The Unpublished Writer

There's really no worse type of writer. There are hack writers, there are pretentious litterateurs, there are boring scholarly writers, there are award winners, there are profound writers, there are dead writers, there are exciting but empty pulp writers, and there are amateur writers who fund 200 copy runs out of pocket and sell most of them to friends and family and get interviewed in small town newspapers. All of those writers are doing what they love and are not worried about tomorrow: they produce, sometimes they get published, often they are the victims of overrating and hype. For the most part they are just adding to the colossal pile of wasted paper that represents literature in situ.

Then there are unpublished writers. Like cockroaches, they are headless survivors, unable to feed on their aspirations, often orphaned from inspiration, hiding in the shadows and mostly consuming (when they can, headless and all) and producing filth. It's impossible to really understand how many unpublished writers there are, or what drives them. Beyond merest subsistence, this type of writer has few goals that are concrete. A poem-a-day work quota, three hours of prose/day, or half a screenplay each night are not unbeknownst to the unpublished writer, but they are better acquainted with day-jobs and drinking binges and hopelessness. When they set down to work on half-forgotten characters and plots, these poor souls get caught in a vicious cycle of re-reading and compulsive editing. They are procrastinators, and in fact their relation to cockroaches is facile and untrue.

The cockroaches, at least, get published and exist in the tedious middle-ground of writerly success: readings, signings, 10-15k a year plus some royalties if they're lucky,  and maybe some articles and exposure pieces to round out the old portfolio. They could go into television or radio writing. They could go into various types of copy writing. Marketing and advertising are the prime escape vectors, but times are hard. Sometimes they're shortlisted for a prize and their cachet goes up for a while and they entertain visions of success.

Compare this to the spider that is the unpublished writer: day job madness, late nights, drugs, hair-pulling typing escapades with open source word processors. They see themselves as hopeless moonlighters. Somewhere in an immense tangled web of wasted promise, these writers slowly produce tortured works that are blurred with self-revelation and inconsistent style. Then silence for weeks or even years. Inspiration comes brightly and passes quickly and leaves no marks. No, the unpublished writer is wretched, and each year passes without a printed work or anything noteworthy for the portfolio. Queries are shot down in flames, credentials are nonexistent and mocked, routes to success are suggested, and the book is closed.

And another year passes, and with it any hope of true and honest publication. All they ask for – these withered shells, who write from their soul, who wouldn't use a vanity publisher if they were paid to, whose every word is wearied and grim – is a spot at the corpse-crowded table where the hacks drink greedily and pontificate about saleability and audience, where the old guard hoard awards, where the bright new prodigies bullshit openly, and where the eyes of the reading public are focused like the glimmering eyes of wolves in the dark... yes, the reading public, waiting for their three or four inspired works per decade, habitual readers who yearn for something new – something, perhaps, that has been overlooked, a supposedly worthless bauble in the cold, dying grasp of the unpublished writer.