Hack

No, we’re not venturing into Matrix territory.

And even though I’ve been smoking WAY too much lately, I’m not about to do that.

Though, I could do for a good old fashioned loogie HOCKing.

No. Today, I’m battling a different kind of hack.

See, I’m reading this book. It’s by Markus Zusak and its called The Book Thief. It really has me reeling. See as a hack writer, when I do happen across truly gifted writing, it fills me with joy, yes, but it also fills me with a sense of embarrassment and depression when comparing it to my own writing.

Now, I’m not starting this to get a pity party going…no, no. I’m just grappling with this struggle and thought it might be therapeutic to write about it.

See, some of you have heard about my minor successes and my major struggles. Some of you read this and get entertained by it. Others probably see through all of this ham-handed veiling and get right to the point – hackish. To fill you in, I came from a grad school program that taught everyone how to read their work with a high-toned and fancy-to-do voice, write long, fluid, rambling, descriptive sentences that seem to go on with no end in sight and use every form of punctuation; and ironically how to limit your audience to the twelve people sitting around you in a grad school writing workshop.

I don’t say this to bad-mouth writing programs. They do the best they can and I got a lot out of my experience. But in hindsight, I see that the scope of modern day writing programs is very limited to the highly academic style of writing that seems to only reach a smaller and smaller audience.

Okay, parlay that experience with joining the workforce as a marketer and proposal writer – earning a pretty nice buck – and then getting my feet wet with writing adventure novels for middle school kids. That’s like taking a banana out of liquid nitrogen and dropping it on a hot plate – KABOOM.

So here I am. I just finished a novel, a science-fantasy novel, whose sole reason for existence was to give me a product to potentially woo an agent to my work.

So why a science-fantasy novel?

Take a look at my analytical mind at work. Ever notice the fantasy and science fiction section at your local Barnes & Noble? Yeah, it’s f!@#ing-A ginormous! Now, have you ever looked at the covers and read the first couple pages? Come on, admit it. Everyone has at one point or another. Most of it reads and smells like a three-week old tuna salad sandwich at the bottom of your high-school locker. But that stuff sells like hot cakes in a lumberjack town. And why does it sell?

Because it reaches toward an audience instead of away from it as a lot of academic contemporary writing does.

Well, that probably just black-balled me from the literary crowd.

Maybe that answers my question. Be a hack and be proud of it. It works for Stephanie Meyer.

Ooh, that probably just lost me the genre crowd.

But it still troubles me. Work your ass off, write the next great American novel and have a one in a million shot at actually achieving it, knowing I am not gifted and the words do not come as easily as they do for other, much more talented writers – OR – play the hand I’m dealt, work with the meager talent I think I have and hack out mediocre but palpably sellable fantasy novels and make a decent living out of it.

Is there truly a balance between high-art and marketable product? I think they are opposing ends on a long scale, but no one said you have to spend all your time on either end.

But it is writing about fun, fun things and not having to crowd your head with weighty diction, complex characters and boring day-time-television plots.

I think I’m just going to stay a hack.