the cost of having been everywhere

By way of follow-up to this post: I’ve been able to publish so widely because I am always attentive to the character of the publishing house or periodical I hope to write for. What kinds of books and authors do they publish? What is their core audience? Whom do they hope to reach? I make sure that my pitches and/or drafts are well-tailored to the character of the venue, and don’t push too hard against its boundaries and conventions.

I’ve made a point of this because I’ve learned that, while there’s no statement that’s true of all editors, it’s fair to say that most of them are pretty cautious: they have a sense, often hard-earned, of what their audience will accept, and are disinclined to publish anything that will rock the boat too strongly.

But I sometimes feel that, if most would-be writers are inattentive to these matters, I may be overly aware of them. One unfortunate result of my attentiveness is something I’ve mentioned before: though I have published nearly 20 books now, not one of them is the book I really wanted to write. I’ve shaped each one to make them more appealing to editors, and have (with deep sighs) set aside ideas and scenes and set-pieces that I knew would provoke editorial skepticism. I have also, as I’ve mentioned before, had a number of proposals turned down flat by multiple editors and my agent. And then there are the books I most wanted to write, which is to say, the ones I never attempted because I knew they would never sell.

If I had been less focused on what editors want and more passionately committed to saying what I want to say, I might never have been published at all; or perhaps I would have published fewer books but ones that had greater impact — or, more to the point, books that were simply better than the ones I have actually done. There’s no way to tell at this point.

But this is one reason why I am reluctant to abandon blogging: here on the blog I come closest to saying the things that I really want to say. (Though I still think that, even on the blog, the little self-censoring demon on my shoulder gets more deference from me than he deserves. Decades-old habits are very difficult to break.)