The Two Paths: What It Means to Be a Writer Today Part 2

The Two Paths


In my previous post, I explored the news for writers emerging from the ashes of traditional publishing. Recently, I have been thinking about how writers get started. Two people I know have recently asked me for advice, or else didn’t get out of the way fast enough when I offered it. These two friends couldn’t be more different in terms of age: one is 23, the other 45. They also couldn’t be more similar. They feel frustrated at what life has to offer in the way of engagement with the world. No jobs for the high minded, for the restless of soul, for writers.

They also want to make some money doing something they love. What can I say?

In reality I don’t say anything, not compared to what I feel should be said. It’s not feasible to dump one’s accumulated riffs and rants, the burnt seeds of wasted potential, the caffeinated speed raps, the fruit of reading and thought and experience. Forty years of that.

Instead, I say to the young, go, if you must, to law school, because there is no path that I can even point you down. We know you’ve tried to get internships, job interviews, but as of September 15, 2008 the old ways of wetting your feet while writing your first stories just up and vanished.

Forty years ago, when my wife and I and our friends stumbled blinking into the world, there was such a way. I now know it was more of an illusion but it had the blind unwavering trust of millions and so was stable underfoot. Here it is:

You emerge from your evolutionary pool—school, library, gang—with the sense of a secret power, perhaps your only power: words have extraordinary meaning for you. In turn you value them, honor what they can do, and practice like a samurai until adept in their use.

In college your abilities are recognized, which is nice. But in the old guild style you are expected to hang back, work hard, write a showcase story or novel excerpt, which is brought to the attention of a magazine editor —a quarterly or journal—who after a couple rejections publishes something. After a couple more acceptances the names of an editor or two at the slicks are murmured to you. You write and are terse and polite. They write back one-sentence verdicts, thumbs up, mostly down.

You send a story. Rejected. Another. Rejected. You’re out of stories. You write more; it’s becoming like a regular job now. Either you get on the stick and crank or you’ll still be doing this when you’re 25! And now you’re broke and the family isn’t sending any money and somebody murmurs “Grad school.”

Either you go or you don’t; it’s more of the same. Now you’re 25. Words still do it for you. But money is no longer discretionary; without it creative thinking gets banished to third or fourth on the day’s to-do list.

Now, thus far this story describes a world that still exists in outline, in living memory. But what follows no longer survives: a ladder of literary markets.

Kurt Vonnegut apologized to a bunch of us in 1975 at Iowa, saying he felt shitty about our prospects when he used to be able to sell a story to The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal for $5,000 or even $10,000. That money from the “slicks” subsidized the likes of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-5. Meanwhile we could look forward to fighting over $250 honorariums and payment in copies. Kurt was a sci-fi writer, he could see the future wasn’t getting any better. It never does.

So the ladder vanished, rung by rung. The network of fiction editors was squeezed for pages, lost column inches to diets and TV stars, and then lost their jobs. Short stories no longer ran in magazines—the argument that a spate of unreadable experimental fictions accelerated the process has merit, but really it was TV, then cable, and long before the Internet we’d lost Mademoiselle, Glamour, all the women’s mags we once turned our noses up at. And the ecology of fiction went into shock. Book excerpts, of mid-list novels, used to be subject to bidding wars. An author might get a couple hundred grand on top of her advance. No more.

Meanwhile the old guild system was failing, without all that fresh green money to water the roots the new trees weren’t thriving. Used to be, a writer like John Irving could publish a couple or three books that didn’t sell many copies and then he’d have his “break-out book” and the publisher would rush copies of his old books back into the stores and they’d become retroactive bestsellers, too. And everyone got rich, or at least made good money, and did so while upholding an ecosystem that guaranteed a stable future.

Once that was gone—no slicks, no excerpts, no patience to let writers grow (because money = patience)—book publishing became like Broadway. Where, as playwright Robert Anderson said to us at Iowa, you can make a killing, but you can’t make a living.

This is a good place to pause, with our two writers facing his or her respective paths, or rather, standing where the paths peter out before a great dark wood. The young writer, wondering whether to persist, the more mature writer, starting out in the evening, both are going to make a choice.

What they decide—and the consequences thereof—will be dealt with in my next post.