“Wow, I never imagined you’d read something like that,” they said almost in horror, as though I’d just admitted to a world-class sommelier that I drink Lambrusco straight from the bottle.

I love really good literature, obviously. But I don’t have a lot of time for leisure reading, and when I do, I don’t necessarily reach for a Cormac McCarthy or Kazuo Ishiguro.

I don’t choose books that I think will impress friends or colleagues or strangers in a café.

I don’t care if you gasp when I admit I didn’t like a certain “classic” novel by default simply because it is a classic.

I don’t care if you turn your nose up at me because I’m not reading whatever sneering deconstructionist tome you’re slogging through—dripping with semiotic snobbery and hoary lit crit nonsense—and pretending you’re enjoying it.

Basically I want to read a fucking story.

I want to read about places I haven’t seen, full of people I’ve never met, involved in something fascinating and perhaps just a tad over the threshold of plausibility.

I want to read about people doing things. If most of the verbs in the book are variations of thought or said or felt, forget it.

Give me some characters with faults. Give them important, wonderful things. And then yank them away. Let me see the wind knocked out of them so I can watch them react and see what they’re made of. What do they do?

If I find a work of fiction that gives me that, I’ll likely read it, no matter what lasting literary “value” it may have or the cachet it displays when I pull it out of my bag.

No matter what kind of writing you do—short stories, books, children’s lit, screenplays, stand-up bits, whatever—don’t ever approach it as though you’re trying to please an audience. Don’t ever write what you think people want. Don’t ever write about something you think is popular. Because invariably, it will suck. And it will suck hard.

Write to please one person and one person only: yourself.

Which is to say, write the kind of book that you love to read. Write the kind of script that you want to see on the screen.

If you write something you don’t like, you’ll get bored with it and shelve it, or throw it away and start over, because you don’t want it to see the light of day. And rightly so; if you’re not interested in the story, no one else will be either. But if you write something that thrills you, mark my words you’ll finish that fucking thing. You’ll find a way. And you will work your ass off to polish it before it leaves your desk.

Obviously there’s no guarantee it will reach an audience. But at least you didn’t write a dispassionate tale about teenage vampires, for example, simply because teenage vampires are a popular thing. You wrote something that pleased you immensely, based on topics and themes and interests that tickle your brain and grab you right in the guts. You wrote the kind of story you’d pay to read if it had been written by someone else. Which means it’s likely that a load of other people with similar interests would pay to read it as well. What’s more, savvy readers can always tell the difference between derivative crap written to editorial order, and prose by someone who clearly wrote the story solely because they loved it and wanted it told.

And that’s good news for you.

Enjoy.

Your second novel is hampered by crippling doubt, self-loathing, a paralyzing fear of failure, a head full of imaginary people screaming at you, hundreds of words of uninspired narrative dross, and minutes that pass like entire days. Not to mention excessive doses of caffeine, alcohol, and empty carbohydrates.

Let’s say you’re on an airplane, and the old man sitting next to you starts chatting. Normally, you don’t like smalltalk with strangers. Or any talk with strangers, especially when you’re strapped into a tiny coach seat on an aging 737. But he’s elderly, so you listen respectfully as he tells you all about himself.

Let’s go on to say that because you’ve shown polite interest in the man, he begins telling you a story. You do a little mental eye-roll, but the old man is a veteran, and when a veteran tells you a story, you shut your damn mouth and you listen.

Two hours later, and the man has finished telling you one of the strangest stories you’ve ever heard. And you know it’s just a story, because it was too bizarre. It was unreal. It just couldn’t have happened the way it was told. But you’re fascinated, so you ask the old man some questions. And he won’t answer you. He shakes his head and changes the subject, acting like he’s uncomfortable that he told you the story in the first place.

Upon landing, the man apologizes for not asking you enough about yourself, so you hand him a business card and give him the ten second highlights of what you do, and you write his name and address in one of your notebooks.

When you get home, you find that his story is still stuck in your head. What parts, if any, were real? Was he just old and confused? He’d told the story with too much conviction and too much detail for it to be entirely fabricated. So you write him a letter, and ask him to tell you more.

