Writing about Writing (and Indie Publishing)

The most interesting essay in Tom Bissell’s collection, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, takes a close look at the differing styles of writing books and the kinds of promises they make to prospective writers.

Ostensibly a survey of several different books, Bissell pithily outlines the rules of engagement for each type: the users manual, exemplified by Strunk and White, which focuses on the mechanical aspects of crafting sentences; the Golden Parachute books, such as Donald Maas’ Writing the Breakout Novel, which trades equally on the promise of creative fulfilment and future commercial success; the Nuts & Bolts crowd, where a mid-list writer share techniques and exercises that worked for them; the tea and angels crowd, driven by the same impulse as the nuts and bolts crew, but with a considerably more mystical and muse-driven approach. 

Then, of course, there’s the Olympus books: written by highly esteemed writers, wether it’s Stephen King or Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates, and focused on more personal insights and motivations that are aimed as much at established fans as emerging writers looking for insight.  

For someone who has been involved in teaching writing, in one form or another, for the last twenty years, it’s an incredibly amusing (if occasionally dismissive) breakdown of books that, by and large, sit on my shelf and get referenced often.

It’s also an incredibly useful framework to have in mind as I launch into a few months of shoring up my skills as a publisher for Brain Jar Press, figuring out what I need to do in order to level up my business. There is a decided streak of Golden Parachute-ism at work in a lot of the books, blogs, and webinars that I’m reading, a logical hold-over from a few years where indie publishing was new and folks were making big money.

The ones that I’m getting the most milage out of, however, trend towards the nuts and bolts approach–fewer frills, more laying out of what worked and what didn’t.

It’s not that I dislike the premise of Golden Parachute advice–as I’ve mentioned before, the subtle core message of every writing book or blog, including mine, is usually please by my stuff. The problems is that the demands of the Golden Parachute form require total confidence in the techniques presented, otherwise you’re offering a parachute with all sorts of unsightly holes. 

Some writers can do that and make it easy to pull out their useful advice. Others…well, they deploy the same rhetorical tricks as self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese, confirming their usefulness by deploying immediate stories about someone who achieved fantastic success–often disconnected from any other information that might provide additional context about the market they’re working in and the business plan they’re using.