If PatronQuo were to put out a wish list for its ideal kind of participating writers, they would have the following traits: Great storytelling abilities, tremendous egos, a thirst for competition, a ken for self-promotion, a dash of bombast, and a liberal spicing of anally obsessive attention to perfect grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.
In fact, they would seem a lot like published author Holly Jahangiri, who happens to have all these traits in spades and who, incidentally, happens to be leading the pack in All-Time Earnings on PatronQuo.com. And she shows no sign of slowing down, particularly since she’s made full use of PatronQuo’s recently unveiled story badges in order to further spread her literary seed online.
Holly is a new type of author for the Internet age – one who is savvy enough to realize that it’s the public that casts the final literary judgment, not the gatekeepers who are forever dictating who the next “hot” literary property will be. If consistent direct public appeal is the true mark of a hot literary property, then Holly is it. And whether the gatekeepers say so or not, Holly – and PatronQuo – are going to get the word out to the public.
To see what makes this writer tick, we’ve fielded her a series of tough questions and sat back to see how her wit would handle it.
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As an award-winning writer with a long list of publishing credits, what is your advice for aspiring writers who believe they can finally pay off that mortgage if only they win lots of awards and rack up a whole lotta publishing credits?
My advice? Don’t quit the day job just yet. Writing for a living is work, like any other. It is not luck, although the vision most of us hold of sending our hopeful young manuscripts off into the cruel publishing world sometimes makes winning the lottery seem easy by comparison. Keep plugging away at it, though, and don’t give up; if writing is what you do best, you can earn a living at it. The saddest thing is to watch someone slave away, day after day, at a job they hate. If you’re willing to back up your passion for writing with a little old-fashioned work ethic, then the awards and publishing credits will come in time, and you can pay the mortgage without them.
In your opinion, what are the common features of a badly executed short story?
Telling too much of the back story up front, in narrative form, thinking the reader won’t understand the rest if you don’t educate them before the story starts. When I read a story that starts out like that, my first reaction is, “And I care why?”
Are there any easily identifiable features that mark off a story as professionally written?
As a reader, I’m quickly sucked into the scene – it’s almost like hypnosis. I’m in the writer’s world. I’m willing to suspend disbelief. I’ve gone deaf and dumb; I am the protagonist. Within five minutes or so, I’m no longer consciously aware of words on paper, forming sentences.
I stop compulsively editing. I wouldn’t notice a typo if it hopped up off the page and made razzberries at me. I’m too engrossed in the story.
To date, you’ve earned $36 (minus our 15% slice and applicable transaction costs) through patrons on PatronQuo.com. How do you plan to spend your lucre?
Well, probably on office supplies. I have a pen fetish. I really need a Mont Blanc fountain pen, and I can die happy.
I may reinvest some of it on a worthy author or two here on PatronQuo – keep the fun going. Because I have to admit, a friendly literary Death Match does get the adrenaline flowing. Just a little.
Corporately Interested Leading Question of The Day : Do you feel that all authors have a secret need to see how their tales would theoretically match up in head-to-head literary death matches with the work of other authors?
They may kill me for telling secrets out of school, but I think the driving need among authors is to know someone’s actually reading and caring whether they ever write again. And secretly, all published authors long for some measure of critical acclaim or popularity with readers – they’ll say things like, “No, I write because I must! I write only for myself!” and I think that’s nonsense. If that’s true, why publish? Wouldn’t that just be the ultimate arrogance? “I write only for myself, but here – I know you’re just dying for a few drops of ink from my pen, so I’ll publish this just to indulge your burning need.” I don’t think so. We’re all competitive.
Writers with fragile egos, though, won’t survive this business. It’s highly competitive. Winners are the ones who can use the rejection slips to wallpaper a bathroom while they write the next book. They’re the ones who can pick themselves up off the pavement faster than the others and be first to the mailbox with the next manuscript. The analogy of manuscript-as-love-child is a dangerous one, I think; then again, a good parent teaches the child to pick himself up after a fall and try, try again – so maybe it’s just a question of whether the writer is a good parent or a neurotic one.
Jewish Guilt-Inducing Question of The Day: The owners of PatronQuo.com are expending precious , life-sustaining calories to promote you along with the work of our other participating writers. What are you doing to promote PatronQuo?
“Expending precious, life-sustaining calories”? J, have you ever considered a career as a writer? I’m going to use that as a pull-quote to market my new diet book for literary couch potatoes, that’s what I’m going to do.
But seriously, I’m not Jewish. Or Catholic. Your puny guilt holds no power over me!
What do you think I’m doing? I’m writing. That’s what writers do. We write. We’re notoriously rotten at self-promotion (but some of us are learning, thanks to the Internet and constant reminders from publishers that we’d better do our part in closing the sale, too). We’re introverts, for the most part. If we were extroverts, we’d have spent our college years partying and training to become social media gurus instead of grammar nerds.
What are you doing for us, Mr. Impresario?
