Giving up on traditional publishing in the name of love
To stop chasing traditional publication is, to many writers, to accept failure. To bury a dream.
Writers — Real Writers — want to be published.
I didn’t know that until I was in an MFA program. There, in the workshop library of Weld Hall, the red hardbound bindings of program graduates’ theses — for many, their first real “books” — on subtle display on the shelves near the entrance (and exit), we learned more than how to professionally critique and be critiqued. We also learned, in that casual, contextually appropriate way, that the goal of writing was to create something “publishable.” Stories were for literary journals and magazines; books were for publishers. To be a real writer, i.e., a writer to be taken seriously, one sought and achieved publication.
It made perfect sense at the time, because at that time we were pumping out original stories and their revisions knowing we had only a temporary guarantee of an audience in our workshop peers. Unless we planned to regularly get together after graduation to swap stories (we did not), the days of writing for built-in readers would come to an end. For new work to be read following graduation, someone would actually have to publish it.
As common-sense as that was, it added an entirely new dimension to what I’d experienced as…
