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Dec. 28th, 2011 09:12 amMy reading until 9.30 am is the Quantum Physics for Poets book again. There are a couple of things my class didn't quite reach and I want to finish with them. I was distracted, however, by a rather evil remark by Pauli. He apparently said that he didn't mind that a person thought slowly, but that the person published faster than they thought. Certain pressures in the current writing market place puts some writers in this position. Instead of reading their best work, we're given the half-thought version. It makes no-one happy. There's no easy solution. Some things take more time than others and some circumstances don't permit of that time.
Pressures by publishers are one thing. Pressures by oneself are something else. A potential trap for writers who choose self-publishing is to send work out when it hasn't quite run the distance it needs to run. One of the checks on this with the old publishing system was the eye of an experienced editor. It wasn't a perfect check, of course, but it was there.
As a reader, I'm hoping that our brave new world of publishing will develop some of the checks and time-sinks that enabled the writers who actually need that extra time to take it. Right now, one can go straight from writing to Smashwords. This works for some writers, but not for others - and I'm not yet convinced that we all have the skills to know where we fit. Or rather, I'm very convinced that I dont have the skills with my own writing and I have seen maybe one writer in twenty who has those skills innate (of the writers I work with or know well).
Needing time and checks doesn't make us poor writers. It means we need a particular environment to produce the work we're capable of and that environment is different to that of those who (like the legend of Mozart) produce perfect material very quickly.
And now I want a periodic table of writers. The columns would indicate genre affiliation. The numbers are obviously peer recognition (readership and prizes and reviews and fandom, combined in a fascinating formula - call it writer ego?) and the rows...I don't know yet.
ETA: I lost edits! This would be because the doorbell rang... Which just goes to show...
Pressures by publishers are one thing. Pressures by oneself are something else. A potential trap for writers who choose self-publishing is to send work out when it hasn't quite run the distance it needs to run. One of the checks on this with the old publishing system was the eye of an experienced editor. It wasn't a perfect check, of course, but it was there.
As a reader, I'm hoping that our brave new world of publishing will develop some of the checks and time-sinks that enabled the writers who actually need that extra time to take it. Right now, one can go straight from writing to Smashwords. This works for some writers, but not for others - and I'm not yet convinced that we all have the skills to know where we fit. Or rather, I'm very convinced that I dont have the skills with my own writing and I have seen maybe one writer in twenty who has those skills innate (of the writers I work with or know well).
Needing time and checks doesn't make us poor writers. It means we need a particular environment to produce the work we're capable of and that environment is different to that of those who (like the legend of Mozart) produce perfect material very quickly.
And now I want a periodic table of writers. The columns would indicate genre affiliation. The numbers are obviously peer recognition (readership and prizes and reviews and fandom, combined in a fascinating formula - call it writer ego?) and the rows...I don't know yet.
ETA: I lost edits! This would be because the doorbell rang... Which just goes to show...