"Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing."
— Meg Chittenden, writer.
Within the pages of FlashQuake, there are writers who did more than just stare at the wall, and it got me to wondering, just what does make one a writer? Doing my second guest stint as an editor here (or anywhere, for that matter), I was reminded once again, that those of us sitting in the room staring at the wall have a much better deal in life than those poor souls, called editors, who read our stories. Out of nearly 400 submissions, the editors have to sort down to the 5% that fit in the issue. Those are the easy ones. The tough part of the editor gig is the other 95%, stories that someone labored over in that room, polished and honed, wrote and rewrote, proofread, and finally, submitted, only to get the inevitable rejection letter or e-mail. Stephen King stuck those rejections on a nail in the wall near his desk. What names of editors are on those, I wonder? I am reminded of the record company that didn't think the Beatles had a future and chose the Tremeloes instead. I remember seeing the Tremeloes around 1971, playing in a bar on Long Island (not exactly Shea Stadium). Whatever happened to those Beatles? Luckily for that poor record company, they did finally sign a little known band called the Rolling Stones. It's all a judgment call. Did you ever go back to reread a book you thought was fantastic years ago only to find that now you wonder what you ever saw in it? Some people have human relationships like that too, but I won't go there.
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
— Isaac Asimov
No question, Dr. Asimov, who wrote or edited over 500 books, was a writer, and no doubt he was probably in mid-sentence at the moment of his demise. No one would question if J.D Salinger was a writer, yet Catcher in the Rye was his only novel. Oscar Wilde, who once said: "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." This could explain his writing only one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1891. In all fairness to Oscar, he was more playwright than novelist.
Cyril Connolly said: "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." His only novel, The Rock Pool, in 1936, was only 150 pages long, but I have to admit, I identify with his philosophy. Don't we all initially write for ourselves? Yet, as Carol Burnett once commented, "Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own." It sure is nice seeing those words in print, but not at any cost. Ernest Hemingway's son Patrick published True at First Light in 1999, thirty-nine years after his father's death, after chopping 100,000 words from the original manuscript and filling in the blanks with his own writing. Needless to say, Patrick was no Earnest, and Earnest may have had good reason to keep those 200,000 original words in his desk. Hemingway himself (Earnest, that is) said about writers, in an acceptance letter for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954: "For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day." He also thought: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Not a bad role model, when you think about it.
Twain himself once said: "Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you wish." Most writers do that on a daily basis. He also stated: "I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." Ah, the life of the fiction writer. Twain also advised: "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow." Words all writers can live by.
So what is being a writer all about? To me it's writing and submitting, at least on an occasional basis. I say occasional, because that's the way I do it. I have learned you will not get published if you don't submit your work. You also may not get published if you do. It's the writer's code, which to paraphrase the pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, is just a guideline. Thomas Mann said: "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Probably so, but we could use a healthy dose of ego too, as Winston Churchill demonstrates: "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." Personally, I can identify better with Kurt Vonnegut: "When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth." We're all in this together.
As for editors, I return to Oscar Wilde, who said: "Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood." So are editors.