How would you rank the following elements in the makings of a great fiction writer: Creativity, Grammar, Spelling, Ego, Social Hostility, Bi-Polar Disorder, An Inborn Talent In Sucking Up To The Right Editors/Literary Agents/Publishers?
Okay, seriously? That one made me laugh out loud. Hmm. Good question…
You missed “wildly irrepressible imagination” and “ability to lie like a rug.”
I once read that it’s not really “creativity” that’s key – anyone can make stuff. Making really cool, original stuff, though, is a challenge. I’d add “storytelling ability” to the list, and I might put that first.
I know an astonishing number of writers who think grammar, spelling, and punctuation are just necessary evils, and “isn’t that what editors are for?” Would you buy a dresser crafted by someone who didn’t know a circular saw from a hammer? (How on earth do you get bloodstains out of wood? Ask a mystery write!) Really, grammar, punctuation, and spelling are the tools of our trade. Competent use of them helps the reader to suspend disbelief; poor use encourages the reader to go on a typo hunt, instead.
After that, I’d say bipolar disorder can be a plus or a huge obstacle. It’s a spectrum disorder, so a little touch of it adds passion (a cyclical sort of passion, wherein the exhausted and depleted writer must then go into the writer cave and hibernate while the ideas brew in his fevered brain). Too much bipolar disorder can lead to unpredictable down times and self-medication. This is great fodder for screenwriters – you know, the cliché of the publisher hounding the writer to finish the third book in the series, while the writer holes up and has an existential crisis in the cabin in the woods. Gets old for everybody after a few rounds, though.
Ego? I’d say “thick skin.” Ego too often connotes arrogance. Though really, arrogance lives in the Id, doesn’t it? The childish, tantrum-throwing diva within. No one needs that; it’s unprofessional. Self-confidence and a lack of neediness would serve a writer well.
Social hostility? Well, remember what I said earlier, that if we were less introverted we’d have spent our college years learning to be social media gurus? To some degree, it helps not to be overly sociable. But…hostility? Hm. Great for satirists, but it’s hard to inject humor into satire if you don’t love your subject just a little bit. And I really don’t think writers who dismiss their readers as irrelevant are destined for great things – unless it’s to be studied by graduate Lit students after they’re dead, and to have their twisted relationships analyzed in terms of the literary clues they left behind.
As for sucking up to the agents, editors, and publishers of the world – that’s not even on the radar. It’s been tried, and doesn’t work. They’re incredibly frustrating people who insist on having a solid product to sell – they don’t want cookies, bribes, odes, scented love notes, teddy bears, or any of that rot. Just good, solid storytelling wrapped in writing skill, appropriate to the target market of their publications. Their dogged insistence on writers following instructions is what trips most of us up (some of us write instructions for a living – now you want us to read them, too??) Those submission guidelines – it’s like the gates to Hell, J. The gates to Hell.
As a published author, how do you feel about having your work showcased online in a venue where anyone off the proverbial street is invited to submit?
Oh, I’m not a snob – but poor quality control is what has given self-publishing a bad name. If people who claim to be writers can’t police themselves, and insist on inflicting poorly written dreck on an unsuspecting public, then it makes the whole profession look bad. People trust big name publishers because they believe in their heart of hearts that each book has been rigorously edited – and that some large, impersonal corporation has judged each book “worthy” of a million-dollar investment in advances, production costs, marketing and promotion, and so on. To some extent, they’re right.
For reasons of quality control, PatronQuo is considering to stage a Slaughter of Slush ™ event in which we’ll periodically – and publicly – purge some of the more egregiously slushy, typo-filled, grammatically challenged submissions from our database. Would such an event appeal to your more sadistic side – and, more importantly, do you think that such an event will tap into the atavistic sadism of our target market in order to gain more readers and patrons for our site?
Sort of a Roman Coliseum thing, wherein we give each work a thumbs’ up or a thumbs’ down, and throw it to the lions regardless? Could be fun. I think you should put up a big warning ahead of time, though. This is not a game for fragile egos. I have my evil impulses and moments, but I really don’t like to see innocent people get hurt.
That said, Simon Cowell amuses me. Could you get him to judge, perhaps?
Do you feel that PatronQuo is a bit too aggressive for the delicate sensibilities of today’s literary community – or do you feel that an obsessive focus on sadism, combat, money, ego, sport, rankings, and death matches is precisely what’s needed these days to engage a mass online audience (bread and circuses, etc.)?
Last I heard, participation wasn’t mandatory. Let’s see what the audience wants. My pen and I live to serve our Caesar – the reader.
What’s your view on split infinitives? Do you support those who continue to police against their use, or do you support the right to boldly bitch-smack those who still care?
A skilled writer knows to pick her battles wisely; there is a time and a place for split infinitives, sentence fragments, and other bugaboos that would make your Third Grade grammar teacher wince. But be prepared to defend your reasoning behind doing so.
Language evolves; rules change with evolution. I’m not in favor of change merely for the sake of change, nor do I support change to accommodate laziness, lest we all start writing lik thz.
That said, some of the most colorful expressions in Literature are the result of someone bending language to his will, and not the other way around.