Let’s travel back to a long time ago, say a year ago. It is very early fall, with school starting across campuses. Television shows are starting new seasons. Including one very popular show, Gossip Girl. OMG. I know. I wasn’t much of a fan of the show, but a friend of mine suckered me into watching it. “Summer Kind of Wonderful” kicks of Season 2, exploring what the characters did on their summer vacations.
The thing about this show was that I knew some of these characters. (Not Ed Westwick’s character Chuck ‘I’m Batman Chuck Bass’ Bass, he would not be able to exist in this mortal realm.) While my rich friends and acquaintances tend live far out on Long Island, the attitude, mannerisms and opportunities afforded to them was something I knew about. This isn’t what made me angry about the show. What made me angry was something I should have seen coming since it showed some of the characters having internships.
Enter Dan Humphrey, the lead male character who is supposedly a writer. His mentor / teacher person is chastising him for not having a story ready for submission. For submission for the New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Let me repeat that: For submission for the New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Needless to say, after my eye started to twitch uncontrollably, I started yelling at the screen to the shock of my confused friend.
For those loyal fans of the show or those who simply who do not know: best-selling authors have problems getting published in the above literary journals. No matter how much money a person has, they probably are not getting a story in, especially someone still in high school.
Now, a good number of things in this show are implausible. Chuck Bass’ fashion sense is what happens when a tornado hits a Ralph Lauren store. You can’t get downtown from the upper west side within a half-an-hour. But the above scenario took the cake and had sex on it. (I mean, this is Gossip Girl.)
Hollywood always had a weird relationship with writing and writers. You used to like us, Hollywood–what happened? Gone are the days where Truman Capote could fill up a concert hall for a reading of sections from In Cold Blood. Gone are the days when Gore Vidal would beating with William F. Buckley on the news. Now, we’re all stuck in the basement writing, paid or unpaid. Now fictional rich teenagers are doing better than real life writers are.
If I had to take an educated guess, the fall of the big name author had to happen some time in the 1950’s. (Outside of major playwrights, other writers seemed to always be regulated to the background.) It would have to be roughly around Capote’s time, as I find it hard to name an author that would sell out audience for a reading or recall someone being famous solely because he or she was a writer/author. Perhaps the decline of author-celebrities happened because of a decline in reading. Conversely, perhaps there was a rise in the number of authors appealing to various new markets. The latter is great for intellectual and social, bad for anybody hoping to strike it rich.
There seems to be a few ways to get well known as a writer. You would think that it would be to write a lot, especially a series. But then I present you with the cases of Daniel Steel or David Patterson, big names that nobody would be able to put a face to.
No, option 1 is to let Hollywood come to you. Stephen King has written lots of novels, but is mostly known for his short stories and only a few novels. Why? The Shining, Carrie, Pet Semetary, Catherine, and the non-horror Stand by Me are known to a large audience as movies, not as short stories or novels. But even then, King is a rare case. Even those authors optioned for movies will have their work overshadow them. I mean, I really like Michael Chabon, but I saw the DVD case for the Mysteries of Pittsburgh at one of my jobs, and didn’t make the connection some time later at a bookstore.
Option 2 is to have an interesting life and write a memoir about it. This is what many critics moan about when ranting about the rise of the memoir, especially due to the spectacle of it, where the battle on the best selling non-fiction charts seems to be over who had it worse and whose story is the most uplifting.
Sometimes these two options come together. For example, J.K. Rowling may have just been the author of the Harry Potter series, like many authors of fantasy and sci-fi stories. Yet, a good portion of the public knows her face, because she has a story herself, a real-life rags to riches story.
James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces shows how things can be twisted to someone’s advantage. His heart-rending memoir was some novel that wasn’t doing well while being shopped around as fiction. (Probably because it reads like the love child of e.e. cummings and Chuck Palahniuk.) However, everyone knew that memoirs and autobiographies were selling like hotcakes, and thus the book was marketed as such. Oprah heard of his ‘inspirational story’ and I think you all remember what happened from there.
Outside of Oprah, you might get a movie made about your inspirational life.(Nothing seems to sell more than something based off a true story.)
Speaking of which, it seems like to make it big in the writing world you almost have to be a celebrity to become one or know some and be ready to dish our their dirty secrets. This is why celebrities write books (or have people write one for them) because it’s instant profit. Now, I don’t want to knock all celebrity writers as some of them are are actually good writers. For example, Barbara Walter’s Audition is going to be a far better– or at least interesting– read than Paris Hilton’s Confessions of an Heiress.
By now you can tell its a bit of game. Kathy Griffin strikes for the heart of silliness of the celebrity book concept and the Oprah effect with her new book:
Yes, Offical Book Club Selections is the title.
It all seems so fake doesn’t it?
If you still want to write after this post, than perhaps you’ve realized you’re not in it for the money. In that case, you might want to turn off the television. Not because it’ll distract you from writing, but because you’ll start wondering why fictional people are doing better than you. Don’t worry though, the characters have writers behind them.
Maybe you’ll be one of them.
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