Making a book seems relatively easy, doesn’t it? Compared to producing a rock record, a book doesn’t require a room full of expensive gear. Making a book doesn’t take a cast of thousands compared to shooting a movie. The process involves a few people, starting with the author, then the editor, and the brain trust at the publisher, which includes the marketing team. A bookstore buyer will often be consulted on the cover design. Printing the book will obviously require a press. And yet, an e-book file is uploaded to digital bookstores with little fuss.
The book remains a surprisingly low-tech endeavor in the 21st century. Great, right? It means book publishing is relatively easy. It’s a spectacularly wrong assumption. Human nature will invariably complicate a straightforward process. The advantages of book publishing from a production standpoint are lost in how books are analyzed for publication. Because the making of a book is uncomplicated, the struggle becomes about something else. The way this struggle plays out leaves book publishing as perhaps the worst of all the creative mediums—with the least visibility.
We know why books are special. Readers are drawn to an interior, psychological experience unique from all the creative mediums. A written narrative is comprised of words on a page, yet this collection of words activates a reader’s imagination. Reading is an activity of the heart, mind, and will. No other art form captures the whole person as readily as a book. It’s writing’s greatest strength; sadly, it’s how an industry that seeks to control book publishing exploits it.
The psychological aspect of writing is used against writers from the very beginning. You’re told there are rules for getting published. You must follow these rules to the letter. If you do, there’s a slim chance you will be accepted. If you disobey the rules, you will be disqualified from consideration. Obedience is rewarded, and willful disregard will result in ostracization.
Insiders and outsiders, the threat of punishment, and the possibility of a reward are how a cult operates. As does the applicant feeling lucky to apply.
All the creative mediums have exploitative onboarding processes. It’s true an actor or musician must often do things to get accepted. The casting couch can be a test of an actor’s compliance. A predatory music contract is often a cost of fame.
The publishing industry couldn’t be worse than these regrettable and punitive practices. And yet, the writer’s onboarding test could be described as insidious. The actor and musician hold their noses as they compromise themselves. They engage in actions that they wish they didn’t have to do. The writer’s hazing is internal. A writer must think a certain way to succeed. It’s not a physical test but one of mind control. A writer can’t pretend to believe something. It takes convincing oneself of what you’re writing. Otherwise, the writing doesn’t have any power. It isn’t persuasive. The actor has reservations and still performs the job. The writer must believe.
I was a true believer in the publishing dream. I spent every available resource to be accepted and reach the promised land. I went to graduate school. Afterward, I quit my job and wrote a book full-time. Over the years, I hired a freelance editor and shaped my manuscript into the style and format required by the publishing industry. The goal was to comply with strict rules while preserving the basis of my novel, to thread a needle. It wasn’t until much later that I realized it was impossible. The book I wrote was itself a form of noncompliance. I was disqualified.
At the time, I followed a shrewd course of working within the system. I made all the smart moves to be seen as a member in good standing. Only many years later, I saw I was not acting of my own free will. I had given over my goals to a destructive industry that operated like a religion. What I wanted was simple: to become a published author. How could a noble goal require a complete reorganization of one’s life and, after a decade of severe sacrifices, lead to nothing? It’s when I saw I had been in a cult. It may have been unofficial, without a building, a book, or a handler. No one in the industry knew who I was (which was the problem), but the industry had captured my attention and coopted my personal will. It was in charge of my self-image, and it controlled my future.
The novel I wrote was the disqualifying factor. It’s like hearing the news: you are the problem. This process came before my gender, age, and political affiliations would become other disqualifying factors. Back in the Aughts, a manuscript’s willful unorthodoxy was reason to be rejected from the club. The problem was that my novel was based on a classical style that formed the basis of the golden age of Western civilization. My heroes were the giants of the novel Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, and Kafka. The inspirations I took should have been a strength, but I found the environment of New York publishing radically changed.
Didn’t everyone admire the greats? It was an outdated question. The instructors at my master’s program were post-modernists, not classists. They weren’t interested in mining the world for truths, which was considered blasé, cliché. These successful, published novelists were members of the club. We had entered the academy to become like them. We wanted to emulate them in every way. Unfortunately, their subjects were not inspiring. They were interested in the chaos and dissolution of Western civilization.
In the mid-1990s, in New York, the publishing industry was in a race to find dissolute stories. They sought novels about transgression. The backdrop of these stories was the classical world we all inhabited. The stories needed this backdrop to make the dissolution seem that much more shocking. No one in the master’s program wanted to emulate Dostoevsky, which was a fanciful, trite goal. They were mining the depths of depravity.
The word depravity is charged, yet it’s a descriptor of the stories of that time. Examples of literary books of the mid-1990s show the author’s goal to write about depraved living. It was the point of the book, the only way it worked.
I thought I could work around the cult. I still didn’t realize I was banging on the door to be accepted. I couldn’t leave the work of my literary heroes behind. Writing would be pointless if I gave up my classical views. I staunchly believed interest in the novel came from those books of the 18th and 19th centuries. The modern novelist was spending the inheritance accrued during that golden age on their own dark worlds. If they didn’t produce books that showed the common grace hidden in our disappointments, people would stop reading literary works. And today, they have.
Published authors of the late 20th century rode the momentum created by the modernist greats Hemingway, Bellow, Roth, and Updike. As modernists, they spent a lot of time reflecting on the depravity of the world. They lamented it and, at times, promoted it. Together, they sold a lot of books by showing the attraction to doing the wrong thing. And yet, these authors reinforced the justness of a greater influence in our lives that tended toward good. They weren’t lost souls building a case for their lostness. They wrote the world as the everyman saw it. They paid fealty to optimistic life, and some might say, to God.
The children and grandchildren of the 20th century went further. They became postmodernists because they felt a dark world was the only true one. They were fascinated with the wrong thing, and they celebrated the wrong thing in their books. To the optimistic life, they scoffed and derided it as naivé. In their fervor, they became enemies of a just world, bitter antagonists.
Who would read these books? Who would put their lives on hold to write such books? Only true believers and high priests of the cause of post-modernist thought. Real people wouldn’t apply.
New York City was romanticized in the 1950s as a place to realize your dreams. E.B. White wrote, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” That view of luck, kismet, destiny, or one’s calling led people to the city. We were classists at heart. We believed there was a truth laid before the foundation of the world that we could discover in our lifetimes. New York held that promise.
From the pictures of brave ironworkers standing on girders high above the city, New York had become, by the end of the 20th century, captured by hardened cynics and cultural addicts who focused not on the heights of humanity but on the depths. It became the city’s chorus because false teaching requires strict fealty to maintain, its logic falling apart under scrutiny. And so, the cultural pursuit of books came under authoritarian control. Only those books that reinforced a fatalist, defeatist worldview could be tolerated. The grinding down of the human will was the unobserved goal of an unexamined cult mentality.
There would be many career casualties in the publishing process, myself among them. My adult life would be turned upside-down in pursuit of a worthy goal made into a shameful farce. Only now, decades later, would I see what I sought was unobtainable under the rules set forth. I went from trying to join an odious movement to hoping to live to see it crumble and the classist writers of the golden age hopefully rise again.
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