Since my last post – and thanks so much to everyone who liked it – I have been giving more thought to my writing career.
I realise that I shied away from confronting one of the core realities about the writing career today: namely, who are you? If you have to Put Yourself Out There to Reach Your Readers you have to first work out who those readers might be and then consider what kind of author they want you to be, which means, you have to look like that writer. Once upon a time a writer looked like him/herself, no matter what he/she looked like. Shirley Jackson (below) wrote Gothic horror stories about life in small New England towns. Her publicist would never have let this photo into the public realm if it was today. Actually her story is very interesting, see the link below.
And then there is Charles Bukowski. OK, this is a cheap shot, but hard to resist.
Cbarles Bukowski, 1970 portrait by Sam Cherry.
Actually when you look at photographs of famous writers going right back to the early twentieth century you can see already the aesthetics of writerly fame were already at work, in parallel with the growth of photography. There are profound existential questions here, but let’s skip them for the moment and go right back to Square One!
Everyone in this game accepts that Marketing involves being someone marketable. These days the author is a product, and like all products it does matter what she/he/they look(s) like and whether or not they fit the current paradigm for successful writers. There are countless guides to how to ensure a successful author photo. I like this one, especially for its analysis of specific published author photos. A certain look, a physically attractive or interesting persona, a hesitant smile that looks great on the back cover, a certain age, an air of reserve and mystery – possibly the hint of the exotic – that will work. But the thing is, if that is the author in their photo, then it has to be the author in real life as well, in the unlikely event they get asked to appear in public somewhere, like at the Podunk Valley Writers’ Festival.
What do you do when you don’t even dimly resemble any of the persons identified as successful writers in their photos? It has occurred to me that it might be helpful to hire someone. Good training for a budding actor! Hire a young person, able to manage the Internet, look great and make public appearances, that might be a good alternative. After all, the gig economy demands people work in all kinds of different careers so there must be hundreds or thousands of young people who’d love to be writers without having to write any books. As for the writer, if you can use a pen name, why can’t you use a pen body? There are ghost writers, why not writers’ ghosts?
Is this a good plot or what? I don’t think it’s been done before although back in 1976 Martin Ritt directed a very young Woody Allen in a movie, The Front, about a writer manqué who signs his name to scripts by real writers blacklisted during the darkest days of Hollywood, when J Edgar Hoover determined what would and would not be acceptable from writers and movie makers according to his own warped ideologies.
And there has been at least one movie about Ghost Writers – Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski, starring Ewan McGregor, 2010.
Maybe there are other movies with similar plots, and that great little series Younger, currently in Season 5 on Stan, takes up the issue of ageism in the publishing world, and the extent to which millenials are currently determining what is published and what isn’t – in tradpubland of course. Incidentally in researching this blog post I came across a list of films about writers here. I’d love to watch all of them in one big binge! That’s the only thing I might enjoy more than actually writing the stories myself.
Annette Hamilton - Writer 