Reason #15 Addendum: Clichépalooza

Now that you've begun to accept that you're a lazy, plagiarising fanfic writer, let's look at some of the different forms of cliché that you frequently abuse, and how you can identify them -- so you can plainly see that your fiction is merely a string of old, stolen ideas held together with conjunctions.

There are clichéd words: mostly adjectives and adverbs, such as "grizzled" (usually followed by "detective"), pretty much any word that ends in -ly, and the queen of all clichéd words, "quirky". Let me tell you now, everyone is quirky when they think no-one's looking (for example, I find delight in ripping random pages out of books in bookstores). Resorting to using "quirky" to describe a character is a stop writing moment.

There are a couple of easy ways to spot clichéd words in your writing:

• Words that you frequently read in fiction but almost never hear anyone use in everyday speech (Do you know anyone who would appreciate being called "grizzled"?)
• Adjectives/adverbs that appear more than three times in your entire writing output

There are the clichéd phrases: "to all intents and porpoises", "lies, damned lies and goddamn awful fiction", or "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw clichés". They're often tired similes and metaphors that no longer inspire comparative thought ("a drop in the bucket"). Others are elegant variations: using five words where one would suffice ("in the fullness of time" instead of "eventually"). Still others are little more than punctuation -- think about how many writers use "let's get out of here" because they can't figure out how to end a scene. Even synopses have their own clichés, such as "and then they", "it turns out" and "little did they know".

You can determine quite simply if a particular phrase is a cliché: ask yourself if you've ever read those words in that exact sequence before. If you're not sure, Google it. A few hits might be coincidence, but more than ten and you might as well contact the authors of those pages to form a bad writers' support group.

There are clichéd characters: the bitter ("grizzled") detective with a secret that explains his bitterness and his limp, chasing the preternaturally intelligent serial killer with the absurdly complex and predictable psychopathology who appeared as a minor character on page 50; the self-aware anthropomorphic robot who is fascinated by or yearns to be a chemically-imbalanced talking meat-bag; the school bully with latent homosexuality who winds up as a twice-divorced fry cook; the hooker who inexplicably does something nice for someone without expecting so much as a bag of crack and a shot of penicillin in return; the emotionally disconnected elf (or, indeed, any 'elf'); the young agricultural worker who it is prophesied will rise up to save the kingdom from the tyranny of market forces; or pretty much every supporting character in your fiction that you had to make "quirky".

You probably know who the clichéd characters are in your fiction, because you remember the original stories they come from. You didn't really try to hide the similarity, because although you're ostensibly writing a WWII-era spy thriller, subconsciously you really want people to figure out it's thinly-veiled Star Wars fanfic.

There are clichéd plots and plot elements: that one crucial forensic clue the oafish police overlooked, that the preternaturally observant amateur detective finds on page 87 but only tells you about on page 279; the paradox of travelling back in time just to explain the time-travel paradox to the one smart person in the primitive tribe who conveniently learns to speak English fluently in less than a chapter; the mysterious object imbued with the mysterious power to to remain mysterious, that must be found/rescued/destroyed at any cost but never adequately explained to anyone; and dear God, any story that is driven by, makes reference to, or includes a recipe for, a "prophecy".  

How do you find the clichéd plot elements in your writing? That's easy. Look at page one. Or, more likely, page 27, where your plot actually starts.

There are also clichéd writing careers: there's the sophomore slump, where the author spent six years writing their first novel, then the publisher wants a follow-up in eight months; the runaway bestseller, where the author can't think of any story that will live up to the surprise hit of their last novel; the trend chaser, where the writer keeps writing knockoffs of current hits, hoping that the money train will hit their house when it derails; and the all-time number one, the imawriterdammit, which (roughly translated) means the person who claims all the social benefits of being a writer because they once scribbled down an idea for a story combining two clichés they saw on different episodes of The A-Team. 

For those who genuinely fear they have been unwittingly infested with clichés, here are some external resources which have selectively quoted the worst parts of your own writing for you:

• Jessica Morrell, at one of the many websites called The Writing Life, has a handy list of clichéd phrases.
• TheInfo.org has an even more handy online cliché finder.
• John VanSickle, with the help of dozens of generous nerds, has compiled a spectacularly detailed and redundantly-named Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés. If you have two or more of these clichés in one story, you're banned from even reading SF.
• Kathy Pulver and J.S. Burke risked a lawsuit with the Grand List of Fantasy Clichés and Amethyst Angel tries the humility defense with the Not-So-Grand List of Overused Fantasy Clichés.
• Strange Horizons provides a list of Horror Stories [They've] Seen Too Often.
• If you want to kill the clichés almost as they occur, check out Lake Superior State University's annual Banished Words (and phrases) list.
• And the acme of all cliché lists, the 3,300+ strong Cliché Finder. For random demotivation, visit 10 Random Clichés often.

Reason #15: You're a Cliché Abuser

Clichés are the cancer of fiction. They may be hard to spot at first -- a borrowed phrase here, a stock character there -- but if left unchecked, they can metastasize throughout your prose, infecting any shreds of originality and talent, until your output is nothing but puerile dross. See, it's happening already.  

(I'm assuming you know what a cliché is, and not just because people keep saying your writing is full of them, and that your life as an unsuccessful writer basically is one. If you don't know what a cliché is, then it's time to hitch a ride on the Stop Writing Express to Acceptance, where you can catch a bus back to Reality.)

