Thoughts Provoked by Jacqueline Howett

I don't know how many of y'all might have had any reason at all to see this week's very public meltdown of self-published author Jacqueline Howett. Thien-Kim tweeted me yesterday, saying it might interest me because of my interest in (read: tiny little obsession with) writing and grammar and Stuff. I took a few minutes and read the comments, and oh, my. So many, many things have filled my head.

One: thankyoujesus for editors. Goodness. There's a reason we need them, and this illustrates why. Here's a big XO♥ to mine!

But here's what really has my brain going about this whole thing: what technology has wrought. Blame it on the internet, blame it on technology. Blame it on whomever or whatever you want. But here's the deal:  once upon a time, you had to be able to do something well before you had a chance to foist your efforts on the public. To get your stuff published, you had to convince a publishing company or a newspaper or a magazine that you 1) had something to say and 2) could say it clearly and coherently enough that an editor could help you shape it into something graspable. You know? If you had some vague, amorphous idea floating around in your brain, you had to take a little bit of time and try to shape it into something that made sense before you could begin the process of putting it in front of an audience.

Not any more.

Now anyone can publish anything. And, going even further, anyone can put anything out there in front of anyone. So you've got people writing books and writing reviews and doing podcasts and making movies and taking photographs and, and, and. And some of them are very, very good. And many of them are simply execrable. People delight in the internet's enabling them to bypass the traditional paths, those monolithic empires that are the Keepers of The Gates to fame and public acclamation. They revel in Everyman's ability to get his stuff Out There in front of an audience--perhaps an audience of millions, if only he can Go Viral--without having to bow and scrape to The Powers That Be. So, yeah, that's cool. It's really groovy that we can bypass The Man and go straight to The People.

Right on.

Except. Except that there is a reason there are editors and copy editors and publishers. Well, there are many reasons, and most of them, sure, have to do with money. Doesn't pretty much everything? Money and power. Yeah, I get that. But some of it has to do with keeping people from looking like total amateurs, clueless in their craft, incoherent due to their lack of effort to work and polish and perfect the art they hope to put in front of the public.

I love the internet, I truly do. I love blogs and videos and, well, tons of stuff. I think it's wonderful that people can put their stuff out there and I can go see it. For free! But--oh, and this is such a huge but!--I really do wish the people putting it out there would slow down and take some time to do a little work first. You know, like, um, actually learn some skills. I've read reviews by people who have no clue what a review should be (I'm not a reviewer, so my "reviews" of books and magazines are "here's why you might like this," rather than any attempt at a critical evaluation = I know what I suck at and try to avoid it (yeah: I know the things at which I suck--but I spared you that convolutedness)). I've seen videos by people who should really just wait until they learn how to focus a camera. I've read blog posts (oh, lord) that are not only unreadable in their total lack of structure and theme but are so boring as to provoke one of those forehead-slapping, "Huh?" moments, when you're reading something and you're thinking, "Why, exactly, does this exist?" You know: in a perfect universe, something this botched and banal would have been sucked into some whirling vortex the moment it left the author's brain.

Self publishing. I know it's becoming ever-more-popular, and I understand why. For one thing, if you self-publish and do even moderately well, you stand to make a ton more money than you would if you were having to "share" it with a publisher. And, you know, money is what everything in life is all about.

Truly, though? The only reason I can think of to self-publish is if you have some grand idea that involves stuff a publishing company doesn't want to tackle:  you've got this cool idea for something interactive, or with pop-ups and fold-outs, or with photos on every page, or whatever. For most self-published works, however, I'm guessing that the reason they're published by Self is because they were rejected by everyone else. And if you've got an idea and it's been rejected by a bunch of companies, maybe instead of saying, "Damn you, you insensitive bastards! You can't keep me from Being an Author! I'll forge ahead and go it alone!" maybe you need to stop and ask: "Why? Why does everyone seem to think this is a bad idea, a non-money-making idea?" If you can figure that out and answer the question, and if your answer is something like, oh, "they don't understand the appeal of a how-to book about naked shadow puppets," and you still think it's fabulous, then maybe you should go for it. But if, on the other hand, you can't quite figure out what it is, you should ask. Ask people who know, friends who have a clue, your brother-in-law. Maybe it's that your proposal makes no sense. Maybe it's that--oh, who knows? It could be thousands of things. The point is: if no one will publish it, it's not that they're out to thwart you. There's a reason. I'm not saying you shouldn't self publish; I'm saying you need to figure out why no one wants to publish and take care of THAT first. Then go ahead with your plan.

What self-publishing means for the rest of us--for the readers, the consumers--is, sadly, this: it confuses us and, ultimately, makes us grouchy and suspicious. When we spend money for a book or a magazine, we expect to receive a certain level of quality in what we've bought. We expect, you know, content. Grammar and Stuff, at the very least. While we may be happy to read poems by our nephew Howard that contain no words recognizable to human beings on this planet, our expectations are a little different if we've shelled out actual money. Then we expect things to be maybe a little more polished. Maybe, you know, making sense and stuff. We expect the author (and if you've been around The Voodoo Cafe a while, maybe you're beginning to detect a difference between "author" and "writer") to have maybe, oh, I don't know, taken a course in writing? Grammar? Have a theme?

Something.

I, frankly, am overwhelmed by the glut of stuff out there. The poems, the books, the magazines, the blogs, the videos, the music and photographs and reviews and, and, and. While some are, assuredly, quite good, there is a continually growing pile of crap, and I don't want to wade through it trying to find the good stuff. What it all comes back to is a rant I've pitched before: there is nothing--NOTHING--wrong with the concept of hard work. With the idea of self discipline. With the notion of mastering a craft. Just because you have a keyboard doesn't mean you can write. Just because you have a camera doesn't mean you can take photos. Oh, sure, it may mean You. Can. Take. Photos. It doesn't mean you can take photos that are good enough that anyone will want to spend time looking at them. (Taking photos: one more thing at which I suck quite spectacularly, which is why you don't get a lot of them here. You know, that's one of the benefits of age and experience:  you know the things you don't do well and aren't really interested in sufficiently to make working at them worthwhile in the larger scheme of your life. I have a whole list of those. An imaginary list, because I don't much care enough about them to write them down, but it includes writing critical reviews and taking great photos. Also cooking. Singing. My god, it's a very long list.)

So here's my advice:  just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should* do it, and just because you want to do something doesn't mean that you're ready to share it. If you care about writing or painting or taking photographs or reviewing books or making movies, you owe it to 1) yourself, 2) your potential audience, and 3) (the most important) the craft itself--to practice. Work at it. Make mistakes, experiment, improve. You should do all those things before you ever, ever, put it out there. Why? Because if we're inundated by tons of horrible books, books we've bought or downloaded or whatever, and they keep being really, really sucky, guess what? Pretty soon we're going to quit buying books. We'll read only what someone else, someone we trust, assures us is good. And if the reviews we read are poorly done, misleading, incomplete? We'll quit reading those. If the blogs we visit are boring and trite, filled with whining and incomprehensible sentences and blurry photos? We'll burn out on even trying to read blogs. In short, the more crap there is for us to have to wade through to find something worth our time, the less likely it is we'll ever make the effort to search. No one wants to wade through crap.

I have more to say, but I think it's a separate rant. Maybe not--but I'm going to spare you having it all together here. Go. Read something pleasant--something less grouchy than this. Read Mary Oliver. Read the NYT book reviews. Read something good and send your compliments to the writer who took time to practice the craft.

XO