But you get nothing in return. Maybe the poor guy died, you think. You forget about the old man and his crazy story, and go on with your life.

Then several months later, to your complete surprise, a thick envelope shows up in the mail. There’s a letter from the old man, telling you some of what you wanted to know. The envelope is full of papers and materials that corroborate a large amount of what he told you in his story.

So now you are completely freaked out, because if he lied about what happened, then so did the other men who were with him.

And the whole thing is just too fucking eerie to believe. But you don’t have a choice.

The answer, my dear aspiring scribes, is no one. Agents are a vestigial luxury enjoyed by established writers of a higher order, but they are hardly mandatory; don’t let yourself think for a moment that you need one when you are just starting out.

I’m sure you are aghast, and ready to point out to me that every book about writing you’ve consumed so far (and let’s be honest, you’ve read a lot of them) has asserted rather authoritatively that acquiring an agent is an absolute necessity if you intend on selling your novel and/or screenplay.

This, of course, is complete nonsense.

All of those aforementioned books were likely written by authors who themselves had agents, and therefore had to state in the book that agents were essential. Would you throw your agent under a bus by not mentioning her in your book about writing? Of course you wouldn’t. Having said that, it should now be clear to you that they are featured in writing guides merely as a professional courtesy and not as a sine qua non of the publishing world.

Obviously we must now address the question of how to bring your work to the attention of a publisher. The answer is a simple one: direct solicitation. Package the most recent draft of your hush-hush manuscript¹  in a large envelope and send it directly to the publishers you would most like to print your novel.

You’re a whip-smart bunch, so I’ve already anticipated your next concern. You’re going to tell me you’ve researched the major publishing houses and noticed they all have a disclaimer on their websites to the effect of “no unsolicited materials accepted”. Of course they need to say this, or else they’re going to be drowning in drafts from every amateur who ever put pen to paper. But they obviously don’t mean anyone reading this column; statements like that are just a wink and a nod to professionals like you who have read a large number of writing guides and have worked feverishly for the better part of three entire months on your manuscript.

It may take some time to receive a response from the publishers – don’t get discouraged! Acquisitions editors have a lot of work to do, and they may not get to your submission for at least a few days after you send it in. If you’re really concerned about time, and you have a little bit of extra money to spend, you might want to consider services like FedEx Overnight, USPS Express Mail, or even UPS Next Day Air. In addition to rapidly getting your manuscript to the publisher’s door, packages that exude a sense of urgency and importance tend to find their way to the top of the editorial pile more quickly than a plain brown envelope.

Hopefully this week’s column has helped clarify why expensive professionals are not necessary to your success as a first-time author. Also, if you have any topics you’d like The Passive Writer to cover in future essays, please send them directly to my agent.

Are you religiously reading Low Resolution Theatre, the comic I’m doing in tandem with the lovely and talented Angela Black? Are you following it on Tumblr? Or subscribed to it via RSS? You should be.

Alternatively, do you have “read LRT every day” tattooed backwards on your forehead so you’re reminded of it every single morning when you look in the mirror? That’s an option as well, albeit a fairly drastic one.

Regardless, please read and support the comic. Early adopters will have bragging rights once it becomes world-famous. Also, you might get access to some cool swag before the general public.

To be tossed into a fire.

But no. I will instead be spending the day (and likely the weekend, and a good part of next week) on the fifth set of notes on the fourth full rewrite of this fucking thing.

So, yay.

Infinite Jest is an enormous yet rewarding read, and is one of my top five favorite novels.

Yes, it looks intimidating, but as Jason Kottke explains in his excellent forward to the project:

It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

So, go out and get a copy right now, and dig in. You won’t be sorry.

He found it hard to stay calm on the gurney and wanted to rip apart the rough institutional sheets and scream and cry but ended up laughing instead because the BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP sounds from across the hallway made him feel like he was an extra in some trauma scene in a TV medical drama.

The absurdity of it all soothed him until the nice nurse came in and gave him a sedative and complimented his watch and he looked at her sideways and shook his head and said “I should be dead now,” and she just smiled and left and all he could do was look at the green ceiling and laugh through his tears when the BEEP BEEP BEEP started up again.