Q: Why do you sabotage yourself in query letters?
A: I wanted to show what it’s like to be a writer. The business end of it. The part you don’t see because nobody with any sense talks about it.
Say you want to be a writer.
You write a book.
Then what?
You offer it for sale.
A writer lives off the sale of his work.
Who do you offer it to?
A publisher.
Well, a publisher doesn’t read unagented material. So you offer it to an agent.
The agent is swamped. She knows how to make a living giving publishers what they are looking for.
She knows it’s a waste of time offering them anything they will not take.
If she senses you are a kook, you won’t get along with a publisher, you won’t be easy to edit, you won’t be nice on television, you’re a creep, or awkward, she’s not going to bother.
She wants someone who is attractive, witty, with a winning personality, a positive outlook, someone who is a success, who can be a role model to other aspiring artists.
Does this sound like a role you want, as an artist, to fill?
Q: No. I didn’t become an artist to do that. If I wanted to do that I would have majored in business.
A: You have a chip on your shoulder.
An attitude.
Q: The coaches said I had an attitude in high school.
For shitty attitude.
A: Coaches are fascist hicks.
Coaches are company men.
Nixon admired Vince Lombardi.
Q: And the writer is a doomed loser. That’s very sophomoric.
A: I haven’t lost. I’m winning.
They didn’t break my spirit.
They didn’t make me knuckle under.
Writing is a contest.
A test of character.
Is you is or is you ain’t an existentialist.
I read Notes From Underground in high school.
Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponti, and Claude Levi-Strauss, sitting around a café
on the
Juliette Greco. Camus, looking like a movie star. Flamenco music.
Gypsy business. Django Reinhardt.
Evergreen Review magazine.
Terry Southern. “Red Dirt Marijuana.”
“Twirling at Ole Miss.”
Q: And you think young people are still interested in this?
A: Yes.
Young people who intend to be artists, or the significant others of artists who wonder what makes their loved one tick, or people interested in art, and artists, and the mechanics of a life in art, the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty.
Q: Inside
A: Yes.
Letters has been taken over by business majors.
They ask the wrong questions.
Who will buy this? How many copies will it sell? To whom?
That’s not a question an artist asks when he begins a work of art.
That’s a commerce question.
Q: Everything must come to market, Robert Frost said.
A: That’s true.
He made art.
Now we have Maya Angelou.
She makes art.
Toni Morrison makes art.
Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveler; he
Served human liberty.
Q: So it’s for old people too. Failures.
A: Yes. You’re going to fail. But you must fight anyway.