Recently, over at Freya's blog, she asked the question: is traditional publication a vanity project? Which led me, via an innovative mental process, to interpret the question as: is it, in fact, cheating?
That's given me good for thought. It seems to me that, in order to cheat, by definition there has to be a set of rules.
When I first started out writing fiction, I used to think - in some hazy, undefined way - that the world of authors and publishing was some kind of meritocracy. Or perhaps it operated on some kind of conveyor belt principle. Essentially, you queued up, collecting ideas along the way. Then you wrote your book and submitted it to a 'few' agents. In the fullness of time - and it seemed to me that three to six months was a fair and equitable arrangement - one of the agents took you on and they subsequently (three to six months again) found you a publisher. And hey presto, in due course (or, as I like to think of it, three to six months' time), your book hit the shelves.
QED, you might say, if that particular plan had worked for you. You might, but I didn't.
Ask any writer, though, and they'll give you a plethora of
stories to demonstrate the unreliability of rules. Even at the writing stage,
new plots emerge, characters dwindle and genres metamorphose (for example, my
thriller, Standpoint, was originally intended to be a crime drama, until the
characters thought better).
Once the book is written, plans can fall through. That agent
who didn’t reject you initially and asked to see the whole manuscript (be still
my heart) eventually turned you down because he didn’t feel he could make the
connections to get you the breakthrough and development your book deserves, in
an already crowded market.*
Or you wrote a book that suited a genre perfectly. But what
scuppered you wasn't necessarily the quality of your work; it was the relatively superior quality of other people's
work at the same time.
Or the publisher who signed you up already has a full
schedule for the next 18 months, or can only offer a small print run for newbie
authors, or tells you at the contract stage that they will require an author's
contribution of a large bag of cash.**
Then again, the book might get out there to critical
acclaim, but few sales; the two forms of success not being interdependent.
There is another, unwritten rule (forgive the irony). And
that is that every successful author ought to have worked hard for it
(suffering a little, perhaps, on behalf of all the writers who won't make it
that far), and thoroughly deserve it.
Here, I feel, we all cheat in one way or another. Maybe the
writing comes easily to us, or luck plays an important part in the process. We
know someone who knows someone. Maybe a suggestion comes, unbidden, to try door
58. A chance remark at a dinner party leads to an 'in'. (I've heard this is the
number one reason that writers attend dinner parties, followed by the chance of
free food. Personally, I've always considered my lack of dinner party invites
to be a major flaw in my campaign for publication.)
All of the above only seems like cheating, to others, if
what has worked for one person cannot be formulated and replicated by everyone.
Which is a lot like the rest of life really.
Plumbers (I know, plumbers and writers...) often get jobs on
the basis of personal recommendation, which can be hard lines for a new plumber
with no track record or connections. It isn't fair; no, it's competition.
So my message to you, dear fellow writers, is this: lose
your sense of entitlement. It's a myth and an unnecessary burden, implying, as
it does that your turn will inevitably come. And cast aside any notion o there
being a meritocracy. When it comes to getting your work into print, or online,
you use whatever connections and resources are available to you. There are no
rules. Maybe that's why it's called fiction.
Write well, edit well, submit well, self-publish well and
promote well. That's all you can rely on, and even then the outcome isn’t
guaranteed. Expect anything else and, frankly, you're only cheating yourselves.
* Actually said to me, once. If it's flannel, it's
impressive flannel.
** They wanted over £5000. See elsewhere on the blog for the
tragic details!
