Christopher Hitchens’s piece on Gore Vidal in the February issue of Vanity Fair, “Vidal Loco”, is a fair if sad account of the decline into irrelevance of a once-influential and provocative American voice (Vidal was occasionally referred to as a contemporary Oscar Wilde). Before recounting the ways in which Vidal has become an unreliable and possibly slightly unhinged public intellectual, Hitchens pays Vidal sufficient respect to first relate some choice quotes from his subject that Hitchens admits were “things one wished one had said oneself”:

Of a certain mushy spiritual writer named Idries Shah: “These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.”

Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.”

Of the late Teddy Kennedy, who was then in his low period of red-faced, engorged, and abandoned boyo-hood, that he exhibited “all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal.”

I discovered this piece thanks to Stephen Romei over at the Pair of Ragged Claws blog, who said no matter what one thought of Vidal, you had to love his line about Joyce Carol Oates. Intrigued, I clicked across (up? down? over?) to find out what Vidal had said about the woman whose writing output is so prodigous I am filled not with envy but concern. (Okay, a little envy.) Hitchens writes:

Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”?

Joyce Carol Oates by Opale/Retna Ltd

Vidal’s quote perfectly captures the enervating effect of Oates’s relentless wordsmithing. I am simply at a loss to understand how anyone could produce so many novels (more than 50) and short-story collections (30). Her latest 165-page novel took her precisely two months to write. But I am in awe of Oates for another reason, too: at the age of 71, she has fallen in love and married for the second time, following the death of her husband of 35 years less than two years ago. I’ve been widowed now for about five years and haven’t dated anyone I would come close to marrying! Now that’s the book of hers I’d like to read. Instead, she has whipped up a 400-page memoir of her grief, and has a collection of short stories dealing with loss coming out later in the year. The Wall Street Journal recently ran this interesting profile of Oates.

Any writer aspiring to publication should read this sobering but, in my view, accurate analysis in The Guardian of ‘The Death of the Slush Pile’. The slush pile – that generic term for the stream of unsolicited submissions that arrive at publishing houses daily – has taken on something of a nostalgic glow in recent years, with stories of slush-pile discoveries of luminaries such as Phillip Roth. But as a refugee from book publishing, I can attest that the slush pile was the bane of editors’ lives before the internet changed … well, very little, when it comes to getting published. But that’s for another post.

I worked at a major Australian trade publisher for three years in the mid-1990s. Hardly the dark ages, I know, but still, it was a previous century. By that time, literary agents had already become influential, but their power and the publishers’ reliance on their gatekeeping role had not assumed the default status it enjoys today. Even then, we all assumed that the vast majority of unsolicited submissions – meaning those manuscripts which had not already been vetted by an agent and deemed worthy of representing before a publisher – were likely to contain few hidden gems. So the revolving door of receptionists were trained to respond to telephone inquiries from aspiring authors who wanted to submit manuscripts, by first suggesting they find an agent; and if they still wanted to submit their manuscript, to send it in marked to the attention of Margaret Rogers. Anything that arrived for Margaret Rogers was destined straight for the slush pile – because Margaret did not exist. Her initials were simply code for Manuscript Rejection. Editors took a rushed look through the slush pile when they had a spare couple of hours – maybe once every three months, in other words.

The slush pile has never been the best way to getting published. My advice to anyone working on a manuscript is to get out from behind your desk once in a while and attend events, courses, workshops and other networking activities where you will eventually bump into someone who either works in the publishing industry, has been published already, or who used to work for such-and-such a publisher but now does something else. In all of those cases, these people will have friends or acquaintances at other publishing houses, and they will be willing to give you some advice or, if you’re really lucky, to suggest the name of someone you should contact. Your job is to listen to the advice they give you. Listen to it very carefully. These people will be speaking the truth but they will also speak a little bit in code, because they don’t want to crush your hopes with the brutal statistics of the slush pile and agents and publishing meetings that focus on everything but narrative style and structure.

The fact I used to work in publishing certainly helped me to get published – but only because I had an insider’s knowledge of how the process of publication works. As a former editor, I knew my manuscript was in sufficiently polished shape to submit it for consideration because I had read so many unsolicited and agent-submitted manuscripts, and I had helped authors to develop their own manuscripts – those that had been accepted by a publisher – through to publication. I therefore also acknowledged that there would probably be further work required on my manuscript, because publishers do have valuable knowledge and insight into making a book the best version of itself it can be.

Editors and publishers are always horrified by the arms-length pile of unread manuscripts from friends of friends, from former colleagues and so on. It’s impossible for them to avoid manuscripts from people they know, however distantly. And whether they know or know of a manuscript’s author, reading manuscripts is a time-consuming and fraught endeavour. Invariably the reading experience is split into parallel thought lines: Does this speak to me, do I want to keep reading it? and Could I sell this? The straight-out no’s are easy to call after years of assessing manuscripts. A yes/no split is not uncommon, and will result in an eventual rejection of the manuscript, causing distress to editor and author alike. Occasionally, very occasionally it’s a yes. Which is what we’re all aiming for. I like this quote from Samuel Beckett:

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Here’s a thoughtful piece from retired Washington Post literary editor Bob Thompson.  In “Writing about Writers” he recounts having to interview Joan Didion about her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking – three days after her daughter Quintana’s memorial service. “What was I supposed to do?” he writes. “Ask her how she felt?” He also remembers trying to talk to Phillip Roth about his writing, on the author’s strict condition that the interviewer not ask him any questions about his personal life – when his is a life mined for fiction more overtly than most writers.

The writers festival circuit in Australia runs from late May through mid-September. This year I’m working towards participating in a couple of them by chairing sessions, moderating panel discussions and so forth. Thompson’s exhortation to ask writers about writing – about their experience of writing this particular book (the one they’re spruiking) and how it differed from what they had written before - seems like a reliable rule of thumb to follow, whatever the venue. Without this ‘Didion Rule’, as he calls it, we’re in danger of falling back on the tired tropes of book-related story-telling: writer overcomes struggle to enjoy success with latest book, novelty in book marketing, or the size of a writer’s advance.

On that last one, I’m always irritated when I come across news items about writers’ advances. They usually present figures which seem to be large, outside of any context of the complex business environment  in which those advances are made. Following this logic, such items should appear in the business section of newspapers.  There’s hardly ever an explanation of how advances work, or often don’t work, and the pluses/minuses for authors of accepting such advances. What rights has the author signed away, knowingly or not, for example, in return for an up-front sum? Then there’s the underlying assumption of intrinsic worth attached to a “large” advance for a book, when in the music industry the opposite seems to be the case. How many times do you read of some singer-songwriter who produces a record for $1,000 or thereabouts in their cousin’s garage, and it becomes – in another reporting trope – “an overnight sensation”? For me the story of the path to publication is always the most interesting, as there seem to be as many variations as there are books in the world.

Many people I know have had something of a struggle in 2009. Here are some wonderful new year wishes from the remarkable writer Neil Gaiman that are too good not to share:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. I hope it’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to be, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.

Neil Gaiman’s website