Notice Me!

There are several thing your English teachers fail to warn you about as you get older and become more and more enamored with the idea of writing for a living. One, that 68% of your peers will never effectively understand the differences between your/you're and there/their/they're. Two, in this day and age, when sites like Lulu, and Chapters/Indigo supply easy-peasy self-publishing programs (whether free or for a modest price), it isn't so much the story you write, but the story you are.

Without naming names, over the last fifteen years or so there has been a surge in authors who have made names for themselves due to their own personal histories. And let's face it, you can't make up this stuff (...well, they might be able to...). The housewife, the poor mother, the man who posses a questionable fascination  with motorized vehicles and women in tight shirts. There is a plethora of people out there, some with talent, others with... taaaalllllent? Ultimately, however, it comes down to the same thing. These people, with as much or as little talent as they had at the time, were marketable.

The literary market is absolutely saturated in new and emerging authors who think their ideas are 'new' and 'unique' and 'hip', to which the literary community replies with 'no', 'ha-ha', and 'get out'. Rejection, it's viral and it's rampant. The best new, struggling, and emerging authors can do is come up with a winning combination of the old that will entice a particular audience. Once they've got a combo, 87% chance it involves zombified werewolved campires, these authors have to be something more than the same sort of struggling wannabe author the rest of them turn out to be.  Usually by pretending to be a zombified werewolved campire.

Maybe it's because we live in such a media-rich time where television, the internet, film, magazines, books, radio, and skywriters are constantly reminding us about the wiles of celebrities, but we thrive on the stories of the creators as much as the stories they have created. That is exactly why authors like Stephenie Meyer (Woops!) and J.K Rowling became as wildly famous as they did. Yes, there is a certain level of ...taaaalllent?  that either exists or arises (or lives as a mythical beast, prowling throughout the literary forest, preying on young minds, before disappearing into the recesses of the darkness.) And yes, they managed international acclaim. The real question is ought to come down to is: Would we be as impressed if they were middle class, white men?

Well, that would make Twilight  a whole lot more awkward than a solid percentage of people already find it. But it always raises an interesting point. How on earth can struggling authors stand out among the rest of the struggling authors? If we promote our own histories as reasons why publishers should take note of us (because we are interesting, we are unique, we went through things that can be considered marketable), are we essentially whoring ourselves out?

We all have interesting things in our background. Oh, your parents got divorced; you traveled the world on a llama; you won an international spelling bee. Whatever the case, these days, it is an asset. We do have to shamelessly self-promote ourselves in order to gain a quarter inch of that spotlight. Some of us have a bit more to work with, others make the story (see: internet rumor regarding: JK Rowling quit her job and went on welfare to write Harry Potter as opposed to lost her job etcetc).

So the big question is, are we prostituting ourselves in an effort to proceed further with our craft? And more importantly, did I ever tell you about how I got this scar while single-handedly fighting off a pack of wolves in order to rescue a baby who had a nuclear bomb strapped to its rubber chewing ring?

True story.