How to become a published writer (1 of 2)

“A man of low intelligence believes, against all evidence, that he is an exception, and that the world owes him happiness.” Unsourced

He knew they wouldn’t like what he’d written, so he thought he’d just make that very admission right from the off[S1] . Unreliant on that slippery trope which seeks to propel the reader past the point where they’d[1] otherwise have already correctly deemed the piece to be rubbish, -- around now[2] -- he’d be unburdened and free of pressure. Liberated. But he didn’t know, because if he had, he’d never have made the admission in the first place and would have just discarded the piece in a shot. More like he suspected. There was still a shred of doubt in his mind that there was something in it, and so, bravely, he ploughed on.

The notion that the reader wouldn’t like what he’d written wasn’t new and was carved into every piece he did. It was the sine qua non of wanting desperately that the reader like it, i.e. him, and he executed all manner of fatuous linguistic trick to try to bring this about, with unsurprisingly the opposite effect. He hadn’t in fact decided to write anything in the sense of having made a resolution to do so; hadn’t planned, evaluated or done any research, and there was no writing, no plot, no scene-setting, no action, no climax, retardation or denouement. Real writing had some if not all of these things. It was forged from assiduously-acquired material hailing from a clearly delineated historical epoch. It employed an embarrassment of tried and tested techniques such as point-of-view, time-shifts, defining and establishing a sense of place, allegory, symbolism, meaning, repetition and lists in order to be able to meld and merge numerous disparate narrative strands into one satisfying whole. It had characters in it, numerous tightly-drawn and psychologically taut characters, characters who spoke in heavy dialects or whose dialogue was stilted enough to give it that ring of failing somehow to replicate the conversation of normal everyday life. He had no characters but imaginary ones and himself. As usual, his assumption of position before computer was down to nothing more than a rash impulse to churn something out and not to any desire to entertain or edify his potential reader. Meaning he couldn’t have come to the conclusion that the reader wouldn’t like what he’d decided to write, because he wasn’t even writing with one in mind, demonstrating that his beliefs were often founded on fallacies, confirming that he was a complete prick. This wasn’t writing. Fine if he was saying that he wasn’t imaginative enough to come up with a bona fide story, but say exactly that instead: I’m not imaginative enough to come up with a decent story.

That his overarching psychopathology might be alienating the reader bristled in and out of his awareness like engine noise to a car driver. It wasn’t crucial that they carried on[3], but that they did so, and liked him, and thought he was clever and handsome, plus pretty cool to boot and all those other things he liked to think about himself in camera whenever he managed to pierce through the manifold layers of self-hatred, was something he was able to confess he anticipated would bring him a good deal of satisfaction. His idea of happiness was completely aligned with and conditional upon becoming an admired and published writer. They could call him in suspiciously over-sincere voices saying how struck they were by it, especially by its unique cock-eyed brand of humour. He could furnish them with a script setting out what to say and somehow erase from his mind thereafter any memory of those words having been supplied by him, since it was probable, if not likely, that he’d come up with more apposite remarks than they anyway. But, no, joking aside, he wouldn’t want this happiness to be brought about under sufferance -- no sirree -- or out of any sense of pity, and to ensure that the reader took this non-pity condition to be no more than just an empty statement, he sought to adduce his pained awareness of that sappy phenomenon of ‘bestowing-undue-praise’ as evidence that he was firmly on the side of veracity -- brutal honesty -- as opposed to that of fawning and not hurting feelings when it came to the whole believing-what-people-say-in-response-to-your-scatty-attempts-at-literature-debate.

Ideas abounded as to what should be written and how, ideas so deeply entrenched that the very idea that he could divest himself of these abundant ideas could only be processed by dint of their replacement with other equally normative ideas. Gradually he’d learned to place less value on opening sentences, on their being unremittingly dynamic, seductive and original, which was all in all a positive step. But his opening sentence was still ungainly and encumbered, even if adjectives tended to go better in pairs. Numerous other bad habits and stylistic incongruencies persisted. How can I be good enough to arrest your attention?, he kept asking himself unconsciously, failing to understand that if you were good, you didn’t need to venture into that murky hinterland of questioning author/narrator/character/reader relationship just to get something off the ground, a something which everyone could understand and had no need to be explicitly stated to them, because to attempt to state it was fatuous and beyond the necessity of the thing.  There was -- in his mind --  a perceived dichotomy between material written by successful, published i.e. genuine writers and what those who’d never have a rat’s chance in hell scrawled down, and actually he had very little idea of what made a coherent piece despite the fact that he’d read an awful lot of real writers’ work. This of course begged the question of how one actually achieved publication and highlighted the fact that at some point a published writer hadn’t yet been published, and not only that, that a published writer couldn’t have known that he would be. Dot, dot dot.

