Jim Frenkel Saves My Self-Esteem

One of the things you struggle with as an unpublished writer - and I have this from many reliable sources - is that there is so much rubbish published each year while your own manuscripts lie mouldering on the hard disc. Who hasn't put down a book in disgust, crying to the unjust heavens, 'How the hell did that get published? I write a million times better than that and all I get are rejection slips!'?

We all know that the publishing game is a lottery - and not a particularly well-run one at that. Slush piles are so high and standards of writing so low that anything good in those piles is effectively a tiny signal buried in lots and lots of noise. I used to think that it was so hard for the publishers to spot the good stuff that, in despair, they simply picked something that wasn't actually written longhand in green ink, published that, and hoped for the best.

Yet something that was said at the Brisbane Writers Festival has given me a bit more insight into what is going on. It was Jim Frenkel who said it.

He's an odd sort of bloke, Jim. An editor with Tor Books in New York, he's about as world famous as an editor can be. I was in one of his workshops at the BWF so had the pleasure of listening to his insider insights for about three hours. I've never seen so many people get up and walk out of a workshop because the presenter had pissed them off before. (Maybe I need to get out more.) It's true he had a strangely confrontational manner, with not just a hint of pomposity about him. He even said that anyone who was anti-Semitic should leave the room because he was Jewish and they might not want to hear what a Jewish person had to say. (I found this quite shocking. I don't know what New York publishing is like but that's not the world I live in. Someone did actually get up and go at that point but not, I suspect, because they didn't like Jews.) Yet there was something strangely likeable about the man. For all the apparent aggression and arrogance that simmered just under the skin, there was a deeper layer of intelligence, delicacy and sensitivity that drew me to him. I could easily imagine being friends with him (not something I often imagine about anyone!) but only after he had lowered the all-but-impenetrable defences he seems to have deployed against the world. It will never happen, of course, unless the two of us are ever marooned together in a well-stocked bar for three days.

I digress.

What Jim Frenkel said, among several other interesting things, was that there are great writers in this world and there are great storytellers and they are not necessarily the same people. He took an impromptu poll of the workshop participants (all wannabe writers, I would suppose), asking who would rather read a good story than read good writing and, to my astonishment, almost everyone wanted the story. His contention, therefore, was that the reason so much execrable prose is published is because publishers are giving the people what they want: good stories.

It certainly explains the fact that not one in twenty sci-fi books I read these days is well-written. It also explains much of the advice and guidance editors, publishers and other writers put out, which almost exclusively focuses on structure and pace, character and plot. It explains why most sci-fi these days is space opera - and pretty awful space opera at that. It also explains why my favourite sci-fi writers are mostly dead, or getting there; they come from a time when good writing was valued more highly than it is now.

So now when I toss aside the unreadable work of some modern 'master' of the genre with cries of anguish and wails of self-pity, I can at least console myself that it was the half-witted, clichéd, trope-ridden story that the publisher liked, even though it seemed to have been written by a hyper-active ten-year-old with literacy issues.