[Open Letters] To: Aspiring Novelists

Note: I have placed an updated version of this letter here: http://www.seanjjordan.com/to-aspiring-writers/

To: Aspiring Novelists
Re: Getting Published

So you want to get a novel published. And you’ve decided it’s time to start shopping your pitch around.

Do yourself a favor. Don’t. Because chances are good you’re wasting your time. Which means, by extension, you’re going to waste a lot of peoples’ time in the process.

You might think that you’re a great writer. There’s a possibility that you are even a great novelist, but it’s remote. I can say that safely because I know that you don’t have any experience writing actual novels. If you did, you wouldn’t be looking for a publisher. You’re a wannabe, and while you might believe that you’re sitting on something incredible, I’d be willing to bet that the book you think you’ve written and the book you’ve actually written are vastly different in quality.

Go to a bookstore and check out the fic/lit section. Notice how many books are on the shelves. Notice how many you’ve never even heard of. Now, understand that this section represents just a tiny fraction of all the fictional books that have been published over the last 10 years. Most of the books that have been published in fiction genres are long-forgotten. Only a handful are held over for multiple printings.

I’ll bet you believe you are different. You think that you have something the tens of thousands of writers who have come before you don’t have. You think that you see the world differently from everyone else, that you’re more skilled at telling stories, and that you have something special to offer. That’s fine. You’re entitled to think whatever you want.

But when you start shoving your manuscript in the faces of editors and literary agents and professional writers demanding that your work be considered for publication because you believe that you’re somehow entitled to do so… well, you’re nuts.

You may have written a novel, but it doesn’t make you special. Every year, thousands of people write novels 50,000 words long during the month of November for National Novel Writing Month. Most of them don’t feel entitled to be published. A lot of them know they’ve written complete garbage. The accomplishment is in crossing the finish line. Many shelve their drafts and move on to something else. They have no illusions of grandeur.

But you, oh aspiring writer, who may not have even finished one entire novel. You love to go on the Internet and into writer’s groups to talk about how wonderful your work is. You love to have long, late-night conversations about the craft of writing. You love to critique other published writers and explain why you are better. You read Writer’s Digest and attend writer’s workshops and keep an earmarked copy of Writer’s Market close at hand.

Here’s my advice to you: sit down, shut up, and just write. Not about writing, or about how wonderful you are, or what you intend to do with all the money you ‘ll make when someone finally realizes your genius. No. Write a novel. Then another. And another. And keep on doing that until you write something that is actually good; something that someone might actually want to read. Something an editor might actually want to publish.

And then, before you waste anyone’s time with it, spend ten times the amount of time that you spent writing the book actually revising it. If it took you one month to write the novel, you need to spend 10 months revising it. If it took you six months to write the novel, you need to spend five years revising it. I’m not talking about the calendar days it took you, of course, but the actual number of hours you spent writing. My rationale here is simple: you’re going to have to put some distance between yourself and your work. You’re going to need to snap out of the mindset of “I just wrote this” and into the mindset of “I need to fix this.” And you’re going to have to do that over and over and over until you have refined your piece of writing to be something that’s actually good. If you force yourself to repeat that process ten times, you’re going to quit if you create something that’s garbage… and you’re going to shape your ungainly rough draft into something a little more refined.

You can solicit the opinions of others, but don’t waste your time soliciting the opinions of other writers, particularly other amateurs. You’re just giving them an excuse not to be writing. Instead, solicit the opinions of readers – the more jaded they are, the better. Ask them where they got bored, or where they found their minds wandering. Ask them where they thought the novel could have been better. Don’t let them get off with saying, “it was good.” Tell them not to spare your feelings. Tell them to pretend they’ve just spent $10 on your book and you want to know if it was worth what they spent. Ask them how much they really thought it was worth. Ask multiple readers who read multiple genres. Don’t let one person’s assessment of your work be the be-all and end-all of your beliefs about its quality. Evaluate every critique you receive, and separate legitimate concerns from the personal tastes of individuals.