Here's an important point to remember:

Cliché is the plagiarising of what has already been plagiarised

Every cliché begins with an act of plagiarism -- for an idea to be overused, it must be used by one writer and 're-used' by another, then another and another. The idea becomes a cliché when it has been copied so many times that no-one remembers the original text -- or at least, it's been copied so many times that it seems acceptable to copy.

If the original idea was sufficiently broad, and the copying of the idea sufficiently popular, the cliché may be charitably described as "trope" or "convention", or in rare instances, "sub-genre". Which leads us to:

Cliché is a form of fan fiction

One of the (many) arguments against fan fiction is that the fanfic writer relies on the reader's understanding and expectations of the original work, avoiding the difficult work of creating plot, setting and character, and skipping straight to the "action" (often man-on-man, or man-on-wookie). Clichés, especially "genre conventions", function in the same manner, invoking a familiarity in the reader to spare the writer the arduous labour of creating original meaning. Which leads us to:

Cliché is the antidote to originality

Unless you're specifically setting out to plagiarise, or create genre-fanfic, you use clichés when you're just too lazy to think of something original. Not sure what your character would say in a given situation? Or how to move the story from point A to point B? Or how to describe a particular setting, or action, or emotion? Then fall back on your internal database of What Other Writers Have Done™, and hide your shame with the Everyone Does It™ defense.

If you string enough clichés together, you can reduce the amount of work you have to do yourself to little more than typing.

Reason #14: Youre Speling is Atrowshus

(That's right, kids, to celebrate the end of the second week of the second month of International Slushpile Awareness Month, here's an all-new Reason with some slush references thrown in.)

There is a myth about publishing, propagated and regularly renewed by bad writers desperate to justify their futile reveries. The self-sustaining power of the myth is such that writers in its thrall cannot see, much less correct the basic problems in their writing -- problems so fundamental, the writers are forever doomed to get form rejections that don't alert them to how severe these problems are. This myth is:

Publishers employ copy editors to fix the spelling and grammar in your manuscript.

This myth is pervasive because in the most literal sense, it is true. Publishers do employ copy editors, and their role (in part) is to fix errors of spelling and grammar during a book's pre-publication phase. But in the funhouse mirror that is the bad writer's state of perpetual denial, this simple fact has been tortured into a comforting, yet utterly untrue corollary:

It dont mater how bad is my speling or grammar, cause thats' what copyeditors is for.

And thus a sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate'd, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn't initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.

I don't think it's much of a secret that this is the fault of the massive wussification of education in Western countries over the last forty years. After the peace movement of the 1960s, the powers that be decided that kids were getting too darn smart, and a smart kid was much less likely to say "sure Mister President, I'll spend six weeks learning to field-strip an M-16 and having my sense of self systematically destroyed so I can be sent to murder some poor, ill-trained conscripted suckers with a different skin color trying to defend their country with outdated weapons you sold to them before you decided that stealing their natural resources was cheaper than buying them". It's far easier to maintain a massive standing army ready to fight and die for no reason other than "the President says it's cool" if you don't teach them to think for themselves in the first place.

So, now we're on the second generation of kids who are getting a free pass through the school system while barely learning to read and write at a functional level. The frightening thing is that some of them still think they can be writers -- while the saddening thing is that if the education system was designed to develop intelligent and capable citizens instead of consumers and soldiers, they could have been writers.

Some of them (surely) have interesting lives, and strong ideas -- it's just that they lack the linguistic capability to express themselves, and what's left of today's reading public have less and less patience to wade through books that read like they were typed by throwing pebbles at a keyboard across the room.

And -- here's the kicker -- for the same reasons, skilled copyeditors are now rarer and more expensive than when your high-school-dropout granddaddy was nurtured by his publisher through a long and unremarkable midlist career. Publishers are desperate for the Next Big Thing, and they're prepared to spend even less money on even more books than ever before. So, while slushpile manuscripts are getting worse, less money and time is being put into polishing the rough gems. These days it's write well, and sell well, or get the hell out.

(You might wonder, if literacy levels are dropping, why you can't write for people who are just as illiterate as you. Simple answer: illiterate people don't buy books. The people who do buy books love words enough to recognize lots of them.)

If you're one of these writers, with great ideas and a passion for writing but lacking confidence in spelling and grammar, you're just fscked. Give up. You're wasting your time writing when you should be reading -- Modern English Usage, preferably, but at least read the spelling suggestions and grammar warnings in your word processor.

To help you figure out if you're in this category, here are some different types of spelling errors, ranked in increasing order of ineptitude:

1. Typos. Everyone makes the occasional tpyo. See? Especially in web forums and blog comments. Only the most pedantic grammar nazis get a bug in the butt over a few typos (and pedantic grammar nazis only buy new editions of OED anyway, so who gives a fsck what they think). They're easily fixed (the typos, not the nazis). But it's a problem if you make:
2. Consistent Typos. These are actually:
3. Words You Don't Know How To Spell Correctly. This category includes Words You Spell Phonetically. This is where it gets bad, because it demonstrates that you haven't read widely enough to see these words spelled correctly. You may be forgiven a (very) few of these, as the intended meaning will probably be understood. But agents will reach for the form letter when they find:
4. Words You Don't Know How To Use Properly. This includes tortured phrases like intensive purposes and classic mistakes like its/it's and their/there/they're. They're very simple rules, kids, and it's a shame you keep breaking them.

