Uncle Ralph

It's impossible to overstate the impact that Ralph Ellison's legacy has on African American literary writing, and African American male literary writing in particular. Even if there was a hypothetical black male writer who never read Invisible Man in his life, his writing would still be interpreted through the shadow of Ellison. Every black male who publishes a literary fiction novel deals with the promotional mantel of "The Next Ralph Ellison," and has reviews that judge it against the critics' understanding of Ellison's text. That's just the way it is.

It's not that I see Invisible Man as a perfect creation: it takes too long to get out of the south, you don't even get to see Ras's final battle firsthand, and of course there's that ending. But with Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison created the idea of the black intellectual novel. Ralph Ellison is the patriarch of black literary fiction. One of the most enjoyable conversations in my life consisted of Percival Everett and I quoting scenes and characters in Invisible Man back in forth to prove our points as if it was a biblical text.

One of the attractions of the literary life is the chance at immortality, that by creating works that endure, a writer too can endure in the minds of readers long after his or her lifetime. Admittedly, this is a pretty pathetic form of immortality: even if you become a legend you're still dead, and even Shakespeare will one day be dust when the blink of human existence is over. But it's better than just dying, right?

Maybe not. Unfortunately, living on through your work means that your life remains fair game for investigation, analysis and general use in the public discourse. No matter how unflattering or personal your issue or secret, if your a big enough author someday a dusty academic might be pulling out your dirty laundry for all to see. And the deeper and more personal they go, the more that biographer will be heralded. And now it's Ralph Ellison's turn for literary exhumation, in the first major biography of the man since his 1994 death.

Stanford's Arnold Rampersad, an extremely gifted historian best known for his two volume biography of Langston Hughes, has spent the last few years turning his attention to the equally large figure on the prose side of 20th century African American literature. The result of Rampersad's efforts are reviewed here in The New York Times, as well as dissected here in great detail by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als. From both accounts, the image that results of Ralph Ellison the man is largely unflattering: a narcissistic, selfish, philandering snob obsessed with the white elite to the point that it tragically distanced him from his own blackness.

I'm sure the Rampersad book is amazing; I enjoyed his Hughes work. But I don't know is if I'll be able to bring myself to read it. It reminds me of that infamous diss of Martin Amis's last novel: "It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."

And people wonder why writers are always writing memoirs and autobiographies. It's not lesser writers telling our stories that we fear. It's less sympathetic ones.

Terry McMillan on Literary Excellence

“I just think there are some people who try too hard. They just think every sentence has to be perfect. I’m the sort of writer who thinks your first draft is your most honest. You know, get the story out any way you can. You don’t have to think about it. Just write it. Experience it. Don’t worry how pretty it sounds, how lilting it is, and the imagery, and the metaphor, all that. Most readers don’t care. It’s the people in your book that matter. It’s the human element. The emotional response that matters. That’s what I’ve learned.”
-Terry McMillan, published in January's Poets & Writers Magazine

And so the reign of Black literary mediocrity began.

The Best Black Book You Never Heard Of

"Oh, George, never mind the white people," here interposed Mrs. Garie. "Never mind them; tell us about the coloured folks; they are the ones I take the most interest in." -The Garies and Their Friends, by Frank J. Webb

For so long literary success for African Americans was based primary on how well their work met the political and social expectations of the white American reading audience, how well it spoke to white desires and needs. As a result, scores of amazing African American writers were largely ignored because they didn't fit the socio-political requirements of the whites of their era.

No book was more destined for failure during its own era than The Garies and Their Friends, by Frank J. Webb. It wasn't the first African American novel: it was probably the third. The book was published in 1857, a time when African American literature and abolitionist literature were synonymous. Shockingly, instead of writing a story about southern slavery, Webb wrote a pre-Civil War novel that focused on Philadelphia's black middle-class. Rather than criticizing white southerners, Webb instead turned his eye on the deadly violence of racist white northerners.

Most significant, after nearly a century of African American literature being solely a conversation between a black writer and a white audience, Frank J. Webb was the first author to write a book whose intended audience was his own people. The novel's primary message is clear: we must invest in our families, we must build our own communities, and by joining together we can protect ourselves and our interests. Over 125 years later, Bill Cosby would do the same thing with The Cosby Show, and it would still seem innovative.

The Garies and Their Friends is the first book written by a black person, for black people. And that's why you've never heard of it.

To see how clueless Webb's white contemporaries were to what he was doing, read Harriet Beecher Stowe's bizarre preface, where she erroneously declares that The Garies is about southern slavery, that it is basically nonfiction, and (in a stunning act of denial) that the actual historic mob violence in Philadelphia that the book took as inspiration was not the work of racist northerners but instead the result of "Southern influence."

The Black Literary Canon is ours to load. If we remove the white normative gaze, what are we left with? What would a merit based black canon look like? That's what is so exciting about it: there are hidden treasures out there waiting to be discovered. There is a forgotten fortune buried out there that will serve as our inheritance. There are literary ancestors to be discovered. There are histories to be made.

