I got this article from Salon.com off Mrs. Bakar’s post here. It really is a picture of misery being shovelled promise after promise only to be disappointed. I’ve always wondered what getting a rejection slip felt like, but never had the requisite wherewithal (some say “courage”) to actually get down to arranging stuff so I can then send messy jumbles of words off to publishers.
I had a group of friends, myself included, who wanted to get something ‘out there’ and published because we all had aspirations. One wanted to make lots of money (”I will be the next Tom fucking Clancy lah! I’ll dream up missiles that fly like seagulls!”). Another was more immersed in genre fiction, coming up with short stories of that ‘romantic fantasy’ strain. What to do, she was one girl, we were three guys, so we were always putting off reading her stuff.
But we were just navel-gazing, lazy do-nothings, but we navel-gazed and railed against a cruel world with style. It was always fun wallowing in depression and making like a bourgeois, jaded struggling writer, that whole image of messy hair, leather and week-old body odours.
(No one mentions body odours; why doesn’t anyone associate body odours with struggling, unwashed writers, I wonder).
I suppose all of us, at one point or another, entertained thoughts of actually finishing something. None of us ever got around to getting anything done, eventually, but I’m sure we enjoyed each others’ company. Reading that article off Salon.com made me think some more about the evils of getting your words “out there”. Sol Stein, in How to grow a novel, puts it this way when talking about midlist authors:
Authors live on hope. Those that live on unrealistic hope often turn their disappointment in on themselves when a book doesn’t do well in the marketplace. The self is the wrong target. In the majority of instances the fate of a book has already been determined by the publisher before the appearance of the first review.
Scary isn’t it?
Some recent good news (like, a few weeks old by now) is that quite a number of Malaysians are taking part in the NaNoWriMo contest/challenge. Their website is here.
Basically, you have one month to churn out 50,000 words. No mean feat. I remember there was a competition in Singapore about 2-3 years ago (I don’t know if they have it anymore…) where participants would take part in a day-long (24 hour) challenge to write the best short story they can. NaNoWriMo will be on a much, much larger scale. By the way, for those who are interested in competitions, the BBC also runs short-story competitions, also competitions for plays and such. If I’m not mistaken, there’s one each year. So maybe you’d want to hop down to the BBC webby to check it out.
