Writing advice from 1908, Writing Slowly, and Terrible Query Letters

Writing advice given in 1908 to short story writers. And good points made about how they were getting 3 to 5 cents a word back in the day when 3 to 5 cents could buy, say, about 100 times more than it could today.

Advice on Short Story Publishers:

But I wasn’t ready to give up. An agent once told me never to publish a short story collection unless with a university press, because the next time a book of mine was presented to a New York publisher, they’d check sales numbers and shake their heads.

I think publishers are fully aware of the median and modes and average short story collection sales, and thus they’re only looking at whether your collection falls under or goes over that, not whether it has sold as many as a mid-list novel. Nobody expects your short story collection to have soaring sales, they’re mostly investing in you as an author, and a short story collection is a kind of platform from which to launch a novel. Plus, there’s always the off-off chance that the collection will turn into a bestseller like “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges” or that Adam Hastler collection “You Are Not a Stranger Here,” which was nominated as a Today Show book club selection. In fact, if your first book does do badly, it’s better to have it be a short story collection than a novel, because so many publishers are willing to take chances on first novels.

I’ve just found Bound Off, a short story podcast that comes out monthly, and added it to my sidebar under short stories. Now you’ll have something to listen to on commutes.

Scott Esposito over at Conversation Reading has a great post about prodigious writers, including the rate at which Haruki Murakami writes short stories (he pounds out one in a week). I’d add a writer than I’ve studied under, T.C. Boyle, seems to churn out novels/short story collections at the rate of once a year, and occasionally brings out two books a year. I’ve occasionally been disheartened by such tales of speed, since my imagination works and works well although perhaps not quickly. And sometimes it’s not a conceptual problem, just the organization and refinement of the words on the page that takes the longest. But in contrast to elevating those who write prolifically, I think we should also honor those who write slowly. I’m not talking about people with only one book in them, but writers who write very slowly for their entire lives. The first writer that comes to mind is Deborah Eisenberg, who took eight years to write the eight short stories in her latest collection, “Twilight of the Superheroes.” Granted, they are long short stories, but I suppose it’s a good reason not to beat up on myself because I can’t keep up the story-a-week rate of Murakami.

Why you should never pay for an MFA. Also, along the same MFA track, The Swivet notes that cover letters by MFA graduates are notoriously bad, and asks whether there are practical courses in the programs. Answer: Many don’t have any sort of ropes-of-the-field course, but they should. My own program, the MPW program at USC, does have a literary marketplace course and frequent seminars on topics of finding agents, writing queries, and scoring a publisher, but that’s because it is more oriented towards careers than most MFA programs. Personally, I hate writing query letters, but it’s just one trick of the trade that every writer has to hone in order to survive in the piranha pool of writers. (Also, for writers out there, the literary agent has statistics on query letter survival rates: Read 96, asked to see more of 5. It’s a piranha eat piranha world [we’re way past dogs])

(via Pinky’s Paperhaus)