This last category is the (slush)killer, the "auto-no", the point at which your manuscript may simply become unreadable. They're especially dangerous because spellcheck software won't pick them up; indeed you may only discover them when a patient and better-educated friend looks up from your manuscript and says "What the fsck does this mean?"

Really, if you're going to write in English, you're expected to understand it. Category four blunders are like interrupting a serious conversation to tell a bad joke: people might ignore one and pause politely for two, but three or more and someone's going to throw something at you. You should be glad at this point that your manuscript didn't get published -- a hardcover hurts more.

Reason #13: You Are Not Dan Brown

Dan Brown is rumoured to be publishing his next novel sometime this year, which means the media ex machina will grind again for a few months until the sales figures come in. You have been warned.

(Disclaimers: One, I made money from the publication of The Da Vinci Code. More precisely, I won a hardcover copy in a magazine giveaway, read it, had a chuckle, then resold it for a couple bucks off retail. Two, I enjoyed TDVC the first two times I read it, when it was called Holy Blood, Holy Grail and later Foucault's Pendulum.)

You are not Dan Brown. I'm sure you've noticed this, unless you happened to wake up this morning with the surviving members of Pink Floyd playing "Money" live in your bedroom. In case you're still not sure, here are a few other indicators that you're not Dan Brown:

• Your computer is not made of solid gold, according to specifications on a long-lost page from Leonardo's Codex Arundel.
• There's no voicemail from James Patterson offering to ghostwrite your next novel.
• You are not under permanent surveillance by the NSA, CIA and the Vatican, even if that pizza guy looks shifty and Catholic.
• The paper you're using is not made from recycled hundred dollar bills.
• The CEO of your publishing company doesn't drop by every Friday to see how the next book's coming along, and to ask if there are any odd jobs around the mansion that need doing while he's there.

If you don't know who Dan Brown is, stop writing. You obviously haven't set foot in a bookstore in the last four years.

If you are a Dan Brown, and God knows there are probably thousands of you, including a few Dannys, Danielles and Dons, then you should head down to your local courthouse and change your name. Even if you have no intention of writing. The jokes and funny looks will never stop. (If you're thinking of changing your name to Dan Brown or a close variant, publishers are on to you. Just ask King Stephen, Stephan Kiing and Steven K. Ng.)

If you are the Dan Brown, and you've worked your way through the last ninety-eight pages of Google results to get here, I have a couple of Reasons to Stop Writing that only apply to you:

Special Dan Brown Only Reason #1: You Have Nothing to Look Forward To.

Nothing you ever write will have the impact of The Da Vinci Code. There just aren't any ideas that "explosive" left for you to plagiarise adapt to fiction. It was a total fluke, and you know it. You already know that only a quarter of TDVC readers went on to buy your other books. It'll only get worse. Every literary critic and blogger has their knives sharpened, ready to eviscerate the terrible language, hackneyed plot and bad research/science/philosophy of your next book. Everything you do, ever, will be called "failure" compared to TDVC. J.K. Rowling already has you beat, you'll never catch her. King, Cussler, Koontz, you'd have to sell another hundred million before they even return your calls.

Special Dan Brown Only Reason #2: You've Made Over a Quarter of a Billion Dollars.

You could finance your own global conspiracy for this. Goldfinger would've totally kicked James Bond's ass if he had that kind of operating capital. For the money you're spending on shredding the crackpot manuscripts/manifestos that are mailed to you every day, you could overthrow the Congo, Dogs of War style. Why write about the Freemasons when you could start up the Brownmasons, and live out your days on L.Ron Hubbard's yacht?

And while you're here, Dan, there are a few regular Reasons that apply to you:

• Reason #92: Your Best Fiction is Your Research. Sure, four books under your belt and editors and reviewers just assume you know what you're doing. But any reader who can use Google Maps can prove in a minute that you don't know where Versailles is.
• Reason #37: You're Writing The Same Damn Book Over and Over. Just how many global conspiracies can there be at any one time? Is Amazon taking orders for your Jack the Ripper book yet?
• Reason #55: We've Heard This One Before. If I give you five bucks, will you just send me a list of the nonfiction books you're plagiarising using for research for your next novel, and save me the trouble of reading it?
• Why don't you just start at Reason #1 and weigh up the preponderance of the evidence.

But this is pointless. Brown's incredible chutzpah in plagiarising basing a novel on someone else's (entertaining but ultimately bogus) speculative nonfiction has demonstrated that rivers of undeserved wealth are out there for the enterprising bad writer to exploit. Brown has built a fortress out of sixty million hardcovers, unassailable to the flaming arrows of criticism and the siege engines of copyright infringement lawsuits. If everyone who hated TDVC created a bonfire of derision by soaking their copies in burning vitriol and piling them against the walls, Brown could stand atop the Illustrated Edition battlements and put out the fire with Champagne.

