Sans Fig Leaf
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"Happenstance, coincidence, or..."
1 February, 2007
I attended a panel at a science fiction convention a couple years ago where a woman tried to hijack the discussion about the craft of writing. She ranted about a conspiracy of editors, big name fans, and other people to suppress her work. She seemed genuinely convinced that the only reason she had failed to sell any story (and why her stories posted to open forums never garnered as many compliments as other authors' work) was because of this conspiracy.
When the moderator tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, the woman exclaimed, "Three times is enemy action!" and left the room in a huff. I don't know if she realized she was quoting Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, or not, but she had misunderstood the meaning of the saying. In the James Bond novel, Goldfinger, the villain observes, "They have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." Three times something had gone wrong and Mr Bond was in the vicinity at each time, so it was reasonable to suspect that Bond might be intentionally causing trouble.
Reasonable to suspect isn't the same thing as absolute proof. Just because a big red truck happens to be seen near three different burning buildings doesn't mean the red truck is crewed by arsonists. The appearance of the red truck didn't cause the fire. The firefighters were summoned when a fire alarm went off or a neighbor called 9-1-1 because a fire was already in progress.
Similarly, the reasons a story (or other work of art) isn't selling or getting a lot of compliments could be that no one has seen it and/or very few of the people who have seen it enjoyed it. There are at least as many reasons a reader might not enjoy a story as there are readers, but there are a few things one can figure out without compiling extensive psychological profiles of hundreds of potentional readers.
For example, if the author is trying to sell a historical romance to a hard-boiled detective magazine it's probably not going to work out. Similarly, readers looking for comic strips may not be interested in a 500,000 word prose novel. A forum whose readers regularly praise erotic fiction probably isn't the place to post a children's story (or vice versa!). These examples may seem ludicrous, but I have seen many would-be authors/artists make exactly these sorts of mistakes--and get very huffy if someone suggests that they're peddling their art to the wrong crowd.
Maybe the writing itself is the problem. An objective editor could help. As could an objective reader who can point out which parts are confusing, the slow scenes where the reader starts skimming, or the awkward dialogue.
I don't remember if the woman's rant mentioned it specifically, but it certainly was implied that she felt that the other writers who were more successful than she didn't deserve their success. She felt her work was as good or better than theirs. So the suggestion that the writing might need some polishing would likely not go over well.
Of course, the fact that she was ranting about conspiracies meant she had given up a long time ago. Not consciously, of course, but the very act of placing all of the blame for our problem on other people is a form of surrender. The moment that you believe they have all the power over your success or failure, you cease to believe that you have the ability to succeed--which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
--Elbert Hubbard
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