Making Books for Fun and Profit

"Never mind critics, what do you yourself think is wrong with your writing? How did you dream of your book before it was created? What were your best hopes? How have you let yourself down?"~Zadie Smith

Intergalactica

From time to time I run into someone who says they are planning to write a book. Many are simply too naive about the undertaking to know what they are saying. Some believe they will do it, but since they have no real writing experience or daily writing discipline it is not something that I expect will amount to much. I don't mind being proven wrong, but producing a book is... well, it's a lot like work.

Then there's the problem of taking a good idea and transforming it into something stellar that others might want to read. Putting a bunch of pages together and calling it a book is not an insurmountable task. It just takes persistence. But making a great book is another story.

Then again, who says it has to be a great book? What is great anyways? Great by whose standards? By critical acclaim? By runaway sales? By moral significance?

My opinion is that if you feel compelled to write a book, or a story or assemble a collection of poems, do it. Have fun with it. Express yourself. Pour yourself out. If you're motivated to write book-length manuscripts I commend you for that. It's audacious. It's ambitious. But to make it happen only requires a little daily discipline. Personally, everyone has a story to tell and books are a great way to share it.

I have a co-worker whose mother wrote and assembled memoirs of her experiences living in Germany during Hitler's rule. She did it for her family's sake, and the family has been enriched by this effort. It doesn't matter that the book has not been published by Random House or Scribners. It has been assembled and share.

Digital books have certainly lowered the bar as regards getting your work to the wider public. When you go digital there are no printing costs, and Amazon.com will display your titles all over the world. I don't even think an ISBN number is required for that any more. (Fact Checker: Please confirm.)

You do have to ask yourself why you are doing this? Zadie Smith challenges us to not compromise. But it's not easy. Making a good story great requires a lot of work. In my opinion, however, I'm not sure it has to be great initially. Your story simply needs to be told. If it's a good story, there are others who can help you polish it and bring it to the next level.

As for the profitability part of this equation... Don't think about it. It's a tough market and if making money writing books were all that easy, everyone would be doing it. Just tell your story. Tell it well and people will read it.

Meantime, have a very fine weekend. And write on.

Featured eBook of the Day: Unremembered Histories

What Should It Be?

"The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life." ~Z. Smith

I've been listening to a book titled Changing My Mind, a book of essays by Zadie Smith. It's been a stimulating read so far because she's a writer's writer. I mean, she writes about writers and she writes very well while doing it, and with authority. It's a book about consuming and producing literature, and you can tell quite quickly she's consumed plenty.

She slices and dices lives and works of people like Kafka, and E.M. Forster and Nabakov, and gets one thinking about what good writing ought to look like. What should a modern novel look like? Is the traditional 19th century format the way to go or is it time to be abandoned? How much work should the reader have to do to get the author's pearls?

The reviews on Amazon.com indicate that the book is not for everyone. Maybe I will get bogged down myself, but for now the essays demonstrate a mind awake and a keen eye for observation.

In some ways I'm wondering what motivated her to go into such depths with regard to George Eliot and Middlemarch. My suspicion is that she's trying to figure out for herself what a novel should be. Tom Wolfe arrogantly pronounced the novel dead about forty years ago, and by the proliferation of Reality Shows on TV, he may be right that the hunger for fiction has diminished in our time. But "dead" is a pretty strong pronouncement and based on the sales of books by Michael Crichton, Tom Clancey, Stephen King and James Patterson, I'm guessing there's still plenty of life in the genre.

NEW TOPIC
Oh, and if you're looking for someplace to go some evening this weekend, check out the new show featuring the 3-D art of Mary Plaster at Beaner's in West Duluth. It's big, and it's delightfully in your face. Death, Gaia, Poseidon, Helios (the Sun God) and Zeus are all on hand in rich enormity. Obviously she used a vehicle larger than my Honda to transport the pieces there this week.

In the meantime, whether you're making art or making stories, good luck in working out the fundamental problems of the work. How accessible should it be? Who is your real audience? And where do you want it to go?

And just to mix it up, here's another quote from Zadie: "I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat. "

Till the morrow....