I have a confession: my wife worked in publishing. In fact, she was once a commissioning editor and was paid to assess manuscripts. She decided what got published and what didn’t (okay – the managing director did but she at least got her opinion heard). What I guess I’m trying to say is that she has more idea than most about what is good and what is not.
Nearly everyone I know subscribes to the view that this is a useful thing – that, by having someone who knows what well-written prose looks like, it can only serve to help my chances of producing a readable book. And, I guess if you’re inclined to only look at the positive that might be a valid enough point. But what having a wife with a background in publishing also means is that I know how many books don’t make the cut. It also means that, should I in turn produce a dud, I also have a hell of a lot more to lose – namely, the respect of the person who has agreed to spend the rest of her life with me.
I think it’s probably better to have nothing in common at all with your partner when it comes to what you do for a living. That way, the only side they will ever see in any of your work-related failures is your side. When you come home from the office, crack open a beer and mouth off – “those bastards don’t know a good TPS report when they read one,” – your better half can only nod and agree. They will have no idea what a good TPS report should look like, let alone the inclination to read one. In my case, trying to say “those publishers don’t know a good book when they read one,” won’t work so easily.
That said, even without having someone in publishing reading your first draft, putting your own writing out there for others to read and comment on and tear apart requires courage. And I think it requires even more courage when it’s fiction.
I write for a living, so I am used to people reading my words (albeit a very limited number of people). But having my fiction read scares me in a way that having my articles read never has. Because what I have written isn’t true (or at least isn’t supposed to be) it reveals what’s happening right down there in the depths of my imagination in a way that reporting or even giving my opinion cannot. To put it far more eloquently and in the words of someone altogether better qualified than I am to write on the topic (Ralph Waldo Emerson), “fiction reveals the truth that reality obscures”.
But in my view, revealing what’s going on in the deeper and weirder recesses of my mind is only part of the trauma and possibly not even the most important part. My theory on what makes it so difficult for us to show off our work as first time writers is that it takes away our mystery. It reveals to everyone who reads it that we are definitely not the geniuses they may have mistaken us for before they had seen the fruits of our labour. Or, if I can indulge in just one more quotation from another writer much superior to myself (Mark Twain), “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
It is a state of affairs we all have to get over if we want to get ahead. We have to accept that being a writer is no different to any other job, and that not many people are capable of brilliance. We will most likely never, ever be capable of producing work that is the quality of a JK Rowling or a Martin Amis. And we just have to accept that in the same way that architects accept they will never be a Frank Lloyd Wright, scientists accept they will never be Newton, and lawyers accept they will never be a Lord Denning.
By putting ourselves out there and letting others read what we have written we are forced to admit that, like almost everybody else on the planet, we are mediocre. The only difference with other, less public, jobs is that everybody else now knows we are mediocre too.
