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alexpgpHmmm. I've been reading ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bandicoot's recent posts, and I think he's spot on with his observations about the likely future of LJ. I just hope things don't develop to their logical conclusion, but the only thing that will prevent that is to change what is being done now.
Normally, I'd offer my own two cents on What Is To Be Done, but reading the exchange bandicoot points to kinda makes me feel as if I'd be wasting my time. If I feel particularly ambitious, I may go ahead and do so anyway... in any event, I'm going to indulge my ego and export the entries I've posted since stumbling across this site.
I will further indulge my ego and ramble on a bit about the role writing has played in my life. I beg your indulgence in advance...
Somewhere along the way in my development, I became a word person. I love language. I love words. In school, I loved learning new strange new words and adding them to my vocabulary, though I hated writing papers and essays as much as any of my classmates.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, my dad was a writer. He was a journalist and edited magazines from time to time. In my senior year of high school, my mom - who always suspected that writing was in my blood - came home from the library one day and dropped off a few copies of The Writer in my room. My first impression of the magazine was that despite appearing to be written for people who wanted to be published writers, something didn't quite jell about the content... except for the section in the back - which listed various places that bought articles from writers. That grabbed my attention.
Up to then, I'd never considered trying to write for money, but a few weeks later - and I forget the details, except for the fact that I needed a source of pocket money - I approached the publisher of our town paper, the Locust Valley Leader, to find out if she would be interested in a summary of the high school track team's efforts as it sallied forth to compete that spring. I seem to remember my heart pounding really hard as I made my pitch.
She said yes, though not too enthusiastically, if memory serves. But a yes is a yes, regardless of enthusiasm, so I wrote about what happened (heck, I was at the meet to run the 220 and 440 sprints anyway, so...) and delivered it to the paper's office by the stated deadline.
Two weeks later, the publisher - who was also the editor-in-chief - changed her tune. It turned out she really liked my reports, and even gave me a raise, from 40 cents per column inch to 50. I was elated and began to dream of becoming a writer.
My dream remained unrealized for many years. My problem lay in not having much written product to send to begin with, and not knowing where (nor how, nor to whom) to send the few pieces that I had written. Eventually, I decided to risk disappointment and enrolled in an evening, non-credit course on non-fiction writing at the New School for Social Research, in Manhattan. (It would give me something to do as I waited for Galina to get out of her ESL class upstairs in the same building.)
I say I was risking disappointment because I'd gone to a couple of writing workshops previously, and found them populated with students (and often, teachers) who loved to talk about their creative juices, proper working environments, the evils of the passive voice, and the Art of Writing, but who were apparently clueless about how to go about writing something and actually selling it to someone and getting it published.
The instructor for the course at the New School was an older, no-nonsense kind of guy named Hayes Jacobs, who had been writing for publication since shortly after the Creation, I think. He laid out the ground rules for the course the first night: Students were invited to submit their work to Jacobs, who would critique it in the intervening week and then discuss selected sections of the work in class the following week. The rest of the night covered the format in which work would be submitted (typed, double-spaced, on one side of a page, wide margins all the way around, with title and name placed here and slugs placed there, and so on). Our only available option was the color of paper to be used: it could be white or yellow.
Oh, yes, there was one other rule. Submissions containing spelling errors would not be critiqued.
Such restrictions were not a violation of our constitutional rights, said Jacobs. All editors had such requirements, and if we wanted to sell copy, we had to toe the editor's line. I was impressed, as this was the first piece of solid guidance and advice that I'd ever heard regarding the craft of writing.
Since there were no student submissions to discuss the following week, Jacobs held forth on subjects such as how to submit work to an editor, how to find editors, and how to find out what they want. Pure gold, all of it, to my inexperienced ears.
Of the class of about 20 students - I seem to recall I was the only male in the group - only a handful submitted work that week. Nothing of mine was in the pile of papers on his desk at the end of the night, which made me realize that I was as much of a "wannabe" as most of the other folks who'd signed up for the class, and brought home something the instructor had said earlier in the evening.
"Most of you here," said Jacobs, peering at us through his Coke-bottle glasses, "don't really want to write. You want to have been published, which is a completely different proposition. If you fall into the latter group, you are wasting your time in my class."
Next week, and more often than not in the weeks that followed, Jacobs' pile of submissions included something of mine. His discussions of work submitted the previous week included recommendations as to how the text might be improved, and where particular articles might be placed.
In the end, I learned a lot, but it wasn't really enough. I actually sent out a bunch of articles, but all I got in return was a bunch of rejection slips. In retrospect, my failure was not in my writing, but in not sending editors stuff they needed.
Eventually, I broke through that barrier by concentrating on figuring out what editors wanted, and then writing articles about those subjects.
But that is a subject best left for a future post...
Cheers...
bandicoot's recent posts, and I think he's spot on with his observations about the likely future of LJ. I just hope things don't develop to their logical conclusion, but the only thing that will prevent that is to change what is being done now. Normally, I'd offer my own two cents on What Is To Be Done, but reading the exchange bandicoot points to kinda makes me feel as if I'd be wasting my time. If I feel particularly ambitious, I may go ahead and do so anyway... in any event, I'm going to indulge my ego and export the entries I've posted since stumbling across this site.
