For creative writers only.
I had a student who although published abroad could not get published in the UK. Although her detective novel was published, she was told by a male agent that only male writers could write good thrillers.
Is publishing an agent led industry in which genre writings are largely dismissed in preference for stories on relationships? The epics of the past seem gone forever? The novel of ideas rarely seen?
Pure class bias, Stanley. Just what Dickens suffered and Ray also loved Dickens among many others. Ray began in the pulps but grew far beyond genre limits. I just lost a more detailed answer. But here goes again.
Prof. Grace Dillon, Anishinaabe nation and professor of Indigenous Studies at Portland State U., wrote an essay about RB using the story "Dark they were and Golden-eyed" to explain how RB nurtured her as she grew up on and off the reservation. It is in our collection Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars. Grace edited the first indigenous collection fo SF stories: Walking the Clouds (Univ. of Arizona Press.) The Martian Chronicles stories were written int the 1940s when US culture had cowboys shooting savage Indians. If we do not give historical context, we miss the point entirely. Europeans often follow our New York intellectuals, figuring they are the only voices worth hearing in a cultural back water such as the US. (Wrong, my dears. All that miserable cultural capital can be so misleading at times.)
Bradbury showed in TMC how a beautiful way of life is destroyed by settlers and their diseases on Mars. He always looked at the colonial project as a disaster but understood humanity had to expand due to the push of population growth--alas--bring most of its failings right along. He held a kind of aesthetic view of the displaced. The McCarthy era critics and censors missed hm bc science fiction was beneath notice. But the FBI did have a 50 pp. file on Ray. The censors did not like Fahrenheit 451.
Grace Dillon used Anishinaabe words and phrases untranslated here and there that I had to fight editors to keep in her essay on Ray Bradbury on our collection. She talks about Gerald Vizenor's (Anisinaabe cultural theorist in Canada) concept of "survivance" and how Bradbury's stories help her in this.
"PDF of story "Dark They were and Golden-Eyed' by Bradbury
https://www.cusd80.com/cms/lib/AZ01001175/Centricity/Domain/9924/Dark%20They%20Were%20and%20Golden%20Eyed%20Text.pdf
Ray's only story in The New Yorker was "I See You Never" Nov. 8, 1947. Nobody was writing about deportation raids of Hispanics. Ray witnessed one in his downscale mid-town LA rooming house. This story was the first outside the ethnic press to deal with this topic. That story alone should make clear that RB was ahead of his time and not just on tech and science.
Gloria
LINK:
http://www.davidglensmith.com/wcjc/1302/PDFs/Bradbury-never.pdf
Dear Colleague Stanley,
Thank you for this important question. Many of us struggle and see others who seem, shall we say, trite and superficial (though latching onto a trend) gain published status. So what gives? This should be entertaining and I wish I could "channel" Dorothy Parker.
Gloria, most struggle. If you engage in creative activity that is a given. Do you think agents have certainviews on what to publish?
I think that when it comes to the topic of publishing creative works, one thing that is of note is that creative writers, who often spend countless hours a day toiling away in an attempt to produce a profound expression of a truth that they have experienced, only to realize that the fate of their work lies almost entirely with other people who may very easily not understand or have access to the same experience which led to the creative work's existence. This is the paradox of creative endeavors—they were intended to be the deepest way to express one's own individualistic experiences, but as professions have somewhere along the way become professions in which one's career is almost entirely determined by others (perhaps even more so than other areas in academia, where more freedom of expression seems ironically to be given to individual writers.) Considering this, it may or may not necessarily be that all (or nearly all) publishing companies have become mere political agents, but either way it is a more serious problem when such a result does occur. Because success in creative writing does come so much from how a particular work is received both by the public and by the publishing company itself, a publishing company which, rather than being more politically neutral (as I would argue to be the ideal), becomes an agent for a particular political affiliation easily runs the risk of almost censoring certain works simply because they are at odds with the company's own subjective political convictions—as Stanley Wilkin displays so clearly in his example of the student whose detective novel was rejected by a male agent simply because she was a woman writing a novel in the thriller genre. Clearly, this is a problem with the publishing industry. My question to anyone who may be reading this response is: what can aspiring creative writers looking to get published do to earn respect in a world in which they can be so easily shut down simply because the contents or style of their writing is at odds with a publishing agent's political convictions?