He paused for a moment to collect his unruly and contemptuous thoughts. That which he was at greatest pains to admit, but which I’m going to make him admit right now, is that he was the most easily influenced writer you could possibly imagine. How he hated to disclose his sources, because he was literally nothing without them. Having failed to find his own voice over a period of seven and a half years, he’d resigned himself to the fact that he didn’t have one, then for some time he clutched tenuously to the idea that the whole voice thing had been a red herring all along, designed to stop people like him from writing in the first place. But what he was really loth to confess was that his initial motivation for sitting in front of his laptop had actually been to try to write, basically, a complete copy of a John Barth short story called ‘Life-Story’ which he’d picked up a few months prior. When this strategy appeared to be failing, he attempted to shore it up with various misconstrued ideas from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, thankfully removed at a later stage. In the pages’ margins appeared his scraggly raggedy propeller-pencilled remarks as if to prove to himself that he’d got the point. And if you happen to know this John Barth short story, which I don’t think you will, Mum, you’ll realise immediately that this piece is a very cheap knock-off like those Rolex imitations you used to be able to pick up in Hong Kong circa 1990.  In fact, it’s hardly as good as it barely resembles the original at all. (That analogy doesn’t work because he isn’t intending to pass this work off as that of John Barth and when he realises this, he will decide to delete the sentence, and if it stays in, it won’t be because he thought it was worth leaving there, but only because he’s too lazy to take it out. It’ll most probably be in brackets as if to somehow relieve himself of responsibility for it.) We all know you don’t imitate someone out of your ball park, and he should too. He had an earnestness in that regard; an attraction towards self-improvement, a nagging feeling that whenever he wasn’t writing he should be, because that was the only endeavour worth pursuing. What a prat! He had very little visceral understanding, in fact he really didn’t have a clue why he wrote other than that he still wanted to be famous and liked. But if he only knew how little people observed him or cared what he wrote, let alone who he tried to imitate, how little they took stock of all his perversions, complexes and painfully nuanced thought-processes, he’d surely be a much less troubled and troublesome individual. He might even be able to stop writing, live, have intercourse and become a millionaire[4].

In apparent justification of his predicament, and in effort at alignment to another’s who he admired and considered worthy of aligning himself with, his mind turned to a scene from one of his favourite motion pictures. In this motion picture, the protagonist finds himself at an impasse in the development of his screenplay and decides to attend a very highly-regarded, but to his high mind, shamefully trite creative-writing seminar, in order to help him break through his writer’s block. Just as they’re drawing to a close, just as the predominating atmosphere stales out with the palpable whiff of Sunday evening lassitude and weariness, our protag, replete with a curious combination of courage and desperation (that this might be his final opportunity), manages to eke in a question to this gregarious exuberant demonstrative, gravitas-laden and eminently successful professor/seminar leader, his major ground-breaking question, the one that he’s been grappling with for months, and whose very asking he believes demonstrates that he’s identified literature’s fundamental issue, yes, this unwitting person actually brings forth these words, in stutters, but also with a totally misplaced sense of conviction in their truth, saying, Sir, he calls him Sir, what if you can’t find anything to write about, because nothing really happens; because there are no neat realisations in life or characters learning from their situation, no epiphanies or life-lessons, you feel that life is just a series of mundane events, and what if in order to recreate reality authentically, you realise that you really have to write about nothing at all? whereupon a frigid silence grips the auditorium, we think, perhaps he’s displaced this guru from his perch with his supremely valid point, but, no, the professor is toying with him, the pause is exploitative, he’s limbering up, playing off this poor patsy as if put in the audience just to ask the professor this one question, that even he couldn’t have dared hoped for, eliciting his entire literary ideology in four or five damning sentences, THINGS HAPPEN ALL THE TIME, that IF YOU CAN’T GODDAM WELL FIND ANYTHING TO WRITE ABOUT MY FRIEND, WELL WOE BETIDE YOU, or some such similar peroration, PEOPLE DIE, THEY GET SICK THEY FALL IN AND OUT OF LOVE, A MOTHER GIVES BIRTH TO SEXTUPLETS,  A YOUNG WOMAN GETS PROMOTED AT WORK, SOMEONE YOU KNOW LOSES THEIR JOB,  A FATHER PUTS HIS LIFE ON THE LINE FOR HIS DYING SON, A MAN COMES BACK TO HIS HOUSE ONE DAY TO FIND IT REDUCED TO A PILE OF ASHES etc. And the poor man has been defeated.