Querying

Ah, the joys of the modern writing age. In one sense, writing has never been so lucrative. Just look at Stephen King and JK Rowling: because of the amazing speed of information spread, phenoms with real talent are blown into mega-successes practically overnight, from restaurant napkin to multi-billion dollar franchise with movie rights and seven sequels. Makes me consider buying a whole stack of restaurant napkins. One success gets you a beach house and a nice Italian imported car. Seven and you’re literally richer than the Queen of England. Of course there will always be a modicum of trash following in the wake, like Dan Brown or Paolini, people who couldn’t plot their way out of a snow fortress crawling with ninjas (who all have rocket launchers, mind you; Ninjas with rocket launchers), but the incredible number of people who can actually write, like David Foster Wallace (rest in peace) or Mark Danielewski, or Mark Haddon, who make millions while still alive is hopeful for our so-called “information age.” Crap gets through the cracks, but the bottom floor is reserved, for the most part, for just really good writers.

As you might have guessed from the “in once sense” that preceded that joyous panegyric of our modern age, there is also a real depression that hangs over the written word, a kind of economic downturn of poetry. There seems to me to be two tiers of authors: the ones who strike a chord with the world, and everyone else. This is in part a myth propagated by authors who aren’t published who want to point out how unfair the world is, rather than how unremarkable they themselves are. Today post-modernism has its lukewarm grip over the vast majority of true literature, and the result is a hodge-podge of just bizarre “next steps” in writing, the new “fresh voice” of fiction coming out every day, a mess of such epic proportions that you can’t even tell the charlatans from the champions without reading through the whole catalog of modern lit. Thomas Pynchon - savior of western culture or hoodwinker of the intellectual class? I believe the former, and thank God some publisher thought, ‘hey, this is pretty good,’ or else we’d be robbed of some of the most brilliant works written in the past century. Or Ayn Rand - insensitive android made of money, or intrepid hero of capitalism? If we were to base our understanding of greatness on the capitalist ideal alone, we’d be left with no alternative but to call Dan Brown the greatest author of all time, up there with JK Rowling and Ayn Rand herself.

So let me throw myself into the fray: I sent off a query letter, my first, today to see if I could land myself an agent. I know I would buy my book from the shelf, were I to see it sitting there gleaming on a Barnes and Nobel display stand. I know that because I wrote it to be the kind of book I’d like to read, about the things I know peak my interest. And so my book is the communication of my soul, the things that scream from my insides to be shared. My request for an end to solipsistic nightmare worlds. And so here’s the true terror of having a book come back declined: the fear that there is nothing inside worth communicating.

And so let me loop back for a moment to those authors who perpetuate the illusion that true art is without fail stifled by committee until the author is dead and gone: in the perpetuation of this half-truth, I see a genuine screaming anxiety that they are not producing works that merit interest. We can blame the internet for overflooding the plane of ideas with babble, we can blame post-modernism for making literature really hard to write. We can blame pop-culture for heralding swindlers like Micheal Crichton over heroes like Scott Heim. But what really gives me the ‘howling-fantods’ is the possible confrontation with your own inadequacy and impotence, your inability to share something common or immortal, something that ought to make every sham successful writer lie awake at night and shiver. Before we condemn the world’s failure to recognize genius, we ought to take a moment to appreciate that justice almost logically built into the framework of humanity’s interest in art: those who communicate nothing and gain everything have gained nothing in truth, and if you wake up from a nightmare in which you were screaming but no sound came out, at least you tried to scream. Laokoon’s statue in the Vatican will never open his mouth, and no sound will ever come out, because he’s made of marble - but dear God, look at his eyes.

So I won’t leave this with the cliche, ‘aim for the moon and you’ll hit the barn roof,’ because that’s just not true. Your cannon is in all likelihood clogged to begin with, and if you aim at the ground sometimes you find gold in the earth.

Writing is terrifying, and if it isn’t to someone else, I wonder how they’re doing it and I wonder why I haven’t ever done it that way. If we examine our soul, and reproduce as faithfully as possible what we find there, how can we be anything but petrified in the face of the world’s consideration?
This is my sendoff to you, Dreamt of Bees: may your journey be rewarding, and never forget the look in Laokoon’s face.