For everyone else, depending on your point of view, not being Dan Brown is a good or a bad thing. There are two schools of thought on this:

• "Gee, I'd love to be Dan Brown. I could drag out all my unsold novels and they'd sell ten million copies each. I'm already trying to emulate him, in my choice of plots, my research, my writing and most importantly my query letters."
• "I could not live with myself, or even tolerate my own presence for more than ten minutes without choking on my own umbrage. I'd have to issue a press release acknowledging that the only part of the book that's even based on a verifiable fact is the disclaimer that says it's a work of fiction, and dedicate my life to walking the streets of this world, handing out refunds to everyone who read the book or saw the movie."

If you're in, or leaning towards the first group, stop writing. The "next Dan Brown" is Dan Brown. The outward ripple of interest in religious cryptogeek thrillers crested in 2005. Those unscrupulous hacks who dusted off their manuscripts in time found only the humble pie left uneaten on Brown's plate, as publishers expensively discovered that one inexplicably successful novel does not translate into a renaissance in literature. Now, writing "the next Da Vinci Code" on your query letter is automatically translated to "Shred Me".

If you're in the second group, you can still learn from Brown's example. The New York Times described TDVC as "[a] primer on how not to write an English sentence".

Dan Brown is the quintessential example of the Breakout author. He has no fscking idea how it happened. If he had the slightest awareness that TDVC would be successful at all, let alone a top-ten all-time bestseller, why did he write three midlist cryptogeek/technothrillers beforehand? He certainly wasn't honing his writing talent. That's why his next book will be more of the same, sans whatever it was that made TDVC a hit. Take out the material that was plagiarised borrowed from other sources, and TDVC is about a professor solving anagrams.

Eventually his readership will dwindle back to the core fanbase of mild-mannered cryptogeeks he was always writing for, who clearly don't give a crap about factual accuracy or beauty of language. Hopefully his publisher won't go bankrupt in the process.

It's an endless cycle. Brown read a Sidney Sheldon novel and thought "I can do better than that". Now, thousands of wannabe writers are doing the same to him. But the really bitter pill is that one of them will be right. And then I'll have to change the name on this article.

Reason #12: You Think Grammar is the Amish Word for Your Mom's Mom

Your grammar, it sucks like the black hole on a cloudy day. If you do not become the grammar master, you may loose your readers who will not be coming back.

(Oh, how it hurts to type that.)

Grammar is not just the green squiggly line under most of your sentences in MS Word. Nor is it something your septuagenarian English teacher invented because your stories were just so edgy, so radical, he had to fail you.

Words are not distributed randomly in sentences. If you want to be understood by your readers, you place words in a certain order, based on common rules. In case you've forgotten, we call these rules grammar.

(This casual definition is worded specifically to fibrillate the hearts of the Grammar Nazis, who trawl the Internet looking for dangling participles and plural noun confusion, and who secretly hope that I am one of them. Fsck you, Nazis! It must be so hard to clean that glass house in which you live.)

Unless you're over 40, you may not know what I'm talking about, because public schools stopped teaching grammar sometime around 1970. Now, even the teachers don't understand it.

This is both the problem, and part of the solution. If you don't know what an infinitive is, let alone how to stop splitting them, you can be sure that 99% of modern readers couldn't care less. The world has moved on from the expectation of syntactic exactitude - now you're considered "bright" if you can read a newspaper after 12 years of schooling. What matters is whether readers can interpret meaning from your sentences.

If your grammar is terrible, which is extremely likely, readers will have a difficult time trying to work out what the fsck you're on about. On the other hand, if your writing is grammatically perfect, you may pass the "old fogey" test but most readers will find your writing stiff and boring, and many will find it just as difficult to read.

A common understanding of grammar is the primary method by which you communicate your ideas to the reader. (I say "primary" because your writing is still full of dull, lazy cliches which communicate old ideas to the reader who already understands them, but that's another Reason entirely.) If you don't have this common understanding of how readers turn each sentence into something approximating what you meant, your work is going into the bin before the end of page 1.

Sure, you can learn the rules of grammar, just as you can learn to say "How much for the private dance with the happy ending" in another language. There are some fine books on the (former) topic. But unless you already have a good understanding, you'll never pass for a local, and you'll always wind up overpaying.

The Reasons

[Updated to Reason #15.]

101 Reasons to Stop Writing is a work in progress. Yes, there will be 101 reasons. No, they are not all here yet. No, they're not in any specific order. Yes, I really do know what I'm doing. Kinda.

This post will be linked from the sidebar, so new readers can read the list without being troubled to browse the archives. The list may not always be up to date, as I'm really lazy.

The Reasons:

1. You Don't Buy Books
2. You Are Not Stephen King (Addendum)
3. You Think Anyone Can Be A Writer
4. That's a Lot of Words
5. I'll Just Pad This Out
6. You Don't Read What You're Writing
7. Publishing is Dying
8. What's Your Exit Strategy? (Addendum: Stay the Course vs Cut and Run)
9. Put the Thesaurus Down
10. You're Not Doing It Right (Addendum: Now With Even More Sex!)
11. You Think Web 2.0 Will Change Publishing (Addendum: You Think You Can Fix Publishing)
12. You think Grammar is the Amish Word for Your Mom's Mom
13. You Are Not Dan Brown
14. Youre Speling is Atrowshus
15. You're a Cliché Abuser

Reasons 16-101 to come. When the list is complete, if you haven't stopped writing, then God help you.