Get the FREE ebook of The Garies and Their Friends here.

Buy the complete collection of Frank J. Webb's writing here.

DISCUSS THIS IN A RELATED FORUM TOPIC HERE.

Debating Black Books

As has been seen over the last couple of months, it is very difficult to engage in a decent debate about differences between highbrow and lowbrow writing, or writing quality at all. Part of this, I have begun to believe, is that many people have not been properly educated in critical thinking, reading, or rhetoric. Many have no real understanding of logic, or that good debate depends on the participants responding to each other's actual points, not to vague concepts of each other’s platforms.

Perhaps most telling, there are many people involved in this debate who clearly don’t know how to read. They skim, gobble down the text and get a basic idea about what something says, but it’s clear that they don’t swallow each sentence one at a time, digesting each careful so as to understand exactly what it is being said. It’s no wonder they see little difference between a poorly constructed manuscript and an expertly crafted one. Unfortunately, this is also what hinders the quality of this debate significantly.

Here are examples of common rhetorical disconnects I have come across in the last three months of this debate.

Money Mania

Criticism: Beginning writers who spend too much time focused on the business of selling books often lose sight of the art, and as a result become unskilled writers.

Response: Yes you can have a successful business selling your own books.

Bizarrely, this response has absolutely nothing to do with the original criticism. In fact, the two statements don’t even contradict each other. This, I would think, is obvious, but the fact that this logical error was repeated by several of the commercial fiction proponents has led me to examine this disconnect.

Here is my theory: the reason this misunderstanding happens is that commercial writers see writing almost entirely through the lens of business, so much so that the words used to describe writing take on a different meaning. Selling books is the commercial writer’s primary goal, therefore an “unskilled writer” is a writer who doesn’t sell books. So when they read the above critical prompt, what they see in their heads is:

Beginning writers who spend too much time focused on the business of selling books often lose sight of the art, and as a result become business failures.

That then is the sentence that they respond to, unaware that their most basic perception has been warped by their entrepreneurial fixation.

Candy is Good for You!

Criticism: While candy might be yummy, it is not nutritious and should not be represented as a meal.

Response: How dare you say my candy isn’t delicious!

This is a classic disconnect, one shared across the board. Notice that the criticism makes no statement about the worth of candy, just the nutritious value (which of course is nonexistent). It does not say that candy is not yummy. It does not say that candy has no value, or a place in this world. But in an community unused to criticism, any critique is considered the equivalent of a dismissal.

Lester Spence has an interesting take on this debate between highbrow and lowbrow art, showing a clip of the battle waging at the National Black Theater Festival, a bi-annual event that highlights the most promising plays in black theater. The controversy swarms around the fact that Tyler Perry, the most commercially successful black figure in theater in generations, has never been invited to this prestigious event.

In my opinion, Tyler Perry is very good at what he does, I would argue even brilliant at it. His work is at times hilarious, surprisingly insightful and creative. And for this, Perry should be highly praised. That said, I don’t think he should be invited to the National Black Theater Festival, which is a highbrow event for more sophisticated theater.

Tyler Perry’s plays are often smart for what they are, but what they are is vaudeville. Their goal is not to innovate in the art form, but to utilize existing story structures to give people something familiar. Their intention is not to go for depth and layered meaning, but to explore the surface. Perry’s plays are not about challenging people to think about the world in new ways, but instead to give them a break so that they can laugh at the world we live in. There is real worth in a good lowbrow vaudevillian play such as the kind that Tyler Perry creates. But that does not mean it is the same degree of worth found in a play that challenges the medium and our very notion of reality, such as the kind of plays once created by August Wilson. However, this world should be big enough for both those visions to exist.

Poopy Throwing Time

Criticism: I believe that good writing should be nuanced, original, and transcendent.

Response: I believe that you are an asshole.

The problem with arguing with the unenlightened is that their first inclination is to respond by flinging the feces scooped from the bottom of their intellectual cages. (Now that’s an insult for you!) Seriously though, this has been a sad re-occurrence in the debate over the last few months. It happens for a lot of reasons: those unused to critical dialogue see criticism as an attack, those just trying to make money are confused with concerns about quality from others whose primary concern is the state of the art form, and there are those who just think that name calling is how you argue. The latter do not always use crass curses, rather instead making personal accusations against the critic's motives (that they seek only to aggrandize themselves, that their criticism indicates insecurity, that they are hateful people, etc.).

The reason this is so detrimental, besides just petty, is that once this happens the debate is over. There is nowhere to go from there, no chance for either side to argue their point. Everything instantly degrades into mudslinging. (Or poop slinging, as the case may be).