Stay away from writing about writing or reading about writing. Many writers make a successful occupation out of selling this stuff to others. Don’t fall prey to them. If you want to be a better writer, write. Vary your work, and write about anything that interests you. Stay away from being locked into a genre or a topic. Don’t worry about your pen name or what the cover of your book should look like. That’s something for professionals to worry about. You just keep your head down and get back to work.

If you have written a manuscript, and you think it’s ready for publication, you should not need to make any more revisions to it. If it comes back with requests for revisions, either it is not ready to be published, or the publishing world is not ready for it. At this point, you must decide — is it even worth revising? If the revisions involve changing the very nature of what you have written to suit another market, you should shelve that story and work on something else. Sell it later when you have found an audience.

If you ignore all of my advice here and insist on pushing on in your stubborn, obstinate way, then let me give you one final piece of advice: don’t send your work to me, because I don’t want to read it, even if you manage to get some other publisher to pick it up. I’ve got plenty of time-tested titles to read. And I’ve got plenty of my own projects to finish.

Thanks,

-Sean J. Jordan

[Open Letters] To: The Writers of NBC’s ‘The Office’

An unbelievable wedding... and I mean that in the negative, I assure you.

To: The Writers of NBC’s The Office
Re: Congratulations are in order!

Wow. I’m simply stunned. It’s a rare opportunity to see what you managed to achieve on television last night, and you managed to not only pull it off, but to do so with gusto. There I sat, watching in slack-jawed amazement, as the wedding episode of The Office danced across my television. And I mean that literally, by the way, because a good chunk of the show was devoted to the cast flailing around in a sad imitation of the Hollywood club scene. And yet even that was not the most excessive thing that happened in last night’s acme of awful episodes.

Did you mean to write a swansong for your series? That’s exactly what you accomplished. All of the excess, all of the indulgence, and all of the smarminess might have been acceptable for a final episode, where sentiments are meant to run high and comedy takes a back seat to tying up the plot. But no. This is only the fourth episode of the sixth season, and we’ll be back in The Office next week asking, “where do we go from here?” Chances are good that the answer is going to be awfully disappointing.

The episode began in the office, with a throwaway gag about Pam using her pregnancy to try to influence the behavior of others. The punchline was a chain-vomiting scene. I should have known then that this was not going to be one of the smart, edgy and human episodes I saw in the first and second seasons of your show, or even occasionally during the third. No. When you rely on bodily humor to get a cheap laugh, my own humors are aroused. Specifically, the bile in the back of my throat.

The episode then moved to the wedding, taking place for no particularly good reason in Niagra Falls. Yes, it’s been explained that the wedding was meant to be held there to prevent people in the office from coming. But you decided to write down a way for them all to be there anyway. Why go to all the trouble?  Were the cast and crew begging for a vacation to one of the tackiest tourist traps on Earth? That can’t be the case, because the only scenes involving the setting whatsoever involved Jim and Pam. The entire setting was wasted except for one painfully smarmy moment aboard a tour boat.

Do you understand what drama is? Do you understand that a few shaky camera shots of two characters getting secretly married on a boat just moments before their actual wedding is ridiculous? If you had spent episodes preparing us for a nightmare wedding where Pam had no control, and everyone else had edged her out to make it about them, then perhaps, just maybe, the scene would have made sense. But what sort of bride wants to spoil her wedding day by going under Niagra Falls, getting her dress and hair completely messed up, and then repeating a sham ceremony in a church? (Of course, Pam didn’t appear to have a wet dress or messed-up hair when she returned; it’s one of those details that showed this whole sequence hadn’t been thought out very well.)