Stay the Course vs Cut and Run

This is really an addendum to Reason #8: What's your Exit Strategy?. I'm posting it in the dying hours before the title becomes last year's top catchphrase.

Hopefully you've spent some time with your family this week, if they haven't already left you. Maybe you've had a chance to consider your writing goals, and how they impact your need for simple human intimacy.

Every writer gets rejections, and every writer can tell you an anecdote or two about the rejection that was totally bogus and personal, the one that turned up a year later, the one that really nailed the problem with the story, and the one that nearly drove them insane. (You might have to buy them a drink per anecdote, which is overpriced in my book.)

Most biographies of successful authors make note of how many rejections they received before their big break. A handful of unpublished novels, dozens, even hundreds of rejections are not uncommon. The common implication to these tales, however, is not "It took me that long to get a handle on this writing game," or even "Gee, my early stuff really sucked."

It's "My, those dolts in the publishing industry wouldn't know a good writer if they bashed them over the head with a Royal No. 10 typewriter."

And it's exactly this attitude that keeps the truly talentless from ever taking stock of the reams of first drafts spilling over their "writing nook" floor, the hard drive full of "fragments", the pile of dog-eared, hand-annotated writing books, the notebooks scrawled with cuneiform-like characters once thought to be poetry, the used envelope with the next submission for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine already stuffed and taped in, postmark steamed off and ready for resending, or the grimy mirror covered with yellowed rejection slips for "inspiration", some older than their marriage.

At no point do they think, "I have wasted my adulthood. I am beyond help. The guys who beat me up in high school all drive BMWs now and have sex with their secretary. I spent next month's rent on story arc software. When the divorce papers were served, I revised and added six pages of backstory. I don't know what day it is and I think the dog died in here, somewhere."

They Stay the Course. They keep going until the cataracts form and they start typing on their televisions, and they start arguments with the postmaster about how he lacks the insight to fully appreciate how to mail his story. They don't stop until Old Man Death says "Just finish the sentence you're on."

You're probably not at this stage (yet). Your friends still call to let you know when they're getting married or moving away. You haven't wondered if you can save on toilet paper by wiping your ass on the rejection slips, then rinsing them off. You haven't tried to reassemble back into the shape of the original tree. When you get a rejection, there's still a small part of you who knows it's because the story was crap.

Now is the time to set a timetable for withdrawal.

I'm not saying you have to Cut and Run, just think about when to slow down. When to permanently retire those execrable early novels you still send out every three years or so because you think the agents will have changed jobs by now. When to just burn the story rather than reworking it (again).

Then, think about when you will stop writing. Set some specific conditions, and a date.

Then tell someone.

Reason #11 Addendum: You Think You Can Fix Publishing

Disclaimer: I don't work in publishing. I'm not going to pretend that I have a thorough understanding of the business. I'm fairly sure no-one does. I don't think that paying attention to the publishing industry has given me some unique insight. It's not like I work for a government contractor.

There are problems in the publishing industry. Unless you're writing iambs by candlelight with a feather quill from your pet dodo, you probably know what a few of these problems are. Likely, you've also whined, grandstanded, and otherwise complained over these problems in coffeeshops, writing classes and convention after-parties, coming to no conclusion other than that the industry must be run by retards.

It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that you have come up with a solution to the problems that is both a) practical, and b) hasn't already been considered, tested or enacted by someone in a position to make a difference.

Arrogance is okay, though. It takes a special kind of arrogance to believe anyone wants to read your work. But if that arrogance extends to thinking everyone in publishing is stupider than you, and your only contribution is unoriginal, unworkable ideas, then you're just like every other schizophrenic barfly who thinks he's running for President.

The problems in publishing tend to break down into four categories, depending on who they affect:

Readers: Books are more expensive than they used to be, so many to choose from, this book sounds interesting but I don't know if I'll like it enough to buy it new, the new book by Favourite Author sucks compared to their earlier stuff, no-one's writing the books I want to read, these authors are all so rich they don't understand me anymore, I could write a better book by squirting ink out of my ass.

Publishing Industry Professionals: Paper costs rising, reading audience declining, annual profits not rising fast enough, no one buys short story magazines anymore, hard to differentiate new product in crowded marketplace, hard to stay two years ahead of the trends, authors are egomaniacal crybabies who think our job is to print money for them, I should just write a book myself.

Published Writers: Publishers only care about Big Name Author, they won't pay for me to stay in nice hotels while I bitch about doing signings, the Borders in Bumfsck Iowa won't stock my book, NYTBR won't return my calls, I can't feed my 87 cats on this advance, my royalty check seems to be missing a few zeros, I think I could've been a lawyer, what do you mean I have to wait for returns?

Unpublished Writers: Help! I'm drowning in the slushpile! Won't someone please validate me? There must be a way I can bypass actually writing a good book and get into print quickly so I can show all those haters who don't know who the fsck I am.

Unpubs tend to focus on the slushpile, not because it's the worst problem (it isn't), but because it's their interface with publishing, the Iron Gates of Approval that they're desperate to sneak under. Of course the slushpile is broken, if they don't immediately receive a grovelling acceptance engraved into a gold ingot. "Reclaim the slushpile!" they cry. "Asylum doors stand open! Change the system, so that my crap gets in."

