Opinion

WRITERS BLOCKED

“YES! YOU CAN WRITE A NOVEL” screams the headline on the cover of the February Writer’s Digest.

No. You can’t. You shouldn’t. You won’t. Please?

In 2006, there were 42,000 adult fiction titles released in the U.S., up a terrifying 17 percent from 2005, according to the research firm Bowker. The number of religious titles published in 2006 was put at 17,921, although a lot of those were probably double-counted from the humor or fiction categories.

Altogether, there were 291,000 new titles and editions published in 2006. How do I know this? There are 145,000 on top of, in, or under my desk, and the rest are piling up at the cubicle next door, where my book-columnist colleague Billy Heller is gradually disappearing behind his ever-growing stacks, as though staging a nerd reenactment of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” tour.

Claiming a place for yourself in Bookworld is like moving to Lagos, Nigeria – a grim, overpopulated slum. Even Lagos isn’t growing 17 percent a year, though. Just as Lagos lures unsuspecting country folk, we have MFA programs, undergraduate seminars and the misguided optimism of Writer’s Digest. George Packer writes of Lagos in The New Yorker, “In the newer slums on the mainland . . . rectangular concrete-block houses squeeze seven or eight people into a single, mosquito-infested room – in bunks or on the floor – along a narrow corridor of opposing chambers. This arrangement is known as ‘face me I face you.’ One compound can contain eighty people.”

Cruel. But can mere physical discomfort compete with the spiritual steamrollering that goes on in another mosquito-infested camp for wayward souls: the MacDowell writer’s colony in New Hampshire? Writes Rachel Donadio in the New York Times Book Review: “At MacDowell, attendees must get permission to visit one another’s studios. Jill Ciment, a writer who attended in the mid-’80s, said she came to believe the rule existed ‘not because we’d interrupt creativity, but because we’d find each other either sleeping or crying.’ Indeed, some find the solitude jarring. ‘It’s like adjusting to a new time zone,’ the novelist Roxana Robinson said. When she first arrived at MacDowell, she faced ‘a kind of frozen horror, the fear that I couldn’t do what I was meant to be doing there. . . . With the absence of all the obstacles you’re used to, there’s a sort of existential terror. That can be alarming.’ ”

As the author of two novels published by major houses and favorably reviewed in national publications, let me disabuse you of a few myths.

Writing a book will make me rich . . . I spent a year writing my novel “Love Monkey,” another four months trying to find an agent, another two months trying to find a publisher, another three months cutting 30,000 words out of it (weeping 30,000 times in the process), a few more months fixing stuff and a few weeks promoting it. My hourly rate for all this was equivalent to that earned by the assistant manager in the lawn-gnomes department of Wal-Mart, and I didn’t even get a blue vest.

Or famous! Renown doesn’t live in a book-jacket photo. Getting your picture in the Style section of the New York Times does not make you a celebrity. Allow me to quote someone who is actually famous, Steve Martin, on appearing on “The Tonight Show” in the early ’70s. “There was a belief that one appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ made you a star,” he writes in his memoir “Born Standing Up.” “But here are the facts. The first time you do the show, nothing. The second time you do the show, nothing. The sixth time you do the show, someone might come up to you and say, ‘Hi, I think we met at Harry’s Christmas party.’ ”

James Patterson can do it. How hard can it be? While it is true that James Patterson, the surly former ad man, slaps his name on another hack thriller every three months, there is a kind of genius in being able to write a 450-page novel that takes half an hour to read. Try this simple test: do you enjoy talking to idiots? If not, don’t bother.

Many will enjoy hearing what I must say. So why say it in a format people hate? Books cost time and money. Books require concentration. Books are raw cauliflower. Blogs are créme brulee. Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga sold 4,400 or so copies of his book (as tracked by Bookscan) in the first couple of months. That’s above average, but in December there were 12.5 million visits to his blog. A successful blog will earn more in ad revenue than the average author advance.

They could make a movie out of my book. That’ll show my high school classmates! Maybe, but the odds are far greater that your book will wind up in some much more horrible place, such as a yard sale or the rain-dampened $1 carts outside the Strand or CBS.

http://www.kylesmithonline.com