My understanding here Christopher concerns also certain styles and approaches preferred. Many agents do not even read the work sent to them.
On RG a few months ago a rather boastful contributor told how he had been asked by a friend who worked for a publishing company to write a novel and he would show him how. Clearly thereby there is a format in publishing possibly recognised by both publishers and agents.
I have read some recently published novels but find they deal with the same or similar topics. There seems no chance at present of a War and Peace and certainly not a Ulysses being published. Genre writing has almost completely disappeared.
In the UK, the agents seem to know each other and come from the same social and educative background as the writers they publish.
Stanley wrote:
"In the UK, the agents seem to know each other and come from the same social and educative background as the writers they publish."
My limited experience states that this is also true of the US where what are called Eastern critics/publishers huddle and protect their own. They may only be favoring the known as opposed to the unknown, the more promising market value vs. a risk. These same often share old school ties and socio-economic backgrounds, as well. But in many cases, these are not cabals but just matters of convenience and who is more visible and nearby. In effect, the "accidental exclusion" is as much a barrier to publication as an intent to exclude, say, regional fiction. Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Nelson Algren, Carl Sandburg all suffered from a coolest on the coast to inland or regional fiction. None of this power ratio is new.
The southern US writers in early-to-mid 20th Century did better because they had a wing of the critical establishment (John Crowe Ransom, etc.) in their corner who were themselves from the south. Other places not so successful.
I do think it may help to bear a familiar name, but it can just as well be negative - if, for example, you are the editor who rejected the latest manuscript ...
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Wilkin & readers,
My general observation is that it is much easier for an author to find a publisher than it is to find an agent. I take it that this is a phenomenon closely connected with mass marketing and the desire of many publishers to specialize in what are called "block-busters," involving massive national or even international sales. Agents who represent authors to publishers are also looking for the kind of material or connections which will appeal to the mass-marketing publishers. What results is a "star system."
A quite limited number of authors can make great sums from publishing or even get multi-million $ advances for works yet unfinished --due in part to media name recognition. Many or most authors on the other hand, never find an agent, since the agents do much of the filtering for the mass-market publishers. Many book sellers, in turn, cater to the mass-marketing publishers from whom they get significant discounts on wholesale prices.
The mass-marketing publishers, the agents, and the large book-sellers, one might say, all have very significant "market power" over the business --of the sort which tends to marginalize those outside the confines of the mass-marketing system. "Market power," by the way, is a term prevalent in discussions of antitrust law. One may first think of the power of a firm to elevate the prices of its own products--or exclude competition. But this also includes the power of a firm to suppress prices paid to its suppliers.
H.G. Callaway
i suspect H. G. you are right. In fact there are an increasing number of publishers directly approaching writers. Although these tend to be small companies.
For those who do creative work, never give up. Once you give up, there is no future in your craft (obviously) and you lose what might be or what might have been.
Remember, Dickens' self published, Shakespeare bought his theatre (or had shares), Tolstoy was rich. Andrew Marvell never published but gained postumous fame.
Once one gives up on any endeavor, they immediately let go of any chance they may have ever had of being successful. However, it is certainly easier to recognize this on a more distant level than when one is concretely in a situation, as I'm sure most of the discussants here are well aware. When it comes to a career like the arts—of which creative writing is a part—which is highly subjective and thus success is highly based off of the reception of a work by other people (who, as I mentioned above, may not always fully understand where the inspiration for one's works come from)—it can be easy to throw one's hands in the air after much un-success. This could be made easier if some of the issues that occasionally arise in publication companies—i.e., subjective bias—can be tackled in some way. The question becomes, however, how exactly can we take on these issues? What actions against it may be successful? Should some legal guidelines be put into place? Or would it perhaps be more successful to attempt to breed a culture of creative humility amongst publishing companies in order to avoid having publishers' biases inhibit the success of struggling creative writers? I leave these questions open to be discussed—hopefully we can find some satisfying answers, or at least take the first steps toward such answers.
