When I was ten, we moved. This was crushing to me as a ten-year-old because all of my friends were in the old school, not the new one. The place we moved was a new housing development, complete with a new elementary school opening up the next fall (as opposed to the junior high and high school which are still some of the oldest in the valley).
In order to ‘welcome’ the new family to the neighborhood, we were invited to speak in church. This is fairly standard practice in the religion my parents and family practice. So little ten-year-old me toddled up to the pulpit, recited something about…creation if I remember right…and went and sat my skirted butt down again after.
This left a big impression on several of the younger couples in our neighborhood. It made me look responsible and intelligent. And it also demonstrated I was the oldest child under eighteen in the immediate vicinity (which sucked but that’s a different post prolly). And suddenly people wanted me to babysit for them. And I got paid for it. Paid!. No one had ever paid me to watch my own siblings (though they started once I proved I was in demand).
And hence my love for earning a living and purchasing the things I wanted was born. There were sucky bits (like writing query letters sucky). Once the toilet overflowed and flooded the bathroom at the house I was at and my parents weren’t home to ask for advice. Once the little girl I was watching went out on the front porched and screamed for her mommy because I tried to make her go to bed on time, and the neighbors thought I was horrible.
But I learned to cope, and with each new crisis came a better understanding of how to conduct myself in a professional manner. Yes, starting when I was ten. When I was sixteen, I moved up the ladder, working at ShopKo as a cashier. Once again, so many lessons to learn about how to interract with people professionally.
At nineteen I got my first computer job and never looked back. That’s taken me through technical support, hardware repair, software development, and even all the way up in the ranks of management and back down again (some day I’ll prolly also share my ‘demotion’ story from old job).
With each new job and company came a deeper understanding of how business works. Of what employees need to do to get and keep jobs, of what employers need to do to get and keep employees, and the balance the two of them have to achieve in order to keep the company afloat and making money. i.e. – not laying anyone off because they went bankrupt.
These are lessons I’ve been learning since I was ten. Babysitting. I suspect the same lessons would have been there to learn if I was mowing lawns instead. Or delivering newspapers.
Like a lot of people, I read a lot of agent blogs. Two posts on my favorites this morning: Can’t Get No Respect? and Reading vs. Representing. Both of these bloggers/agents are articulate and incredibly sympathetic toward the writer’s plight. And they spend a lot of time trying to be kind and I suspect from some of their tones it causes them a lot of stress. Which is the case with anyone who’s a naturally kind person.
What struck me about both posts today, and frequently has with both blogs, is that these people are professionals. They’re dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations on a daily basis, and they can hold their own. They’re lucky professionals in that they’re working in a medium they love, but this is still a job. It pays the bills, it requires certain levels of profesionalism that any job requires.
And it seems to me some of the writers they deal with are not. I know, for us writers this is about passion and art and expression. It’s not about conformity or commercialism. Except it is. If you’re seeking representation or publication, it defnitely is. Professionalism = compromise.
You might argue and say, “But not all authors are that way. That’s only a very small percentage who act/react that way.”
Really?
Are you sure?
~85% of a slush pile is rejected because people: didn’t follow submission guidelines, sent something that’s not represented there, etc.
85%. (As a side note, that greatly increases the odds for those people who are capable of following instructions.)
I know, people act like this in other professions, too. Part of what I’ve done over the last xx years is help hire new employees. We had someone once who interviewed well, but was just kind of giving off a creepy vibe, and his references didn’t check out. We decided not to hire him. We were even polite enough to shoot him a form letter saying ‘thanks but no thanks’. Do you know how many companies out there employ the “no response means no” methodology?
He called the hiring manager at home that night to discuss why she hadn’t selected him.
If that had happened to you, would you have changed your mind and offered him the job after all?
I’ve never gone through 300+ resumes in a day. I can’t fathom doing it every day from now until the end of my career, and then still trying to work with those people I hire on top of that. Now it’s true, I don’t have an agent yet. Quite honestly, I don’t have a representation-worthy novel yet. But when I reach the point where I’m ready to start seriously looking, professionalism will be a leading thought in all of my interractions.
So the question you have to ask yourself is (no, not ‘do you feel lucky, punk?’, different post) – are you in this for the art? The money? A little bit of both? If it’s only the first, leave the poor publishing world alone. If it’s the second, get into freelance or copy writing. If it’s a little of both, try and keep in mind the people on both sides of the equation. Those literary agents out there? A lot of them are in it for a little bith of both, too. And they have to play the game. Don’t make it harder on them.
/self-important rant