Of course the response from the publishing industry is silence. Or a form letter containing a transcription of silence. Because as far as the industry is concerned, the slushpile isn't broken. Good writing stands out like the effervescence of a just-opened Perrier bottle when you're standing in a lake of fermenting pus. (It could happen, and you'll want a Perrier when it does.)

It's possible, even likely, that publishing will change dramatically in the coming years. But the slushpile ain't going away anytime soon, and the other problems really ain't yours to fix.

Imagine for a moment that every problem in publishing was solved. Readership doubled, and doubled again. Improved, targeted marketing allowed every reader to find books they wanted, and those readers bought more books. Sales went through the roof. Advances and royalty payments got sweeter and sweeter. Ten times as many books were published.

There will still be more manuscripts written than there are readers interested in reading them.

Even if no-one else took up the pen, the odds on publication might shorten from 1000-to-1 down to 100-1. That's still 99% rejection. If there was a proportional increase in new writers, agents would needs teams of slush readers to comb through hundreds of thousands of submissions.

Or imagine that magically, writers everywhere start improving. They hone their talent, postponing submission until they're convinced that their work is as good as they can make it. But the market can only support so much product. More rejection slips are handwritten, and the books that make it are great, but ...

The song remains the same.

Really, the "problem" of the slushpile could be halved, overnight, if agencies started insisting that every submission be accompanied by a signed statement reading "I have read and adhered to all the submission guidelines", and trashing any submission that doesn't.

Since that isn't going to happen, you might as well just "write a better book", or get used to disappointment. Or just stop writing, and make a real difference to the slushpile.

If you think you can fix publishing, you need to do a couple of things:

• Come up with an idea - one that is feasible and hasn't been tried before
• Make sure it isn't completely retarded, and would be accepted by the people it's supposed to help
• Figure out how it could be implemented, and how it would benefit the company who pays for it
• And maybe, oh I don't know, allow feedback from people interested enough to comment

If you're not prepared to take these steps, you're just adding more noise to a discussion already choked with a million little whiners.

At least you're not writing. There isn't any problem in publishing bigger than your craptacularity.

Reason #11: You Think Web 2.0 Will Change Publishing

(I would have gotten to this eventually, but the timing is inspired by Meika.)

Web 2.0 is a wonderful, nebulous concept. It's a buzzword, a meme, a marketing gimmick, a catchcry, a call to arms, and yet it doesn't actually describe anything in particular. To programmers, it's an exciting way to build interactivity into websites, experiment with online communication and collaboration, and make nifty gadgets. To tweens, it's an awesome way to get stalked and to get busted puking into your mom's Beemer. To most humans, though, Web 2.0 finally delivers on some of the promise of the Internet that made you buy that first modem, back in nineteen fscking ninety-six.

Web 2.0 hacks, and the talentless masses who choke these channels with meaningless content, can pat themselves on the back now that Time has declared this river of shit the most powerful cultural force in existence. Dear god, now we're all watching each other poop, and rating it.

One thing Web 2.0 has done is bring us closer to Andy Warhol's prediction, and the metaphorical period of fame closer to a literal 15 minutes.

One thing Web 2.0 won't do, however, is put your words in a better order. There's only so much you can learn from sifting through garbage.

Every year or so some pundit declares the next technology to be a [some industry]-killer. POD, e-books, e-paper, Amazon.com, they were all supposed to have killed traditional publishing and bookselling by now, and we were all supposed to be sitting under healthy trees reading democratically-promoted writers on the one sheet of electronic paper, while flying cars whizzed by. But the dents made by these technologies are nothing compared to the impact of Dan Brown and JK Rowling alone. For every person who took a gamble on a POD author, or squinted through an e-book in the last five years, there are two kids and a high-school dropout who set foot in a bookstore for the first time to buy TDVC or Harry Potter and the Obvious Fantasy Reference.

POD, self publishing, e-books, Internet distribution - none of this is really new (not Web 2.0 new). Writers have always had the option of writing out more copies of their manuscripts to hand-bind and sell in the market. The only difference now is that e-books and POD make it a snap to reproduce the product, which means even the laziest writer (who manages to cobble together a first draft of some "experimental" fiction over decades of minimal effort) can become the sole proprietor of I Wrote This Myself Enterprises.

Because the barriers are lower, more shit flows. More books are published now than ever before, but quality hasn't improved. There's just more stuff in the middle, and much more stuff at the bottom.

Apart from experiments in interactive and collaborative fiction, Web 2.0 has meant nothing for how people write. Hell, we haven't even got an online or software thesaurus that beats reaching behind you for the battered copy of Roget's you bought in college. The cyber-fantasy of online, instant feedback and criticism is hampered by two obvious inertias:

• I can't be bothered reading your crap, let alone providing detailed constructive criticism; and
• Even if I did, you'd just get all huffy and tell me I'm wrong and too stupid to understand the deeper layers of puke below the crap.

And thus the dream of Web 2.0-driven fiction founders, on the rocks of obstinacy, continually dashed by waves of utter indifference.

So what does Web 2.0 mean for publishing? Not much. Publishing companies are big enough to absorb the shift to POD, when the quality of POD eventually rivals mass production. People still buy books for the same reasons, and how these books get in front of their eyes is less important than which books they choose - and they ain't choosing meika loofs samorzewski.

