Writers Without Background

Writers who worked as salesmen, postal clerks, guards, miners, farmers, or stewards, to name just a few day jobs, achieved big success in the world of literature. For more than two decades in India, we find professors, journalists, bureaucrats, and advertising people dominating the literary scene, waiting to write another prize-winning novel. Without digging into the literary worth of their works, it is quite strange to note that people from other professions have stopped thinking about writing as a worthwhile pursuit. For this ugly awareness to become so real there must have been some shattering developments that have disillusioned them forever.

Those who keep writing alive are the ones who have other lives. They have flourishing careers for bread and butter and whatever time they are left with, they try hard to write and feel better, to make the literary world richer with their creations meant to conquer the elements of time and space. The survival of the literary world is solely dependent on these people who lead dual lives and for their contributions they deserve genuine praise. God forbid, if they stop writing for some reason, valid or otherwise, there are not going to be good writers in the world.

While we tend to think of this as a bleak development, this could well be the harbinger of good times when writers from other fields would get the much-needed break. Currently, the publishing schedule is full of commissioned submissions from established names, and this leaves editors with no time and energy to waste on blind submissions. Besides they do not feel the need to rummage through a sloppy pile just to find an unpolished gem. Most editors are ready to take this risk for their sanity and peaceful living.

It has been a long time since we had writers who were as exciting as their works. The unusual ones worked as masons, waiters, and served prison sentences. These authors had no flashy CV worth sharing and their education was basic, nothing worth mentioning about degrees, all about their failures in life and institutions they brought disgrace to. But when we pick up books these days, we find fancy degrees and achievements unrelated to writing. We miss those simple two-line author bio notes detailing his place and year of birth and profession. We also miss those authors who never thought academic glories made them better writers. That is truly an endangered sub-species of authors. Authors who flunked school were the most qualified to write and some of them did write brilliant books recognised as classics later.

A writer who says he is just a writer is no writer today. It is important to have a lot more in your professional folder to create a big impression that you are a writer. The manuscript is fine but when the CV is read first before the first page of the novel, the expectations are raised and you know you are reading the stuff of an English literature professor from a university or an editor from a media house. And it is expected that these people cannot write badly. On the other hand, if an unknown writer without any literary background sends in his work, there is a doubt in mind even if it is momentary that the editor will be wasting his time. So the stress on the synopsis is laid and the writer is expected to make a strong case for the book because he is like a gritty lawyer arguing for the release of his book in the market and he should be able to defend it the best. Although it is a fact that those who write cannot necessarily sell themselves well. Their good writing is likely to be trashed if the synopsis does not mirror the brilliance of their manuscript. In so many cases rejection happens because the writer fails to draft a good synopsis. The poor fellow wasted his time writing a good book but he should have written a good synopsis first. The way the market functions is something writers needs to be familiar with. If he fails to align himself with the ways of the publishing world, he is not going to make any headway.

The case is easily transferred to the reader because he is not expected to pick up a novel written by a non-professional. There are strong chances of a novel being purchased if it is penned by a professor but nobody is going to try out a first-time author if he has no such competent background to strengthen his case. The lack of interest in such authors from the leading publishing houses is perfectly understandable although they all make tall claims of diving deep to find the best talent. To keep criticism at bay, they sometimes publish fiction or non-fiction from a CEO or the marketing head of a large corporate house without any publication history, to prove they do promote good writing from unpublished people. In most of these cases, they are the relatives or known contacts of the editors.

While the situation prevails as it does today, do readers miss authors who did odd jobs and spent their lives doing nothing just write. There are very few full-time writers today and they blame the limited market for the poor sales, not their writing. Readers have no idea of what has happened to the breed of writers from unimportant professional backgrounds or writers who did plain jobs to survive. They think they are still around and getting published. While the truth is that most of them have called it quits or fashioned themselves as writers meant for the online platform, hoping to build a vast readership and then getting publishers interested in their widely-read blogs, convincing editors of their acquired market potential by suggesting that their loyal readers would buy and read the published book.

So if you a writer who wants to do nothing else other than write, you have chosen the wrong path. You should have taken up a decent job first and then publishing would have become easier. If you are into an odd job and want to change your fortune through writing, it is a fantasy you should abandon at the earliest. Honestly speaking, we do not live in a world where writing is published solely based on merit and we do not live in a world where readers buy books solely based on the merit of the book, without thinking about how smart the author looks or where he teaches. Do you expect a reader to spend Rs 500 on buying a novel authored by an electrician or a carpenter?