When people tell me they have a book inside of them — which actually happens quite a lot, probably because I’ve been fortunate enough to have had a clutch of novels (traditionally) published — I always want to ask: “Have you considered surgery?” As George Orwell famously said: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
And writing is the easy part. Getting your book published can make the writing seem like two weeks on Necker Island. Or, instead of trying to survive the gauntlet which is the publishing industry, you can self-publish your work … and see it disappear, amateurishly produced and poorly edited, into the vast ocean of mediocrity that is most books. Either way, the tome in which you invested long hard months of your life will probably wind up basically unread, unloved, and irrelevant.
And yet it seems almost everybody wants to be an author someday. So I’ve been watching John Biggs’
View the Original article
0 comments:
Post a Comment