Reason #10 Addendum: Now With Even More Sex!

I'm about to tell you a secret so shocking, it might blow your mind. Yes, cranial fellation is a possibility. Are you ready?

All sex scenes are gratuitous.

There used to be something of a point to sex scenes in novels. Back in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The average semi-literate shopkeeper, who learned everything he knew about sexuality from bawdy limericks, and could count his sexual conquests by the number of different genital rashes that appeared in a calendar month, loved to read racy novels written in French and printed on parchment soaked in vinegar to rinse off the ink from Napoleon: I'll Be Back. It was exciting, back then, to read about having sex on sheets, and to indulge the fantasy of raping the scullery maid without the "comeuppance" of being castrated by her scythe-wielding boyfriend.

By the 20th Century, most people had at least heard of sex, and fictional portrayals began to move on to exotic locales and positions, and introduced the revolutionary concept of having extramarital intercourse without a slow descent into Hell afterwards. In the last quarter-century, the average teenager's sexual experiences were beginning to outstrip the inventive capacity of wallflower future authors who were in the library salivating over the one dog-eared copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn when their classmates were exploring the seductive powers of pre-mixed vodka and orange.

Now, of course, anyone with Internet access can have any sexual question answered, and any fetish satiated, in 0.13 seconds. So, the only sexual frontier left for fiction to explore is what it might be like if Galadriel, Lois Lane and Ally McBeal gang-banged Professor Snape and the fat guy from Lost.

Every sex scene is gratuitous.

For every sexual sequence in a novel that imparts some insight into the characters, let alone the human condition, there are thousands which exist solely because the author got to page 180 and realised the main characters hadn't fscked yet. Almost all of them could be edited down to "And then they did it," without losing anything original.

I'm all for sex in novels, and on novels. I'm being prudent here, not prudish. If I wanted to get an erection on the bus ride to work, I'd bring my PSP and a 1 gig memory card loaded with eroticism of a more visual nature.

Like every other page of your crappy book, the sex scenes should tell me something about the characters that I couldn't figure out from "And then they did it."

If not, stop writing. Or at least just admit that you're writing porn.

Reason #10: You're Not Doing It Right

Writing sex scenes is hard, oh oh my god it's sooo hard. As Iain Hollingshead observed, it's often a delicate balance between awkward metaphor and guttertalk euphemism. (Well, actually Hollingshead thinks these are your only choices, but he's an award-winning bad sex writer.) It's either the sunlit unfolding of silken petals, or his c*** slammed into her c***.

As the annual list of Bad Sex in Fiction nominees attests, even the most celebrated writers are often clumsy and inept when it comes to literary coitus.

Part of the problem is that it's like telling strangers what you think is hot. You can argue creative freedom and the anonymity of the author all you like, but you know that you've read sex scenes in books and thought, "God, is he really into this?" or "I wonder what her mother thought when she read that." Or worse, "I've never heard it called that." Or "What does that even mean?"

Like actual sex, if someone chuckles, or says "What the hell is that?", you're not doing it right.

Like actual sex, it's awkward to give (or receive) feedback. "I don't hear anyone complaining" is not praise. For all you know they're rushing off to the bathroom to finish themselves off with an Anais Nin story. Perhaps they're rereading D.H. Lawrence behind your back.

Maybe they really are only reading you for the articles.

Reason #9: Put the Thesaurus Down

You just picked it up because you want a better word than the first word that came to mind, the simplest and most obvious word.

Maybe the obvious word isn't sufficiently fine, and you seek a preferable substitute. Maybe you don't want to repeat the obvious word -- you think it's more fitting to use two different terms for the same thing, one of which is superior. Maybe you want to echo a phrase or idea, but in a worthier, surpassing way.

You want your writing to be better, and you're prepared to make it better, one better word at a time.

A good idea, you think, a laudable aim, a truly meritorious aspiration.

But a better word here and there won't make your writing suck less. It just shows that you own a thesaurus, and don't know when to not use it.

Better to just stop writing. Better for everyone.

Reason #8: What's Your Exit Strategy?

Are you "Stay the course", or "Cut and run"? How many novels and stories do you have in the field? How many more are you prepared to deploy?

Recent discussion on various blogs has centred around the idea of quitting writing. The broad consensus seems to be that a writer will inevitably return to writing, in the same way that a chronic masturbator cannot look at their open palm without fleetingly wondering where the nearest bathroom is.

But you can call yourself a 'writer' without any requirement to actually produce anything, which is why it's so difficult to define 'quitting'. Quitting implies failure, or at least non-success, and you can't fail if you never set any standard for yourself.

You can call yourself a 'carpenter' too, but unless you eventually produce a table, you're just whittling.

If you have a goal for your writing, some measure of success, then by definition you have a threshold for failure. The only variable is time - how much you're prepared to waste. If you have no measure of success, then your writing will only ever be good by accident.

If you're only writing to 'please yourself', well, the bathroom is second on the left.

Reason #7: Publishing is Dying

These statistics have done the blog-cha-cha in the last few weeks:

In 2004, Nielsen Bookscan tracked the sales of 1.2 million books in the United States and here's what they came up with:

• Of those 1.2 million, 950,000 sold fewer than 99 copies.
• Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies.
• Only 25,000 books sold more than 5,000 copies.
• Fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000 copies.
• Only 10 books sold more than a million copies each.
• The average book in the United States sells about 500 copies.

