Anyone who wants to be a writer, stop.
Anyone who wants to work in publishing, stop.
Sit down, put your feet up for an hour or two, make a cuppatee and read this.
It far more eloquently articulates what I was previously trying to say about the state of publishing in the currently looming recession, and the implications for those with barely a foot on the first rung.
There are things I remember having a profound effect upon my conception of the world as an artist. Some of them are time-honoured and conventional, such as Wilde’s De Profundis. Other examples some might raise their noses at, such as the first time I properly heard Björk or when I spent a week in Skye listening to little else but Patrick Wolf’s Wind In The Wires.
On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile is certainly one of these things. It’s possibly, for an unpublished writer in the early 21st century, the most crushingly depressing and yet strangely comforting overview of the writing-to-publishing process to be read.
Early attempts at networking typewriters often proved unnecessary and silly.
Image by radiospike photography
Too many writers are currently too focused on being published rather than simply writing, because publishing is their only perceived means of not only marking their success as a writer, but developing an audience. This is not just an improbable method to begin with (as the essay demonstrates), but is currently less likely than ever to work. In short, and as I suggested previously, writers have to find their own platforms. They have to seek out both audience and merit on their own, and on their own terms.
So here’s one particularly nice little shelter for budding bloggers and weary writers alike to huddle under, as recently pinched from a friendly Canadian’s blog.
Six Sentences is an open submissions site and online community where anyone may write anything they wish, so long as it’s in the eponymous six sentences. It’s very similar to another site I once used called 100 Words, though perhaps a little more beginner-friendly by not strictly obligating you to both write and edit every day for at least a month in order to feature on the site, though that in itself is a great discipline for those who need it. I also got in a huff with 100 Words as I stuck to it diligently without missing a single day for a whole year, but lost six months worth of entries when they migrated to the new site, despite my emails as requested that resupplied my missing posts. As a result my Year of Hell remains incomplete, but I’ve been slowly republishing the individual entries here on my own blog.
My little offering to ‘Six’ however, based on a perhaps easily deducible recent event, is here. Feel free to furnish me with as many, or as few votes, as you feel it deserves. Like Post of the Week (which yours truly also often judges), the most popular entries are shortlisted to find an overall winner for each month, but it really, honestly isn’t about ‘winning’ anything. It never was. Sites like this are wonderful little virtual gems – not just as an opportunity to get your voice heard in a climate increasingly hostile to new writers, but to hear others’ and build up a sense of community – something that anyone who’s sought a career in literature will tell you very rarely comes easily. It’s certainly the sort of lifeline that will prove inevitably invaluable to authors already struggling to speak as the ship takes on more water.
