The Gatekeepers Are Shrinking: a Rant on the State of Publishing

William Styron was interviewed in the 1954 Spring edition of the Paris Review, and his response to a question about the value of creative writing courses reminded me of one of the reasons why publishing is in a state of disrepair.

Here's the question: What value has the creative writing course for young writers?

And here's the annotated version of his answer:

"It gives them a start, I suppose. But it can be an awful waste of time. Look at those people who go back year after year to summer writers’ conferences, you get so you can pick them out a mile away. A writing course can only give you a start, and help a little. It can’t teach writing. The professor should weed out the good from the bad, cull them like a farmer, and not encourage the ones who haven’t got something."

He goes on to bemoan a New York school which has a lot of writing courses, and he charges the teachers as "mooning in the most disgusting way over the poorest, most talentless writers, giving false hope where there shouldn't be any hope at all...regularly putting out dreary little anthologies, the quality of which would chill your blood. It's a ruinous business, a waste of paper and time, and such teachers should be abolished."

You may think you know where I'm going with this argument, but I may surprise you.

While I have my own opinions of "Creative Writing Workshops" (whether they be conducted in a University program or at one of the many writing conferences across the country) they won't make their way into this blog. And they don't have to. The thing that interests me is Styron's strong words against talentless writers and my repulsion at his condescension against teachers "mooning in the most disgusting way over the poorest, most talentless writers, giving false hope where there shouldn't be any hope at all."

In my opinion, the only way one improves one's writing, is to write. Seems like we should be "mooning" over writers--talented or not, perhaps pointing out things they can work on, but mooning none the less--so they'll continue to nurture their own talent. If they KEEP writing, they'll get better.

But I still haven't gotten to my point about why the publishing industry is in a state of disrepair. At least one of the problems is this: the publishing industry consists of some very big conglomerates owning the bulk of the publishing world. Outside of small independent houses, the gatekeepers of big publishing are a rather small lot. And if they have the kinds of attitudes that Styron has--and they do, let me assure you--then what is going to be published or not is based on the likes and the dislikes of a very small percentage of the population. 

Styron is definitely entitled to his opinion, but I have my own. Bad writing and good writing is subjective. It is wildly subject to one's own attitudes and opinions as to what is good (or bad) and when the gatekeepers of publishing are a pretty small bunch, only the selected few are allowed entrance. And add to the mix that they are basing their publishing decisions on yesterday's successes.

Summing up what seems to be an angry rant, there are a lot of really fine writers out there who will never see their stuff in print...unless they (and sadly they do) turn to self-publishing (I'll save the rant on self publishing for another day). This is not to say that there aren't some really fine books being published out there and that there aren't plenty of writers who have yet to write anything worth publishing in the first place. I'm just saying that publishing would be better off--and readers would be able to discover even more new voices--if it weren't monopolized by so few gatekeepers who can't help but have their own opinion.