And then Jim’s brothers and Pam’s bridesmaids decided to act out a Youtube video by having the entire cast dance down the aisle. The video is referenced several times, but never actually shown onscreen. There has never been a reference to it in the show before this, and the entire joke hinges on the audience being familiar with the reference. I have not seen the video for myself, and as far as I could tell, this entire scene was meant to replicate it, not parody it. That is not comedy. It’s not even entertainment. You’re getting paid to write a show that many people believe to be fresh and original. You’re very bold to steal someone else’s idea just because you think it’s funny for the cast to be awkwardly dancing onscreen. To do this without developing or serving the plot in any meaningful way is an even greater travesty.

You’ve also managed to work in a pregnancy arc this season, which is even more baffling. Countless comedies have been ruined by pregnancy arcs. The only comedy I can ever think of that successfully survived one was Malcolm In the Middle, and that was because that show did not view having children as a blessing, but as a trial to endure. It made sense for a baby to bring yet another layer of hardship into the lives of Hal and Lois.

What does Pam being pregnant have to do with anything? What is your end-game scenario here? Are you going to get all gooey and sentimental on us, as you did with the wedding episode? Are we going to have to put up with Pam being whiny and obnoxious and Jim having to balance work life and family life while Michael tries to insert himself into their relationship? The entire idea is just played out. I’m weary even writing it.

I don’t think you writers understand why people started watching this show in the first place. Back in the first and second seasons, when the show was good, The Office was about the mundane, day-to-day life of a meaningless job. The show was very much in the pattern of the British original, and it managed to walk the fine line between making the characters funny and making them tragic. I would argue that one of the finest episodes was the Halloween episode, where Michael struggled with firing an employee because he really, truly did not want to be the bad guy. There was a humanity about him, then; a Peter Principle victim who just wanted to be one of the sales people, and who enjoyed the title, but not the responsibility, of his position. You could actually relate to him, then.

Look at Michael now. He’s a child and a buffoon — a character who most people dread seeing onscreen and who always predictably acts against his own best interests. He started to get a little of his humanity back briefly in the fifth season when he went off to start his own paper company, but you writers had to get carried away with that story arc and find an implausible way to bring him back so things could be more or less the same as before. You seem to think Michael Scott is the heart and soul of the show. He’s not. He gets too much screen time and isn’t entertaining. In short bursts, yes. But as the sympathetic character? That’s supposed to be Jim.

Ah, and Jim, how far you have fallen. Jim was likable in the first couple of seasons, much like Tim in the UK original. Jim was an underachiever who was stuck on a girl he couldn’t have. We can relate to that. When Jim moved on, he was successful. When he came back, things just couldn’t be. We sensed that they might always have to settle for being friends as they made other compromises in life.

And then, you writers had to mess it up by putting Jim and Pam together. The unrequited love between them was fulfilled, and the show suddenly got a lot less interesting. You teased us with maybe pulling them apart again — and you could have! — but then Pam made the safe choice and quit school and returned to Scranton, and to Jim, pretty much ruining any chance she really had of evolving into a more interesting character. You tried to compensate by focusing on Michael’s relationships, but who really wanted to see those played out? Who really wanted to see the smart, stable, independent woman in Jan turned in to a crazy control freak who eventually vanished off the show entirely?

For a show that is supposed to be a mockumentary, you have been very bad about keeping a strong level of continuity with side plots. Last night’s episode was a great example: Pam’s mother has appeared in the show before, and she was a friendly, likable character who was Pam’s best friend. Not only did the actress change for this episode, but so did the character. Pam’s new mother seems like a repressed WASP who was dumb enough to sleep with Michael despite being likely to know all of the terrible things Pam had told her about him. Pam’s father, too, seems to be different from how he’s been described before. There was no point in including either character; both simply brought attention to the lack of attention to the established “reality” of the show.

