Review of Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life, by Nick Mamatas
Starve Better by Nick Mamatas is an entertaining, engaging, occasionally caustic introduction to the writing life. If you’re a writer looking for some sage advice, be aware that Nick isn’t here to hold your hand and assure you you’re a delicate flower whose beauty is just waiting to be discovered by the reading public.
Nick Mamatas is here to tell you to write. And not just the stuff you love – he’s going to tell you to write stuff you hate, as well. He’s going to tell you to grind out freelance payments for magazines you’ve never heard of on subjects you know nothing about. We all know (or should know) that the writing life is about discipline and hard work, but Starve Better tells us the writing life is also about compromise.
Which is why you need to buy this book – it tells you what you need to know, not what you’d like to hear.
Nick Mamatas is an essayist, novelist, short story writer, educator, editor and ex-term-paper-ghost-writing whore. If there’s a job in writing to be done, he’s probably done it. He’s the author of six novels, had over seventy short stories published, and written hundreds of articles.
Starve Better is a collection of pieces produced by Nick over the years for a variety of publications. The book is divided into two – the first section devoted to short stories and the second to non-fiction. The first tends to be more on the craft of short stories than the business (which is good, because the business of short story writing isn’t a particularly lucrative one). The second is the art of getting subsistence wages for your words.
As a newcomer to fiction writing, I found the first half of the book informative and useful. He starts with the usual disclaimer: all advice on writing is terrible advice, because you’ve got to figure out for yourself your style and voice. He then proceeds to deliver uppercuts of wisdom on writing that brook no dissent. Which may seem contradictory, but ultimately it’s up to the reader to decide what applies to them and what doesn’t (hint: most of it will).
The essays on short fiction cover the hook, dialogue, the sentence, multidimensional characters, the scene break, the ending, editing, not writing twee crap, what he looks for as a slush pile reader and as editor, and more. It’s invaluable stuff, even if – like me – you’ve spent hours dredging the internet for every possible ‘how to’ article on writing fiction. Mamatas approaches each subject with originality and wit sufficient to shed new light on the core elements of the short story.
For example, the ‘hook’ for your short story doesn’t have to appear in the first paragraph. Rather, the opening “should assure the reader they are in a capable pair of hands. The beginning of the story should tantalize, not hook, the reader.” The hook is the motor of the story that makes it worth reading, not merely an arresting opening line.
His advice on getting paid for non-fiction articles is also insightful. I’ve had about a hundred articles published and after reading Nick’s book, I realised I know nowhere near enough. Straight-forward advice on how to pitch and who to target with pitches seems sort of elementary in retrospect, but as I’d had moderate success right from the beginning in getting published, I never looked deeper into the trade. I’ve no doubt the non-fiction advice contained in Starve Better will help me sell more articles in the future, and in this regard the book pays for itself.
If you’re the type of author who has stayed away from non-fiction, you need to reassess your game plan. Getting non-fiction published is way, way easier than fiction, and it pays better.
Starve Better also (indirectly) provides more evidence to what many of us living outside the US assume: it is at once both easier and harder to be a writer over there.
It’s harder because writers are generally poor, and America hates poor people. Mamatas’ discussion of living without health insurance is a salient reminder of how pitiless the American system is when it comes to the less privileged (though I guess when presidential candidate and bottom-feeding plutocrat Mitt Romney is held up as a moderate by the Republican end of the political spectrum, you know there is something terribly unhinged happening in America).
Though we often complain about it, Australia’s public health care system is something every struggling writer should be thankful for.
On the other hand, there are far more opportunities to sell non-fiction work in the US. True, Nick would argue that writers outside the US shouldn’t let that get in the way of pitching stories to US magazines. We all have access to a little thing called the internet, after all. But US-centric information pieces many US magazines expect are not easily replicated by foreigners looking for a freelance payment.
In Australia, the non-fiction market is slim and frequently unpaid. Nonetheless, I do believe that if you approached work in Australia with the sort of discipline and hustle outlined by Starve Better, you could grind out enough to live (if, that is, you can bear to rent far from expensive inner-city bohemia, don’t have a partner and children depending on you for income, and can stomach instant coffee).
Perhaps the only point where I genuinely disagreed with Mamatas was his argument that working class writers tend to be attracted to genre fiction while the middle and upper class stick to literature. Sure, literary fiction is undoubtedly more pretentious, but if there are significant numbers of young working class authors writing speculative fiction today, I haven’t seen them. As I’m from a working class background, this is something I’ve actively been looking for.
If anything, genre fiction is undergoing gentrification. Social mobility in the US has been in decline since the late 1970s, inequality has risen, the middle class is shrinking and average earnings for the poor have declined. In all likelihood there are less working class writers now than there were 40 years ago. The picture in Australia is less clear (and I’ll be examining this at length in a separate article) but in the case of the US, the debate around ‘diversity’ in speculative fiction – while long overdue – is sorely lacking a discussion of class.
Given women, people of colour and people living with a disability are overrepresented in poor and working class communities, you would have thought socioeconomic status have been front and centre in the diversity debate. It isn’t. Indeed, the fact it is barely rates a mentioned only illuminates the degree to which middle class privilege dominates the genre.
But I digress. Nick’s comments on class, while amusing and peppered throughout, are not the central theme of Starve Better. The central theme is his refusal to tell you everything is going to be ok as a writer: it isn’t. Yes, you get to do your literary masterpiece or your genre-busting science fiction epic. But you got to do a bunch of shitty stuff as well.
Maybe you’re working class, maybe you’re bohemian and poor, and maybe you’re just serious about going up on the high wire of the writing life without a safety net – if you are in any of these categories, well, let me buy you a beer and tell you about this great book on writing you need to read.
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