If you are a budding writer, you are lucky to find this essay. You will not like to hear the real truth, but few writers will tell it to you. All you will hear elsewhere is that you must work hard, write a lot, attend conferences and workshops, submit your mss everywhere, be patient, and eventually you will be discovered. If you are young enough and don't need to work for money, this is fine advice. But if you'd like to see publication before your great-grandchildren are born, read on.
First, every writer wants to know "the secret" to getting published. Most will tell you there is no secret, that all you must do is write well. This is a lie. There are several secrets that you won't find elsewhere.
Secret #1: Get to know some editor, publisher, or writer who can like you. Writing is a business like any other. If you want to do business, you will be far more successful if your customer (your editor, since you are trying to sell yourself and your ms to her) likes you. How do you do this? Good question. Go to conferences where you know that editors and agents will be congregating. Don't network, whatever that is. Leave that to the computers. Instead, go after the editors and agents, but don't make a nuisance of yourself.
Find a published writer and learn to love him/her. Try to induce the same feeling in the object of your love. If you succeed or if she feels sorry for you, you may get some real help. How would you like some writer to suggest that her agent might be delighted to look at your ms? Consider yourself lucky if that happens. It doesn't very often.
Secret #2: Become a celebrity. If your name is Elvis Presley or OJ Simpson, it doesn't matter a damn if you're totally illiterate. Your book will be a blockbuster. (Please don't commit murder to succeed in life)
Secret #3: Take an oath to never ever write a word of fiction. Fiction writers are as rare as water on the planet earth. No one who can still read will waste time reading fiction, unless it is written by one of the select few, like the great Barbara Cartland or Danielle Steele. Never try to emulate these heavy-weights of fiction. It can't be done, and you will end up hating yourself. The only person paid less than a fiction writer is a poet.
Secret #4: If you must write fiction, against all good sense and wisdom, then learn the secret agenda of liberalism and political correctness. You haven't got a chance of selling to a New York publishing house unless you know the forbidden words (not the F-word, that's OK) and the buzz words (gay, black, Native American, multicultural, feminism, homeless, ethnic, AIDS). If you can manage to get all these into one book, you have it made. Try inventing a heroine who is an Afro-Puerto Rican-Native American lesbian without a home. She gets AIDS from her bisexual, Eskimo-Mexican-Chinese-Kirghiz lover, who has recently had an abortion, while attending a convention in China on feminism. If you need a villain, remember he must be a he and a white Anglo-Saxon, preferably rich and successful.
Secret #5: Follow the PC rules. No politically correct minority may have a job lower than doctor, lawyer, or politician, unless the writer is a member of the same minority. No rich white person is allowed to survive the book's conclusion. No poor white person may advance to a job higher than waitress, janitor, or welfare recipient.
Secret #6: Take sensitivity lessons. Learn sensitivity in speech and writing. Murder, rape, and mayhem are OK, but crippled, deaf, and blind are not. Know the PC euphemisms, e.g., horizontally challenged (fat), vertically challenged (dwarfish), and mentally challenged (nitwit). Remember that you are writing for the latter group when you send your ms to an editor who will decide the fate of your work.
Secret #7: Don't spend a lot of time or money learning how to write. It isn't that important. It helps to know how to make a good sentence, but it's far more important to know secrets 4, 5, and 6. Don't waste money on workshops. They exist solely to support other fiction writers who are trying to make a living. Especially avoid the ones taught by colleges who want to give you a degree. With their degree and a buck, you'll be able to buy a cup of coffee - maybe.
I have read in the famous "Poets and Writers" magazine about an Afro-American woman who never revises anything she writes. She has the remarkable ability to churn out one book every two weeks. And these books are so good they are instantly accepted for publication. She advises other writers to do the same thing. The trouble with other authors, she says, is that they waste too much time fussing with revisions. Of course, it helps that she writes fiction about her own politically correct ethnic minority.
So what are some of the forbidden words I alluded to under Secret #4? Here they are: chairman (and other similar words like postman), second-string, man or mankind, any reverant use of religious words (irreverant is OK), any irreverant use of animal words (hunting, fishing, water buffalo, rat, skunk, maggot), and many more. So many have been created that whole books have been written about them. Find yourself a lexicon of the politically correct speech of the times. It is important that it be recent because the words change often and continue to grow rapidly. If you are young when you read this, you may learn that there is no difference between the forbidden words of the future and the dictionary of today.
If you follow all these rules and know the secrets, you may eventually get published, even if you insist on writing fiction. But don't quit your day job yet.
Copyright © 1999 by David P. Shreiner, Orpheus Enterprises