My final complaint has to do with Andy Bernard. The Office has always had a great ensemble cast, and Ed Helms as Andy seemed like a natural fit. But wow, has he been wasted. Here is a character who came in as a scheming “yes-man,” who could serve as an interesting foil to Dwight and who could stir up dissension in the office. Instead, he’s been used for a series of gags that I think are meant to be zany, but which come across as gratuitous. Andy used to be smart and interesting in his frat boy persona. Now, he’s just a hard-luck background character who endures pain and punishment for no good reason. Last night’s ill-advised scene with him somehow hemorrhaging his scrotum by doing the splits on top of his car keys was bizarre, unrealistic, and failed to serve the plot at all. Why would Pam have to drive him to the hospital? Why wouldn’t they call an ambulance? How could Andy have possibly been able to attend a wedding the next day? Are you really that weak of writers that you can’t think through these questions before you have a gag filmed, edited and included in the final cut of the episode?

I would like to close by encouraging you all to re-watch the British original and see how far you have deviated from the proven template you started with. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and brilliant writers, and they crafted a show that refused to indulge itself. When The Office ended its second series with Tim striking out with Dawn and David Brent getting fired, Gervais and Merchant took a huge risk, and they left the audience wanting more so badly that they had to put together an encore Christmas Special to tie up all the loose ends and bring some closure to the characters. Even then, Tim had a wonderful monologue about how his life would go on, and how we were just seeing a snapshot of his life. It was a stunning conclusion; a fictional character reminding us that the story would go on even if we weren’t able to watch it for ourselves.

Where is that sort of edge in the American version? It’s long since gone dull. I suggest you sharpen the plot by retooling the characters, avoiding the easy humor, and bringing Michael back down to Earth. The show can still be saved; Scrubs managed to make itself good again in its eighth season. But you’ve got to work at it. Otherwise, I expect we’ll see The Office on the chopping block in the next year or two when the ratings start to drop as more and more viewers tune out.

Speaking of which, I’ll be watching Community, which is one of the best comedies I’ve seen in years. I’m hoping 30 Rock can keep its edge this year, too. But I think I’ll be skipping The Office from now on. Parks and Recreation is getting better, but I’ll let you know now — it’s already pretty stale. I doubt you can save it in time.

Sincerely,

Sean J. Jordan

[Short Story] – Confessions of a Closet Mime

In 2002, I decided to come out of the closet… artistically speaking. I had always wanted to do some sort of crazy performance art, and walking around town as Taceo the Mime gave me a fun new creative outlet. This story was a natural extension of my experiences, and most of it is based on events that actually happened.

Because of the title and the theme, some people never seem to get past the surface and assume that I’m using this as an allegory to talk about a homosexual’s “coming out” experience. Being straight and happily married, I’ve never had to deal with such an experience, so I would have a hard time writing about it. No, what this story is really about is what happens when we find ourselves searching for a way to express whom we really, truly are and find that unique outlet that gives us a chance to finally speak up for ourselves. For me, mime was a passing fancy to pass the time, but for Tara in this story, it’s more of a spiritual awakening.

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[Short Story] – Josh

This is one of my favorite stories that I’ve written, because it really speaks to the heart of the beliefs we cling to. I used to be a hardcore Christian, but I found myself dwelling more and more towards the outskirts of the faith as I dealt with small-minded people who were more concerned with telling others that they were going to hell than they were with helping those people out in their daily lives. It really bothered me.

Another thing that annoyed me was the insistence of these same Christians that the name “Jesus Christ” was the only name synonymous with the redemption of the soul. Truth be told, no one knows what the man we refer to as Jesus Christ actually called himself; the letter “J” didn’t even exist until the 9th century AD, and the Greek word “Iesus” is a translation of a Hebrew name. scholars believe he may have called himself “Yeshu” or “Yeshoua,” but the lack of sources outside the gospels make it hard to know what.

Both of those pet peeves played a heavy role in the creation of Elijah, who is very much like myself in the year 2001…

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[Poem] – The Last Centaur

This is a poem I wrote about a statue in Allerton Park, which is in Monticello, IL, when I really missed the point of what I now consider a great work of art. It’s called The Death of the Last Centaur, and it was sculpted by Antoine Bourdelle.
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