HOW TO SUCCEED IN YOUR WRITING: Satisfy the hunger

Sam McCord here ...

I've lived about as long as this country, and I've seen more than I've understood.

But I know how you writers out there can draw readers to your books.

You satisfy the hunger in them:

There is a need in folks to see themselves ... luckily not in mirrors, for I am denied that.

But in the words of others ... acknowledging their secrets wounds and silent desires.

Take those string of historical romances of white women with "noble" Native American lovers.

You want a slice of Hell? You live the life a white woman suffered in a Sioux or Apache camp.

I lived in those times, and I know.

BUT TRUTH DON'T MAKE NO NEVER MIND IN FICTION THAT IS BOUGHT IN DROVES.

The authors of those novels "succeeded" like many a politician by telling folks what they wanted to hear.

In this case:

Love can be scary yet still be love.  The bad boy can still be good.  Lots of luck with that, ladies.

Yet TRUTH does matter ... it all depends on what kind of "success" you're aiming for.

Take Margaret Fuller, who is thought to have drowned this day in 1850. Her The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women, was mighty popular in her time --

"We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man. Were this done, we believe that the Divine would ascend into nature to a height unknown in the history of past ages, and nature, thus instructed, would regulate the spheres not only so as to avoid collision, but to bring forth ravishing harmony...."

Now, that didn't happen as you all well know. But it fed the hunger burning at the time.

Or for another kind of success, another kind of truth take the American poet Eve Merriam who was born on this day in 1916.

Her Inner City Mother Goose was booed and banned from some libraries when it was published in 1969, though it sold very well and became an award-winning musical on Broadway:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the double lock will keep;
May no brick through the window break,
And, no one rob me till I awake.

Or take the avant-garde poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky who was born on this day in 1893.


 His suicide in 1930, aged thirty-six, is at least partly explained by his depression over what he saw as the collapse of revolutionary ideals after Lenin’s death in 1924.

 His book My Discovery of America sent a mixed message home to his comrades. Amid the criticism for unbounded capitalism is great praise for the country’s exuberance and technology, captured here in an excerpt from his poem “Brooklyn Bridge”:

If the end of the world comes
and chaos smash our planet to bits,
and what remains will be this
bridge, rearing above the dust of destruction;
then, as huge ancient lizards are rebuilt
from bones finer then needles, to tower in museums,
so, from this bridge, a geologist of the centuries
will succeed in recreating our contemporary world.
He will say — that paw of steel
once joined the seas and the prairies;
from this spot, Europe rushed to the West,
scattering to the wind Indian feathers.

What am I trying to say?

Just this:

Tell in your story what the reader wants to believe, needs to believe if you would be popular. 

Tell them what is truth, and you may not succeed as it is counted in dollars, but you will touch the hearts and minds of those who search for the meaning underneath life.

Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson never found fame in their lifetimes.  Only after their deaths did their books find their audience.

Speak of the truth of the human condition: its aches, bruises, and dreams --

And your books may not sell thousands, but those who do read your novels will be the better for it.

Isn't that the kind of success you secretly yearn for?