I will further indulge my ego and ramble on a bit about the role writing has played in my life. I beg your indulgence in advance...
Somewhere along the way in my development, I became a word person. I love language. I love words. In school, I loved learning new strange new words and adding them to my vocabulary, though I hated writing papers and essays as much as any of my classmates.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, my dad was a writer. He was a journalist and edited magazines from time to time. In my senior year of high school, my mom - who always suspected that writing was in my blood - came home from the library one day and dropped off a few copies of The Writer in my room. My first impression of the magazine was that despite appearing to be written for people who wanted to be published writers, something didn't quite jell about the content... except for the section in the back - which listed various places that bought articles from writers. That grabbed my attention.
Up to then, I'd never considered trying to write for money, but a few weeks later - and I forget the details, except for the fact that I needed a source of pocket money - I approached the publisher of our town paper, the Locust Valley Leader, to find out if she would be interested in a summary of the high school track team's efforts as it sallied forth to compete that spring. I seem to remember my heart pounding really hard as I made my pitch.
She said yes, though not too enthusiastically, if memory serves. But a yes is a yes, regardless of enthusiasm, so I wrote about what happened (heck, I was at the meet to run the 220 and 440 sprints anyway, so...) and delivered it to the paper's office by the stated deadline.
Two weeks later, the publisher - who was also the editor-in-chief - changed her tune. It turned out she really liked my reports, and even gave me a raise, from 40 cents per column inch to 50. I was elated and began to dream of becoming a writer.
My dream remained unrealized for many years. My problem lay in not having much written product to send to begin with, and not knowing where (nor how, nor to whom) to send the few pieces that I had written. Eventually, I decided to risk disappointment and enrolled in an evening, non-credit course on non-fiction writing at the New School for Social Research, in Manhattan. (It would give me something to do as I waited for Galina to get out of her ESL class upstairs in the same building.)
I say I was risking disappointment because I'd gone to a couple of writing workshops previously, and found them populated with students (and often, teachers) who loved to talk about their creative juices, proper working environments, the evils of the passive voice, and the Art of Writing, but who were apparently clueless about how to go about writing something and actually selling it to someone and getting it published.
The instructor for the course at the New School was an older, no-nonsense kind of guy named Hayes Jacobs, who had been writing for publication since shortly after the Creation, I think. He laid out the ground rules for the course the first night: Students were invited to submit their work to Jacobs, who would critique it in the intervening week and then discuss selected sections of the work in class the following week. The rest of the night covered the format in which work would be submitted (typed, double-spaced, on one side of a page, wide margins all the way around, with title and name placed here and slugs placed there, and so on). Our only available option was the color of paper to be used: it could be white or yellow.
Oh, yes, there was one other rule. Submissions containing spelling errors would not be critiqued.
Such restrictions were not a violation of our constitutional rights, said Jacobs. All editors had such requirements, and if we wanted to sell copy, we had to toe the editor's line. I was impressed, as this was the first piece of solid guidance and advice that I'd ever heard regarding the craft of writing.
Since there were no student submissions to discuss the following week, Jacobs held forth on subjects such as how to submit work to an editor, how to find editors, and how to find out what they want. Pure gold, all of it, to my inexperienced ears.
Of the class of about 20 students - I seem to recall I was the only male in the group - only a handful submitted work that week. Nothing of mine was in the pile of papers on his desk at the end of the night, which made me realize that I was as much of a "wannabe" as most of the other folks who'd signed up for the class, and brought home something the instructor had said earlier in the evening.
"Most of you here," said Jacobs, peering at us through his Coke-bottle glasses, "don't really want to write. You want to have been published, which is a completely different proposition. If you fall into the latter group, you are wasting your time in my class."
Next week, and more often than not in the weeks that followed, Jacobs' pile of submissions included something of mine. His discussions of work submitted the previous week included recommendations as to how the text might be improved, and where particular articles might be placed.
In the end, I learned a lot, but it wasn't really enough. I actually sent out a bunch of articles, but all I got in return was a bunch of rejection slips. In retrospect, my failure was not in my writing, but in not sending editors stuff they needed.
Eventually, I broke through that barrier by concentrating on figuring out what editors wanted, and then writing articles about those subjects.
But that is a subject best left for a future post...
Cheers...
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no subject
Date: 2001-08-15 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2001-08-15 11:00 am (UTC)One friend who has two published SF novels can't get a third published because her first two, while modestly successful, weren't major hits, which is what publishers are looking for now. They are apparently no longer interested in nurturing new talent and promoting them in the hopes of creating new hits like they once were, but want new "instant" hits right out of the box. I suspect that approach will be severely self-limiting, as few new authors are good enough to generate major hits with their first works.
One problem with business today is that they want instant profit gratification, and seem to have little awareness that they're shooting themselves in the foot in the long run.
I'll be interested in what you have to say in your next installment.
no subject
Date: 2001-08-15 09:03 pm (UTC)Publishing is undergoing a big change right now. On the one hand, the big companies are trying, as you note, to concentrate on "instant successes." A lot of other people are trying to sift through the rest of what's out there and pick up the nuggets for a pittance, or at least under terms that are very favorable to them in the long run.
Cheers...
no subject
Date: 2001-08-15 08:25 pm (UTC)