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How to Get Published, Step 4

By: David Field

[ Posted On: 2009-03-11 ]

Satire is a powerful means of releasing frustration and poking fun at our adversaries. I outline here a further tactic for satirizing the business of writing and getting published. This time it is through the use of purple prose, not seen since the days of Rider Haggard and other great Victorian exponents of wonderful, exuberant literature which would be turned down like a shot by today's editors.

I have a written a couple of short articles, on ezines, which contain satires on our efforts to get published, or just to get a publisher to look at our work for more than five minutes. The virtue of satire is that it highlights the frustrations of our work, it is a safety valve for some of the frustration which we feel and it gives us the satisfaction of making fun of both the publishing business in general and of editors in particular. As I have mentioned in earlier articles it is a powerful way of coping with rejection and a valuable adjunct to surviving in the publishing world. So if you will forgive me, in the present article I will suggest further satirical tactics for lampooning editors.

The technique is essentially the same as in 'Getting Published: Step 3'. Briefly, the idea is to present the publishers with such an unexpected piece of work that they are kick-started into reading it. In the article just mentioned, I suggested using the scientific style of presentation, obviously totally inappropriate to telling a story. Of course it was this very inappropriateness that was the point. The choice of the worst possible style was an interesting challenge and certainly unexpected by any editor. I now choose what is, by modern standards, the equally worst possible style, that of unlimited poetic licence. This may well be a style that appeals to many of you, for, just as at your five year olds' birthday party, you may give yourself permission to do things which have been forbidden to you for years. In fact you are positively encouraged to perform the literary equivalent of throwing egg sandwiches at your sister. Taste goes out of the window and Victorian flamboyant, grandiose, vainglorious, romantic, purple prose comes in the door. Mixed metaphors run amok, like so many geese, as we take arms against a sea of editors, manuscript readers, agents and self-publishing websites. 'It was a dark and stormy night...' is just the start - and a very good start too.

If I may, I will take exactly the same story as last time, that is, the one about getting your manuscript to a publisher by impersonating a famous author. The story started with the aspiring author putting his children on the school bus. Here goes for a translation of this into Victorian melodrama.

'The windswept tree-lined street, with stark winter branches silhouetted against the grey, cloud-laden sky, like so many fingers stretched in supplication to the heavens, lay before me. Wee birds, seeking the last crumbs of sustenance from the hard and unrelenting hand of nature, fluttered in our path, pathetic reminders of the transience of life. My children with nerveless hands, clutched at my arms, the sharp gusts buffeting their fragile forms. Oh! if they were swept away, what despair would visit my heart, what remorse, what regret....." What nonsense! Let's get to the bit where the big silver Merc. zooms in front of his nose. He's leading his children down the street towards the bus.

'Sweet smiles played about the lips of my darlings, like little sunbeams dancing on water on a summer's day. Oh! Innumerable laughter. Aeschylus and Sophocles, where are you, poets of yesteryear, to embellish our world with the gold and silver of your tongues? Far, far away, long dead and forgotten. The yellow bus, that harbinger of separation, lay like a giant sloth slumped at the roadside. Approaching this fearful creature, from the corner of my eye I saw a silver vehicle approach at speed. I dragged my dear ones to me, pressed them to my thudding heart, filled with the dread of a terrible impact. But the sleek lines whistled to a halt inches from us, the great glowing form of the automobile radiating power and strength and the might of industry, the odour of wealth.

Buried in the bowels of this colossus was the glorious treasure of other hearts, of the father and mother who had given them life, who surely cherished them as the greatest lioness cherishes her cubs or the least of mammals, the tiny field mouse, cherishes her tiny sightless, helpless offspring. Five chickens, five wayward children, laughing like the peals of bells on an Easter Sunday, skipped forth, spreading joy and light as they tripped lightly out, shepherded like little lambs by their loving mother. 'Ah! What wonderful creatures,' intoned my daughter, her fresh face and young mind ensnared by these new beings in her life. At length the great bus departed, tearing at my heart as the tendons which bound me to my daughters were stretched and then broken as my dear darlings passed out of my sight.'

Perhaps you may wish to amuse yourselves by writing more of this sort of stuff, perhaps completing the story as I suggested it - or altering it as you wish. We could start a competition: who can write the most luxuriously awful prose, leaking like treacle from the computer screen? Has anyone any ideas how this may be organised? The first prize could be one of my books, the second prize, two of my books and the bronze medal could be all three books, if I may be allowed to indulge on a little satire on myself. The message is that you have to keep a sense of humour, a sense of perspective and also the feeling that you will win through. It reminds me of what we experience in observational astronomy, a field in which I work. Sometimes you go round the world to Hawaii and it is cloudy! But you must say to yourself, look, it took over a thousand years for these rays of light to reach the Earth from Orion. So we have to wait till tomorrow night to see them. What's another day? In the same way, there are many wonderful novels in the world. If it takes just a little longer to add one more to their number, do not get too fussed.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: David Field is a professor of Astrophysics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He has published numerous articles in many Astronomy and Physics journals. His most recent novel, The Fairest Star, the third installment of his Friends and Enemies Trilogy, has just been published. For more information, please visit: www.davidfield.co.uk

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