Christopher,
My evaluation is that agents and many working in publication companies have constructed certain understandings of literature and art, are effectively an elite. Doing so they tend to advance certain kinds of novel and poetry, putting emphasis in poetry for example on technigue and certain political or social viewpoints. There is no longer in many ways a public assessments as many writers (Gloria here is good) cannot get onto the public stage. Although the internet contains good work it does not pay and has no visibility in the former.
I am certainly interested in past and usually dead writers' careers as instructive. Virginia Woolf mainly published through her husband's printing/publishing company-thereby she self published. But this is now frowned upon on the basis that an agent's authority must be placed on a piece of work, thereby creating a certain kind of novel, etc. James Joyce could only get published by very small publishers, Shakespeare and co. This company was responsible for the careers of many of the best writers in the last century, including Hemingway. I think Joyce also self-published to get started.
Luck has of course played a part. William Golding, author of The Lord of the Flies, was unearthed from a slush fund where it had been deposited and dismissed by a reader. He had decided not to write anymore if this novel did not succeed. Of course Rowling was picked up by the chance of being read by a publisher's son. Chance not necessarily ability plays a huge part.
Stanley Wilkin I am actually in agreement with you that, as things currently stand, chance frequently plays a larger role than talent in which writers get published. What I had meant to ask in my most recent response was more so "what can be done to correct this tendency?" Because, considering that chance currently plays a larger role than ability in determining who can get their works published, it is very easy for many good writers to struggle in getting their works published, and some may not ever even get this opportunity. This is, of course, a rather disappointing circumstance for the world of creative writing, and something would best be done to counteract it. My question, then, is what exactly can we do to reverse the situation? Writers can, as you mention, self-publish, which is one solution, although self-publishing is often just as difficult (if not more so) and tedious as getting published through someone else's company. Therefore, it may not hurt to find other possible solutions to the issue as well. Would anybody happen to have any other ideas that may help to counteract this issue?
Kind regards to all,
—Christopher Zieske
Christopher Zieske,
Determination and resolution I'm afraid. There are two likely problems: writer's belief in their exceptionality and right to publish. Sometimes, of course, they are right.
Two: Readers for example working in publishing who believe they are exceptional (if largely unpublished) and are experts in writing. Rowling of Harry Potter fame had their Harry Potter books and her first adult book turned down by the same Reader accompanied by patronising letters telling her to go on a writing course. This Reader of course made huge losses for his company. T. S. Eliot it is said turned down both Animal Farm by Orwell and (it is said) Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
In terms of self publishing: in an internet culture, input is expected to be free. I was looking the other day at my use of sites and alone on here I have over 39, 000 readers of papers and articles, and indeed hundreds of thousands elsewhere besides my paid articles. I have a readership of at least 500,000 but little monetary reward as a result. But since I prefer to expound then stay silent, I choose the easiest processes as this allows me to develop ideas. This is a situation faced by the majority of writers and has, I suggest, always been the case. Chesterdon, that wonderful boy, would have survived if only a little money had arrived for his work.Many scribbled all their lives for monetary reward towards their end. Writing involves sacrifices, but in the end its a middle class process that only occasionally the poor enter. The list of writers from reasonably privileged backgrounds is long, the number of poor writers, those from poor backgrounds who are remembered, is determined by the social conditions of the time these writers wrote in. D. H. Lawrence emerged in a time of expanding working class education and chances to get into higher education, as well as the production of cheaper printed books.
Bias and the lack of empowerment are factors here rather than luck. Not only gender but also the writers' ethnic background. Even their names!
Muthana, that depends. Many black writers have got through on the basis of their ethnicity, often because of white publishers desire to have a black presence. There was a raft of very good Nigerian writers who got published recently but there are actually few Muslim writers with novels, for example, detailing their life experience. So Muthana, finger (in my case) to the computer.
