Gimmes

A very famous writer once said that if you are a serious writer, you should be paid for your writing. You do not give your work away for free any more than a doctor would offer free surgery to "advertise" or promote his work. Actors don't work for free unless it's a charity benefit or something similar. If you give away your work for free, you are devaluing it.

I can understand all of that, and it makes sense. If you are a writer, that is your career and your profession and you expect to make a living wage at it. At least you'd like to make a living wage. If you give away your work for free, how can you make a living as a writer?

There's the dilemma.

With my first book coming out in May (yay!) I'm looking at things to offer and tempt my readers. One of the things a lot of authors offer is a newsletter, and one of the things they offer in their newsletter and/or through their web site is "free" reading material. A serialized novel, perhaps, or short story. An excerpt, etc. With the expansion of the Internet, there has been a growing feeling of entitlement to free material, particularly the written word, and the offer of free reading material to hook more readers feeds into this.

Which brings me back to my original source that said: if you give away your writing for free, you are devaluing it and making it harder for you and other writers to actually expect to be paid for their efforts. Obviously, extrapolating this into some science fiction future where no one gets paid for writing and all fiction is either subsidized (a la public radio--you could have public fiction, I guess) or simply given away free by people who just like to write, is taking it too far. I don't see us ever really reaching that point--at least I don't think so. But there is some truth to the assertion that giving away your fiction for free devalues your writing. Either you think the material you are giving away is sub-standard and not publishable anyway (so why not give it away) or you have so much time on your hands that you don't mind working for no pay. If the quality of the work you are offering is sub-standard, will it really get you more readers, or will it ultimately drive readers away because they'll think you're the worst writer who ever lived?

I don't have any answers at this point, except I'm not sure that offering any of my fiction for free is a terrific idea. I work two jobs: my day job and my writing job. I put in a lot of hours. I want to be paid for my work and I don't want to offer people sub-standard stuff just to feed their need for Internet freebies.

On the other hand, I want to give readers something. Some incentive to go to my web site, read my newsletter (that doesn't exist yet) and hopefully, buy my books. Excerpts are okay as newsletter teasers, although I have to say, most of the excerpts I've read have had an effect on me that was not intended by the authors. Most excerpts have made me decide not to purchase the book. They are either boring or overwritten in some way that turns me right off. Very few (I actually can't think of any) made me purchase a book. The thing that always makes me purchase a book is the teaser/blurb on the back of it. So I really don't know that offering an excerpt is such a terrific idea.

This really is quite a dilemma. I'm leaning toward including Regency period non-fiction items in a newsletter, like recipes, bits of historical news, and that sort of thing. I want to offer something to my readers. They deserve something particularly if they spent their hard-earned cash to buy my book and slogged through the entire thing and didn't blow chunks or throw it against the wall. It would be nice if the books itself was sufficient, but these days, well, everybody wants more. Or at least I guess they do.

As a reader, I actually don't want more. I'm perfectly content with buying the books I want to buy and leaving it at that. I frankly don't want to know more about the author, although I will search out additional books if I like a particular author. I don't subscribe to newsletters or anything like that, but then, I have time management problems and I'm afraid to base too much on what I as a reader do or don't do.

Anyway, this bears a lot more thought and I'd be interested to know if other readers and writers like newsletters and have any expectations about free fiction. It's a big question mark.

Intelligence, Hope, and Writing

Recently, I read an article by a very famous author who mentioned how important hope and perseverance is to any writer. I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, she used a scientific study to illustrate her point, and I was suddenly reminded of my days as a biology student and how easy it is to think you are testing one thing, when you are in fact testing something else entirely. The study she mentioned in her article was fundamentally flawed.

Of course, the problem could have been in how the study was described, or in the author’s interpretation of it, rather than a flaw in the design itself. I have no idea what the actual thesis was under evaluation or how the test was framed. All I know is how this author described it and her conclusion.

What was the study? Two groups of rats were thrown into tubs of water. Group A was thrown into a tub of water that contained nothing but a lot of water. Group B was thrown into a tub of water that contained a small, submerged island. If Group B swam around enough, they could find the island and stand on it, thereby being able to rest and breathe.

When the two groups of rats were thrown into another vat of water without an island, low-and-behold, Group B kept valiantly swimming around, looking for that darn island. Group A pretty much just gave up.

Now the conclusion this author came to was that if you have hope and start from a positive place, you’ll keep going long after the others have given up. This is really critical for a writer because sometimes it takes a lot of rejections over long years before you finally get find the right editor and get published. And you’ll go longer if you can find and treasure any encouragement along the way—sort of like those submerged islands.

However, what this test really showed had nothing to do with hope or even the beneficial effects of positive thinking upon perseverance. It was really more about learning. Maybe even intelligence.

Group A learned very quickly that the faster they gave up, i.e. stopped swimming, the sooner they’d be rescued and put back into their nice, warm cage with food and water (assuming they wanted water after this). Who the heck wants to stand tip-toed on a submerged island in a bucket of water, gasping for air, when they can be removed and put back in their nice cage? Group B never learned this because they were given a crutch to lean on, er, an island. They never learned that if they just pretended to drown, they’d be taken out of the cold, nasty water and put back in their nice habitat.

In effect, what this proved was that you’re stupid to persevere. The faster you give up all efforts and hope, the sooner you’ll be back in your nice, old rut where you can grow fat, dumb and happy until the end of your days.

So is it better to be smart or is it better to be hopeful?

If you’re a writer, it’s definitely better to forget about being smart, because being smart just means giving up before you waste all that time, effort, tears, blood and sweat over something which may never pan out and which will probably not grant you the luxurious living you know you deserve, anyway. And even if you do succeed, do you really need all those reviewers hacking your work apart with snide comments about how your work has degenerated lately?

Mankind did not get where it is, however, by just giving up. Stupid or not, all of our great strides forward and all of our works of art, including literary, were made by people who, like Group B, never learned any better. Or if they did understand how futile their efforts might be, they decided to just keep on swimming anyway and hope to find that little island. And they were willing to drown to do it.

While the test itself was flawed (at least how it was described by this author) and did not support the author’s argument, the author was still right. If we are going to accomplish anything at all, we have to keep working at it despite all the naysayers and evidence that says we are idiots just wasting our time. Is writing really more a waste of time than, say, watching television each night?

Every one of us has a dream, something we’d like to accomplish in our very short lifetime. While striving to attain that dream may not be the intelligent or sensible thing to do, it is the important and hopeful thing to do and it brings out the best in us. We would attain nothing, be nothing, create nothing if we did not continue in the face of adversity to go for the gold.

So, strangely enough, even though that famous author used the wrong example, she was still…right. Maybe not so intelligent, but certainly hopeful.