Chorus of the Forge A Literary Article |
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away where even children could read and understand the meaning of words, there existed mighty literary castles called publishing houses. They were captained by strong men and fair ladies, publishers who knew how to read and sell books. There were frequent jousts between rivals in those days because every house had its champion knights, authors, and strode ever so persistently for more so that each could brag about their talented stable of horses. They knew precisely how to gauge such talent and coveted it most greedily, for the wagering on the waging my book is better than yours was the most exciting event in their lives. In fact, the well-read peasantry delighted in such contests of skill and adroitness, for it provided them with a never-ending entertainment to relieve the boredom of their days, having to work so hard to put food on the table and raise families. Contests of skill, the dime novel, were cheap. The only threats from technology were the light bulb replacing the candle, the automobile replacing feet and the manufacturing plants replacing farms. That aside, there was nothing in existence to equal the sheer satisfaction of reading a great tournament (novel), duel (novella) or short gory (story) from the quill of a master to the accompanying clicks of a mechanical grandfather clock. After all, what could possibly replace time? Before and after the great wars, people hoped for simpler, easier lives. The unobserved part of the changes that were occurring then, as the immoral Industrial Revolution continued to wend and wind its insidious way into control of our lives, was an extension of the Edison-Tesla war of electricity, when AC won out over DC. No one suspected that the analog world was about to be supplanted by digital, that time would be regulated by crystals, paper books replaced by the internet, novels by screenplays, and ink by electrons. The clues were too hard to figure out, though men like Vladimir Zworykin with his x-ray iconoscope tube, Enrico Marconi's radio transmitters, and Alexander Bell's telephone were there for all to see. Who could have predicted that a lengthy novel could be sent over a wire to appear globally and instantaneously to billions of readers on a tube? The publishing business succumbed rapidly down with Poe's House of Usher, sinking to its lowest level as the greatest of their writers died off without replacements. It began in earnest after the assassination of JFK with the reigns of LBJ and Reagan. That which had steered publishing to its most outstanding successes, their editing staffs, were gone almost overnight, and with them, the concept of the literary agent. Without quality writing available, the need for those to gauge it was erased. The highly skilled and knowledgeable ones who honed sentences, re-crafted phrases, detected illogical thinking and repaired crumbling walls of poor punctuation and structure were no longer available at any price, for none trained the new generation in its tedious footsteps. Reading comprehension became less each year as educational institutions foundered with the retirement of competent, literate teachers, replaced by young people who simply wanted jobs. Profit replaced quality in virtually all endeavors. Knowledge, seemingly more available and everywhere, actually became much less and the wisdom to use it was no longer in evidence. With the losses, almost simultaneously, digital printing, POD, and e-books were invented to salvage the industry from having to print thousands of unsold books where they wasted on shelves for the furnaces. It was a survival mechanism. With these new varieties, only the titles ordered needed printing. No waste, no wait compared to before, and no fuss. Whole novels could be placed on the CD or transmitted via electrons through the telephone connections to PCs. It seemed revolutionary and it was except for that never-to-go-away editing problem. Most POD/E houses commenced by asking a minimal charge for their efforts, though they made it very clear that marketing was something beyond their means. Publicity in the right places is simply too expensive for any but the exceptionally wealthy to consider. Authors, having no choice since the remaining traditional publishers no longer culled from the unknown and unproven without huge track records, were compelled to go POD/E. Soon, for the traditional publishers, even track records were not good enough. People were not buying enough books to sustain them anymore. Gimmicks and alternatives were sought to stimulate what all but the MBA's could see was a dying institution. They tried publishing only young people. That failed. They tried young, wealthy, attractive people who could pay for marketing. That also failed. For a time, they settled on the notorious and the fabulously rich, people like Dennis Rodman, Hillary Clinton and Giuliani. None of it worked. Today, they have given up completely on quality and endorsed pornography as legitimate, literary mainstream. It's an admission of total failure. This seemed to make the POD business quite lucrative for the businessmen who owned those companies. So what if the product is unedited and of exceptionally poor quality? Only the selling matters, their only business principle. The traditional publishers thought POD was a joke until James Redford shook them to their senses by personally marketing his POD book, The Celestine Prophecy. Of course, they quickly bought him out to keep things quiet. Now, it's too late. Everyone knows about it. Naturally, with new competitions, the prices POD charged authors for start up costs, typically $99, which are wholly imaginary, rose considerably. The reputation of these houses became likened to vanity houses, traditional presses that do not engage in advertising. Brick and mortar bookstores refused to stock their shelves with what they considered trash, anything printed without competent editing. In spite of that, POD houses like iUniverse, Xlibris and many others now charge thousands to new writers struggling to be