If You Want to Publish, Here's What to Read

Contemporary writers have to write for contemporary readers

My current favorite unrealistic portrayal of the writing life: The Durrells in Corfu, set in the the 1930s, in which Adorable Novelist Lawrence Durrell types, smokes, drinks, seduces women, and occasionally tosses a manuscript in the post.

You know those movies about writers in Days of Yore, in which said writers gleefully slam THE END into their typewriters and then a few minutes later receive the published books along with piles of cash and fan mail? And no one ever asks them to do edits, or make a BookTok, and instead just showers them with love and admiration and a living wage?

Of course we mostly remember the writers who actually were successful in one way or another, and surely there have always been writers who struggled to write and publish and survive. (And of course portrayals of writers in movies and TV shows are always silly.) But it does seem true that in various past eras, the writing life and publishing world were a lot different than they are today.