Dear Colleaghues,
Ray Bradbury came from a rather poor faamily during the Depression. He so believed in himself that people in LA joked that any time they opened a laundromat, there'd be Ray, selling his books. One person asked Bradbury what he aspired to be, when he was selling newspapers in LA as a teen and into his early twenties.
"A writer," said Ray.
Looking at this pudgy fellow who got around LA on roller skates, the man sniffed, looked Ray up and down, and chortled, "You don't look like a writer."
"But I feel like one," Ray replied, full or confidence.
Saying that Gloria certainly proved he was.
Answer me this though: why is he so appreciated in the USA but not in Europe except as a writer of slight, imaginative tales? As an adolescent I read him all the time but when I got older I found nothing on him in literary courses or journals.
Pure class bias, Stanley. Just what Dickens suffered and Ray also loved Dickens among many others. Ray began in the pulps but grew far beyond genre limits. I just lost a more detailed answer. But here goes again.
Prof. Grace Dillon, Anishinaabe nation and professor of Indigenous Studies at Portland State U., wrote an essay about RB using the story "Dark they were and Golden-eyed" to explain how RB nurtured her as she grew up on and off the reservation. It is in our collection Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars. Grace edited the first indigenous collection fo SF stories: Walking the Clouds (Univ. of Arizona Press.) The Martian Chronicles stories were written int the 1940s when US culture had cowboys shooting savage Indians. If we do not give historical context, we miss the point entirely. Europeans often follow our New York intellectuals, figuring they are the only voices worth hearing in a cultural back water such as the US. (Wrong, my dears. All that miserable cultural capital can be so misleading at times.)
Bradbury showed in TMC how a beautiful way of life is destroyed by settlers and their diseases on Mars. He always looked at the colonial project as a disaster but understood humanity had to expand due to the push of population growth--alas--bring most of its failings right along. He held a kind of aesthetic view of the displaced. The McCarthy era critics and censors missed hm bc science fiction was beneath notice. But the FBI did have a 50 pp. file on Ray. The censors did not like Fahrenheit 451.
Grace Dillon used Anishinaabe words and phrases untranslated here and there that I had to fight editors to keep in her essay on Ray Bradbury on our collection. She talks about Gerald Vizenor's (Anisinaabe cultural theorist in Canada) concept of "survivance" and how Bradbury's stories help her in this.
"PDF of story "Dark They were and Golden-Eyed' by Bradbury
https://www.cusd80.com/cms/lib/AZ01001175/Centricity/Domain/9924/Dark%20They%20Were%20and%20Golden%20Eyed%20Text.pdf
Ray's only story in The New Yorker was "I See You Never" Nov. 8, 1947. Nobody was writing about deportation raids of Hispanics. Ray witnessed one in his downscale mid-town LA rooming house. This story was the first outside the ethnic press to deal with this topic. That story alone should make clear that RB was ahead of his time and not just on tech and science.
Gloria
LINK:
http://www.davidglensmith.com/wcjc/1302/PDFs/Bradbury-never.pdf
Gloria Lee McMillan
As an adolescent he was my go to writer with his unusual take on the world and distinctive writing style, putting in a single word capable of changing perspective. In a way this was the point of my question and may be you should extend this. He didnt write about relationships and in a way, like the early H.G. Wells, not seen as grown up. He did not write on seemingly grown up themes, but you are right about the actual seriousness of what he wrote about.
It has in the past made me wonder about how real literature is conceived. In Britain when I was there it seemed like themes dealing with internal aspects of living and life, thought and energy no longer counted. Like McEwan it was literature directed at middle class, middle educated agents-well structured plots and sentences but for me simply middle brow and unexciting. He is the only male writer I know who in a book on failed marraige decided all men are simply too rough.
Dear Stanley,
This is the TWO CULTURES script, of course. Those who wish to take on social issues often do it without romantic and sexual relationships. The reason is obvious people will recall the sex and forget the ideas. But Hollywood adds those relationships, whether they are in the original novel or not. There was no love interest, as you know, in The Time Machine since Weena is but a child, but George Pal's film supplied Yvette Mimeux to correct this teen-aged boy problem. On the other hand, to today's viewers, that adult sexual attraction added in the film looks very dated.
