The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Shaft

 #34 If you are right and the group is wrong, nod, smile and slowly back away.

This is a Writers Mantra about writers' group etiquette.

If you are writing in this part of the 21st century, you've probably gotten the news that you should belong to a writers' group and you should run your prose past the other members before trying to publish your deathless prose.

I've been a member of a few writers' groups over the last decade or so and I wish I'd started sooner. You will find  prose that you think is perfectly acceptable can raise objections by one or more members of your writers' group.

Maxwell Perkins has been dead since 1947. In the intervening years no top-drawer editor has stepped in to take his place guiding literary talent through the shoals of a writing career. You need someone to tell you, "that doesn't work." And sometimes you really, really need someone to tell you that you just don't thank Hitler.

This is where a writing group is a very handy thing. Most mothers, siblings, or friends will read your stuff and pat you on the head saying, "Very nice dear." You might as well tape your manuscript to the refrigerator. Instead, you need someone who has an idea of what works or doesn't-work prose-wise. A person who writes is more likely to be that someone.

But there's a potential problem: Suppose you write stories wherein the protagonist solves crimes with two hard fists, and a hot gat. He likes his liquor straight, and his women pliable.

You'll do well if your writers group has a few manly men or right-thinking women (very, very far right-wing women). But you'll fail if the writers' group is chock full of pacifist, anti-gun, tea-totaling, radical feminists.

Writing is not a monolithic enterprise and what's catnip for some markets is dognip for others. And vice versa. A lot of what is called "bad writing" is just writing for a different market: Don't expect to sell your lesbian coming-out memoir to Zondervan.

In the ideal case, your writers' group will be a perfect reflection of your target market.

Often it is not, and that's the point of this mantra.

Holmesian readers expect Sherlock Holmes to draw some remarkable conclusion from something nobody else perceives. A non-Holmesian probably won't notice if this omission. Likewise, Science Fiction readers do not need to have certain SF tropes spelled out. I once had someone complain in writers group that he didn't know what an AI was.

Push this to the extreme. Suppose you are targeting a very narrow niche where everybody in that niche knows certain things and brings to the reading certain expectations. Further suppose that nobody in your writers' group is a member of that niche. You will get an earful.

Resist the temptation to argue. Resist the urge to vindicate yourself. You've asked the group for their opinion, they've given it, and you have to hear it.

Thank everyone for the feedback. You do not have to say aloud that you intend to ignore it. On another day they might be right.

Writers groups can be subject to groupthink. If you bring some prose to the group that's far enough outside their expectations, you'll catch flack because your prose doesn't match the groupthink. Since it's a groupthink, nobody will hear your reasons defending your prose. Thank everyone for the feedback, etc.

This works on the other side, too. When I feel the need to tear into someone who's written prose so wooden it is an insult to furniture I need to pause to ask myself why I think so:

• Am I outside the target market?
• Am I insisting the other write like I would?

If so, I should qualify my remarks accordingly.

Does Good Writing Exist?

A while back I asked, "Does Bad Writing Exist?"

I hope you're wondering if good writing exists. The word "exist" is the axis around which these remarks will turn.

A friend recently told me quality is "goodness of fit to requirements." Writing happens to be one of those enterprises where the requirements are not necessarily apparent.

Mere conformance to the rules of grammar is a readily apparent requirement. (You can get all Chomsky on me and say the rules of grammar are mere social convention. Then the arbiters of taste--the gatekeepers--can say that they define social convention... This way lies madness.)

There are well defined formulae for story telling going back to Aristotle. Conformance to one of these formula is another readily apparent requirement.

The virtues are well known. So whether a narrative upholds humanistic values or not is a readily apparent requirement.

You may want to cut the Gordian knot and say, "the requirement is what sells." This muddies as much as it clarifies, because bad books which are pushed real hard can sell better than good books that are not pushed as forcefully. Complaining about a bestseller like The Davinci Code that gets a huge publicity campaign is complaining about the choice to push it.

Some books stink so bad that an infinite amount of push won't make them sell. And other books are so good that merely making the public aware of them suffices to make them sell like hotcakes. There's something that inheres within a work that engages with push that helps or hurts sales. I think that something is beauty.

What is the ontological status of beauty? Is it a mere social convention or is it a thing that exists in a thing-in-itself aside from any observer to behold it? 

I am claiming something controversial: Beauty inheres within the thing itself. Not the eye of the beholder or social conventions. Beauty exists in good writing.

Social conventions are bound by pragmatic considerations to the criteria of beauty. The buying public recognizes beauty and chooses to buy accordingly. Those who sell books push their titles without much thought of beauty and thus the publishing business suffers from slack sales.

Disagreements about Objective quality stems from the fact that reality does not come labeled with this thing here as good and that thing there as crud. We subjectively estimate beauty in the thing before we think about it and before we talk about it. This creates the appearance that all quality is Subjective. Yet some books don't sell despite infinite push.

This is why Human Wave SF is such a big deal. Human Wave SF posits in old-fashioned Humanism a set of requirements. I’m eager to take the rules of English Grammar and Spelling, combine them with the values of Human Wave SF, and declare this combination to be the Requirements of Writing.
 
Then I’ll use this to define Quality. A couple days ago I asked Sarah Hoyt (with tongue in cheek) where I could find a certifying authority to gauge whether Finding Time was Human Wave or not.

A test for conformance to the Requirements of Writing could be largely objective. Therefore, I claim that Good Writing does indeed exist, and it is recognized as such when it conforms to beauty in the world.

It's my hope that my writing will rise to the level of being good. I've certainly made every effort to do so.