as you want, and you have no boss hanging over your
shoulder. And you will get thousands of gushing emails from happy
readers, asking you to write faster!
I don't want you to get a chip on your
shoulder. There will be a great deal to learn from your professors,
and it will be worth every minute. But don't let the literary
community make you doubt the value of your goal to earn a living as
an entertainment writer. Writing popular fiction compared to writing
literary fiction is like swing dancing or jazz dancing compared to
ballet. It's like playing music by ear compared to following the
strict dictates of a score. It's like painting the subject of your
choice in the studio of your choice rather than mastering figure
drawing at an atelier before you are allowed to start using color
pigment. It's like free skiing in deep powder compared to a rigorous
discipline of slalom racing. All the above categories have value, and
none is better than the others, but the former in each case is
probably more fun. And for writers, entertainment writing certainly
pays far more on average than literary writing, which allows you to
chuck the day job once you find your audience.
So learn as much as you can, but don't
ever jettison what you already know about writing fiction. You may
even find yourself writing in two styles, one to satisfy teachers
(nothing wrong with that) and another style to satisfy your future
readers. All will be good practice and a good experience.
Good luck, have fun, and stay in touch!
Todd
