Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Writing Good Stuff

Writing Good Stuff

I'm reading the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel. The author is a guy named Tom Monteleone. He is pretty good writer and I find that these Idiot and Dummies books are better than text books and actually do a pretty good job explaining things.

As a matter of fact I will probably never take a course again in something if I can get the material explained in a book such as this. Anyway the author (Tom) tells a story that struck me as very profound. He said that when he needed a little extra income as a struggling writer he used to sell subscriptions to a cable company…In the process of this work he got to go into people’s homes and see where the connections would be hooked. As a writer the first thing he looked to see is what kind of literature the family was reading. Would you believe that in almost all cases the answer was NADA….He was lucky to see a copy of TV Guide or Soap Opera Digest.

Now I should have realized this but for the last ten (10) years I have been living on an isolated farmstead and so some of the obvious trends in American society are passing me by. Tonight however, I received another wake-up call on what a back-water I'm living in. There was an advertisement looking for instructors for a school here on WDC. I filled out the application and got a prompt reply inquiring into my suitability to teach a playwriting course. I had written a full blown Old School (Shakespeare like) play a few years back and it was parked on my port. The follow up question was how I would structure a syllabus for teaching the subject, which I provided off the cuff.

Meanwhile the screener had glanced at my play and said it would never fly these days, a fact I already knew from trying to marked the epistle after I wrote it…. However I had to wonder….how can someone be expected to write anything of quality if there were no books in the house while they were growing up and despite the fact that Shakespearian English might be arcane, this guy broke the code on what it took to pack a theater. His material was so good people bought tickets to stand outside and listen. To write good stuff you have to have read a lot of good stuff and yes….of course…you have to be able to package and present it with modern tastes and trends in mind.

Being on WDC makes the marketing challenges of selling a literary work abundantly clear.