read. It is a waste industry. Only now, after observing the trends of the last thirty years, can it be seen that hardly any quality manuscripts have been produced to rival the glut of genius in the past. The greatest authors have run to where William Faulkner once described the lowest ebb of his life, the screenplay, where cherished descriptions are replaced by facial expressions and scenery. They have no choice. Novels and short stories no longer pay. The dilemma has reached crisis proportions and cannot be reversed without a major overhaul. We writers do not need the computer or any of the technical advances of the Industrial Revolution to create works of art. The most lauded and glorious of our manuscripts, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, War and Peace, et al, were produced on lined paper with a #2 Eberhard lead pencil with an eraser. There's the precursor of editing, rubber, graphite and wood. All it took was determination, plenty of paper and a pencil sharpener, plus an easy-to-reach wastepaper basket and a coffee urn with sugar packets to stimulate the imagination. We are so spoiled by technology, most of us have forgotten how to use script on a page, but for our signatures or names and addresses on envelopes. As a professional editor and former teacher, I am constantly amazed at the errors I see in manuscripts. Adult authors seem to know so little of what they were taught in elementary school, like how to write a complete sentence with a subject noun and an action verb. Punctuation and spelling, which is so obvious to me, appears to be universally misunderstood, especially commas which are simply used where speech pauses naturally. Considering what is offered on the Internet, or in easily obtainable books like Roget's Thesaurus, The Chicago Manual of Style, Barron's The Essentials of English, The Condensed Oxford Dictionary and Bartlett's Book of Famous Quotations, there can be no excuse for writers not knowing where they err if they wish success. Writers should do their own editing to master the craft and be competent, though there is certainly nothing wrong with seeking another pair of eyes for confirmation. Yet, we are experiencing a dissolution of language, an attempt by leaderless billions to merge all words into simplistic street terms in order to avoid the mental energy that excellence requires. Wordprocessors today contain look-up Spell-check, Grammar correction and many more advantages to make writing easier to achieve one's own editing. The excuse I'm given is always lack of time; they work to make money so they can pay me to fix problems they are too lazy or not confident enough to do themselves. The majority of the work I see comes from people who have graduated our school system, the same I attended where memorization played such a key role. They remember next to nothing, not even the basics. Is it the air? The water? Is all the food designed to reduce our brain capacity to less than 10%? Paragraph length run-on sentences like this one, sentences without any reference to those prior or after, illogical sentences or ones using words that have nothing to do with their subjects, sentences in the wrong place, bland sentences that say nothing or are exceptionally obtuse, are common. Mind you, these are sprinkled with structural and punctuation errors as well. It freaks me out to realize I'm repairing stories written by adults with early child deficiencies from grammar school. No wonder there are so few good editors left. One must go through the same manuscript five or six times to catch everything, each time looking for specific discrepancies. Sure, I can understand how a young girl gets married and is immediately placed in a position to raise children, trapped into dealing with the immature for many years before having the freedom to use her mind the way she wishes. I have also witnessed women who have overcome that challenge and retained their knowledge to write well. The same can be said for men, especially laborers who lose themselves in their work. My father was such a man, but never forgot his schooling. For the new publishers to truly succeed and compare themselves favorably with the giants who produced the great books, they have no choice but to seek competent editors, even if they must charge authors extra to do so. They must also stop trying to make huge profits from those who cannot write, but think they can. This is how POD flourishes, 10,000 books a week at Lightning Press alone, charging big bucks to produce garbage that will ultimately be thrown away. For the truly creative and artistic, it is mind-numbing and exceptionally frustrating. The POD publishers spend their profits on advertising full of lies to entice those who do not understand what is being done. They go to great lengths to make it appear as though one's book can be a tremendous success if one purchases their marketing directives, all of which require a great deal more money to have a chance at actually working. I have never seen a single POD fiction book from an unknown become a best seller. They even pay successful authors from other venues to publish with them to illustrate to the gullible how a big name made it. None of it is true. I am very tired of writing about this disaster because there is a very obvious solution to the whole mess. It requires some effort on your part. The only way to change this travesty into something better is to educate yourselves about our language. Surely you understand that the only real education is self-education! If you do not do this, writing as an art form will spiral downwards to its illogical conclusion, replaced totally by pictures. Think about how rap music sounds to a classically trained musician. When a person has lived with the most creative sounds ever achieved on earth for most of one's life, anything less is a huge disappointment. And when a person has read the greatest books and is intimate with their authors, what is left today is not comparable. An apple is a world apart from an olive. Both can be eaten, but one is clearly more savored and cherished. W. A. Rieser |
