Why Every Aspiring Writer Should Work in Publishing

Well there's the obvious--the contacts, the industry knowledge, the possibility of a career working with books that comes complete with a salary and benefits...but today I want to talk about how it can help your writing.

Whilst doing one of my favorite things today (and it really is...maybe I haven't been doing it long enough or maybe I'm just crazy), reading through the slush pile, I came across a pretty well written manuscript. Before you ask, yes I did send it up, because it was that good, and I'm fairly confident that it's worth at least asking for a full, though I can't really evaluate whether it will ever get published.

While that was exciting in and of itself, more important for me was the way this woman really grabbed me from the first page. I'm hard to do that with, and she did it by describing the psychic visions of her main character. I've gotten a lot of feedback (I sometimes call it flak...) about people not understanding the magic in my own writing, particularly in the initial pages. I've struggled with what to do about that, because I'm using those initial pages to do other things and I didn't want to give them up to description.

I have now been converted, because I had a moment, as an editor reading a slush manuscript, where I said "Okay, well done. Let's see what else you've got" and that is exactly what you want when your first page is read by anybody, but especially when it's read by an editor. So I'm now convinced it can work, which makes it worth experimenting with, and perhaps expanding my prologue and assigning it a fixed point of view to get the description done. We'll see. Either way, the point is that I now have a concrete moment where my work in publishing is paying direct dividends to my writing, and that's a very good thing.