(From Bookends, where it seems to have started, though they claim otherwise. A print-on-demand shill calls it evidence of a "dying industry". Miss Snark weighs in with caveats.)

If you read these points (particularly the last three) and think "Hey, only 500 copies, what's the point of even trying?", then I say:

Bravo! Stop writing, and you'll have more time to read books written by people better than you.

Now, there are many reasons why these statistics are not representative of the industry as a whole. (They track ISBNs, not titles; they only count 70% of the retail market; the 1.2M figure includes backlist, small press, print-on-demand and even calendars; they don't include Amazon or WalMart; this only covers the US market, etc.)

But based on these numbers, the reports of the death of the industry are greatly exaggerated. Even on the most conservative interpretation of these figures, the top 25,000 books sold at least 180 million copies, an average of 7,200. (Make up a number for the unaccounted sales.)

Do you think there are 25,000 books in the world that are worth a damn? If you haven't cracked the top 25,000 yet, should we feel sorry for you?

Reason #6: You Don't Read What You're Writing

Think about the list of books you made for Reason #2: You Don't Buy Books. (Pretend you made a list.)

Imagine you had to put all those books back on the shelf at the bookstores you bought them from. (Or, just think about your favourite/most frequented stores.)

Now imagine your next book, all gussied up in a sexy cover, with a jacket blurb that exactly captures the spirit of your story. Where would it be in those bookstores? Would your book be anywhere near the books you bought, or somewhere else?

Would you (or a hypothetical reader just like you) even pick it up?

Reason #5: I'll Just Pad This Out

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing, #10: "Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."

Padding: When you run out of ideas, but keep on writing. It's also something insecure rockstars do to their crotches. The fluff covering the flaccid.

There are only two reasons to pad your writing:

You've got a target wordcount and a deadline you can't meet

You're bored/stuck with the section you're working on, so you digress

They both equate to:

You have contempt for your readers.

If your story is short on wordcount, that's because it's a short story.

Reason #4: That's a Lot of Words

NaNoWriMo aims for a novel of 50k words, but they admit this more of a novella (~175 pages). A more typical novel is around 90k+. Stephen King routinely goes over 200k.

That's a lot of words. How long would it take you to write 50-90k words, even if you (shudder) aren't concerned about quality?

Georges Simenon, legendary Belgian mystery writer and legendary pantsman, could write 60-80 pages a day. He published 425 novels in his lifetime, 2-3 per month, and still had time to nail 10,000 women (so he claims).

You are, however, not Georges Simenon, much as you might've liked to be.

NaNo's need to average 1,666.666 words per day. You probably haven't written that much since your high school English exam. Realistically, you're going to need 2-3 hours per day to maintain this. 90 hours over a month, that's two working weeks.

If you have that kind of time, you need a better hobby. Even if you make it, you've just worked your ass off to produce the first draft of half a novel. Whoopee.

Reason #3: You Think Anyone Can Be A Writer

(jb, this one's for you!)

Putting 50,000 words in nonrandom order in 30 days makes you a "writer" in exactly the same sense that changing a hundred lightbulbs makes you an electrician.

This is NaNoWriMo's central conceit - the idea that you're a "writer" if you attempt their arbitrary challenge. They actually boast this in their FAQ. It's all about wearing the costume, the romanticised idea of a writer.

Whatever happened to wearing a cravat, not washing your hair, carrying a notebook full of scribbled haiku's and nursing the same cup of coffee all day? Now I gotta write something?

Reason #2 Addendum

101 Reasons Post-Halloween Wrap-Up Special:

You are not Clive Barker, nor Dean Koontz, nor Anne Rice, nor R.L. Stine. You're not even Shaun Hutson or Richard Laymon. With the exception of Barker, these authors spent years building solid fanbases by providing relatively consistent product. Not naming any names, but consistent shit sells better than inconsistent mediocrity.

(Barker blew out of the gate with his finest work, then slowly wound down with increasingly uneven novels. But Barker's worst is still better than your best. He will continue to have a cabal of sexually ambivalent fanboys and toadying academics who call themselves "literary fantasists", when your grandkids forget where your grave is.)

Reason #2: You Are Not Stephen King

101 Reasons Halloween Special: You are not Stephen King.

(Apologies to the 1,500+ people who are Stephen King.)

There are any number of theories to explain the staggering success of SK. Most include timeliness (the great horror revival of the 1970's) and luck (having an-form wunderkind director make your first novel into a hit film), and a large measure of knowing his audience (there's a reason most of his novels are set in contemporary America). Even SK has said publicly that talent is the easy part.

There was a time when lazy newbies thought all you had to do was write a fat, scary book about Billy the Truck-Stop Grease Monkey and The Slobbering Pus-Beast from America's Dark Heart, and publishers would cut you a seven digit cheque. But as any number of failed me-too SK clone writers can tell you, the horror revival is long over.

There's something that keeps SK writing, two decades and maybe a quarter of a billion dollars after any rational motivation to write was well and truly met. My guess is it's the same thing that kept him writing after four failed early novels, a handful of magazine sales, and $60-a-week job in a laundry.

There may well be room in the market for another blockbuster horror writer. But it ain't you.