Katharine Kerr September 5th, 2006
After Lois posted her excellent two-parter , “Genre don’t get no/want no respect”, there was a certain amount of nasty reaction out on the ‘Net. I’m not suprised, being as I have gotten the same thing for years for daring to suggest that published genre work could stand some improving in matters of style and structure.  Such observations trigger what I call the “Slan shack” reaction — a sense of betrayal by people who feel part of a beleaguered, misunderstood community. This sense of belonging to such a community is so important to many genre writers that they keep it alive by constantly reminding themselves how academics and others hate them so {sob}. No one wants to believe that now and then, these Dreadful Others are right.
Another powerful motivator for the abuse is, or so I personally suspect, simple laziness. If some authors can get a little money selling a book without the revision it needs, then they can convince themselves it didn’t really need the revision. In the past 20 years I have heard an amazing number of excuses for not revising. I shan’t bore you by repeating all of them here.  One of the most common is “I’m not getting paid enough to do extra work.” Extra???
A related attitude concerns research. Recently someone (who shall remain anonymous) posted a comment that has been bugging me for days now.   Â
“I don’t really care if it’s accurate–it’ll say “fictionâ€? right there on the cover, after all–I just need the overwhelming majority of readers to believe that it’s accurate.”
What the author of this quote, and all the authors I have obliquely referred to above, are really saying is, “Fiction isn’t worth hard work.”  Fiction is crap, basically, because it’s not “true”? That’s what I hear loud and clear, as Yogi Bear was wont to say. Even more to the point, it says, “MY fiction isn’t worth hard work.”
There is such a thing as pride in your craft. A craftsperson works hard to do the best job he or she can because of this pride, a sense of honor, if you will, motivated by love for what he or she does. Secondarily, an honorable craftsperson believes that those who buy the crafted object deserve the best the craftsperson can give them.  We don’t have to talk about “great art” here. We can talk about doing a job well because the job itself deserves to be done well.  Selling a sloppy book for a small advance is not a sign of a job done well. Â
Selling a finely-crafted book for a small advance is a fact of life these days, on the other hand.  Here’s another fact of life: authors will never get a large advance if they don’t work hard for a low one. But is it truly a matter of money? I see it as a matter of self-respect.  If you as a writer don’t respect your own worth, you will find you have lots of company to help you dis it.Â
Usually I dislike Ernest Hemingway’s attitudes to Life, Art, Women, you name it. But I did read one anecdote a while back that resonated. A reporter was interviewing him about, if I remember rightly, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. The reporter announced that he’d heard that H. had rewritten one section 16 times.  Why? he wondered. Hemingway gave him a look of pity and said, “To get the words right.”
Not everything needs 16 revisions. Not every story requires years of top-level research, either. But every single story and novel does require effort to reach that simple goal: getting the facts straight and the words right.Â