But back to Ray Bradbury, his publishing adventures. The 1950s were not a time of great sexual experiment for many writers and RB was not the only one who used a light touch on gendered relationships. The human scale is not the only scale. The external universe runs from the nanosphere to the cosmos. So-called serious literature (high socio-econ. favored lit.) has generally but not exclusively been that which maintains the obsessive concern with the human scale and shutting out the rest. This is the usual culturally astigmatic behavior. Isaac Asimov once said "How I tire of the those dreary eternal verities: love and death."
I went through Virginia Woolf's memoir's index once, looking for any words related to science. There was not one to be found. And in that time great discoveries were being made at Cambridge: Fleming and penicillin, etc.
I actually do not mind the exploration of relationships, but my point was doing it in such a way to appeal to agents. D. H. Lawrence's exploration of relationships places the feelings and interaction between mother and son, lover and lover on a cosmic scale. He added, not reduced.
Not quite sure why Virginia Woolf, writing in a very literary milieu needs to know science. Well, she did actually know psychoanalysis. Surely Joyce didn't either.
Back to Mr Bradbury: have you read Douglas Adams? I am reading some of his books. He reminds me of Bradbury because of his lightness of touch on serious issues.
I have read critics who call The War of the Worlds the perfect novella/novel and so is The Time Machine. Well's listened to Henry James I think who battered him for not writing well, but he wrote according to his topic like Bradbury.
Dear Colleague Stanley,
I spent four years in English Comp-Rhetoric (and Lit) Ph.D. seminars hearing "the scientist" essentialized (as we say) and diminished by people who were lit., comp. rhetoric majors. The issue of mis-communictaions between science and the humanities (if you look at my RG main page) is a big issue for me. I spend my days slogging along the gulch between science and the humanities.
Saying Woolf needed no scientific curiosity (as I found she had none) makes about as much sense as scientists saying all the Humanities are "fuzzy," "trivial" and "I never read fiction."
I meet all kinds here in the old Sci-Humanities Gulch. The buzzards circling up above are waiting for more fresh bodies from those dudes who want to shoot it out over whether Science or Humanities rule, Pardner!
Gloria, does either have to rule? C.P. Snow was a writer and scientist and spent a lot of time over this issue, seeing that science and literature do not meet, but is that true now and was it true then?
H. G. Wells was a qualified scientist and better writer than Snow, Asimov crossed the line, and Douglas Adams most certainly does. Science is perhaps more in the public domain then it was in Woolf's time. A writer woman friend of mine attended a lecture by Ian McEwan and he spoke about science not literature.
Have I still missed your point? Should writers utilise science more in their writings but if they did, would it sell?
Gloria, is it that writers should be better appreciated by scientists who owe their grasp of language and means of elucidating difficult concepts to writers. I find the technical people on here have blind spots, and would they be better if they had some education in novels and poetry? Probably. Many if not most psychiatrists read literature, or the ones I know, but it makes no impression on them as they still preference what they are taught. In fact if you look at some of my writings on psychiatry, I point out they use literary devices to prove their beliefs (science) rather than any scientific processes attached to their hypothesis.
Not interested in politics.
Yes, NASA is so influenced and weighted by politics, that our travel to space must now be funded privately. However, what NASA seems not to realize is that we do not need an external apparatus to space travel. I agree with Ray Bradbury.
It is true that so many people whose works are politically driven and ignoring the ethic of writings and common sense. They are being ignorant of the rule of the game of publication being objective or subjective and bias for the sake of personal inclination and interest.
If science could only learn to "say it with feelings" we would not be having this conversation. But perhaps the rule is - the fewer the words, the more true it looks? or words cost money - and the publisher gains by more, and different, true results in the same issue?
Lou
Yes, money is crucial but tonight I was watching a programme on African writers, mainly from Kenya and Nigeria, who gained success through a publisher in London making a decision to concentrate on black writers.
I believe the quality of a research determines whether it is published or otherwise
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