For good example, look at the end of the National Black Theater Festival piece, and see the reaction of Malik Yoba to Tyler Perry's omission from the event. He responds in a style more apt to professional wrestling than artistic debate, turning to the camera to stare it down with a melodramatic, theatrical threat. It's hilarious. How does this guy not have a show anymore?

Directions vs. Dictates

Criticism: If you would like to go North, take the road to the left. If you would like to go to the South, take the road to the right.

Response: How dare you tell everyone they have to go North? Everybody doesn’t have to go North, that’s just stupid.

Besides the obnoxious and inflammatory intro I used for my self-publishing critique (which shockingly nobody attacked directly, except me just now), the critique itself is rather tame, I think. It doesn’t tell people they should be a commercial writer or a literary one, it just says that the self-publishing route is a potential dead end for those who want to write sophisticated fiction. To my mind, it is a simple statement of facts about how I arrived where I am as a writer, and how others have ended up with the careers that they have. It is not an order for all else to do the same as I did, whether that's getting an MFA or even writing lit fiction. But again, the response logic of some of the would-be critics got caught up in the absolutes of its own invention.

Why I'm Bothering

Another thing that has come up repeatedly, from emails and other responses, is why I’m even bothering to trying to have a critical dialogue at all. For those that wonder, here is a list of my intentions for this dialogue:

1. To create an understanding of the difference between highbrow and lowbrow art in the African American community, and for an intellectual space for both of them so that they might better co-exist.

2. To make aspiring literary writers aware of the pitfalls between them and their goals.

3. To foster inter-community discussion about the current direction of African American literature.

4. To bring a discussion about quality of writing to the black commercial fiction arena.

5. To turn these resultant discussion into an anthology to be published by my new imprint, Niggerati Manor Productions ($39.95 hardcover). Then to come up with a nationwide speaking tour, charging college campuses another $8-12,000 a pop to have a live debate on their campus (think Carl Webber versus Edward P. Jones). Next, I'll spin that off into a reality show on BET where 10 writers live together, struggling to get published, but one team is commercial and the other literary. We'll kick one off each episode, with the tag line "You're a hack!" This show will of course be hosted by LeVar Burton, the winner being published by Niggerati Manor Productions with us retaining the movie rights (because let's face it, it's all about the movie rights). Then it's just sit back, and let the revenue streams pour in.

Now, dear reader, it's time to test your critical thinking skills. Which of the above statements is false?

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson

Self Publishing Debate, Round Two

A Ms. Shamontiel Vaughn, the author of Change for a Twenty, recently read my article on the artistic pitfalls of self-publishing, and as a writer who has self-published took great exception to it. After emailing me and informing my of her impending rebuttal, she wrote the following response:

Shamontiel Vaughn Rebuttal [back online]

The writing in this piece shows intelligence, and knowledge of her industry. But even more so, it shows the intellectual disconnects between commercial and literary fiction writers: we have dramatically different ideas about what constitutes good writing, we have dramatically different ideas as to what constitutes literary success (entrepreneurial versus artistic), we also differ completely on the central importance of literary criticism (which just isn't done in the commercial world, so is misconstrued by them as personal attack, or "player hating"). We even disagree on that absolutely primal element of all good writing: improvement of the text through extensive editing and revision (many of them see attempts at editing their work as attacks against their original vision). The divide is so great that at times it shows how futile these dialogues can be: we seem to be having two entirely different conversations even when we use the same words. Yet I keep talking, in the hope that these back and forths may still be helpful for beginning writers to see, regardless of what path they choose.

I've been over all this before, but here it goes: I don't think the physical act of self-publishing hurts a writer, just that the hustling involved takes away from time that could be spent developing craft, which is essential to do in the beginning before bad habits set in. I don't think publishing with a major publisher helps or insures the quality of a work in any way, in itself. And I don't give a damn about the business of selling books, or typos. My focus is on originality of prose, storytelling, and thought. I don't think a writer has to write literary fiction—there is a time for popcorn and there is a time for steak—but I don't think the two should be confused, or that burnt stale popcorn is okay. My primary goal is helping those who want to write literary fiction (like the works of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, etc.) avoid modern day publishing pitfalls.

I don't like hurting people's feelings—most of these self-published authors are nice people, just trying to make a success of their lives. I don't even like to hurt Omar's feelings: I just singled him out because of his repeated insistence that his entrepreneurially motivated tomes are actually "classic" literature. But I do care very much about African American literature. I do care about its quality, its future, and the writers who seek to be the next ones to load the cannon. Without honest criticism, none of those things can be properly maintained.

Talking Back

When I first started up this site two months ago, I was hoping to start a dialogue about African American literature, conducted primarily by African American writers, readers and educators. This, to some extent, has already started happening. The interesting thing though is that most of this debate is not happening here, at niggeratimanor.com, but on the various sites and discussion boards that linked to the articles on African American literature I did in November and December.

Some of the responses to these essays are interesting, like this one from Monica Jackson, which deals with issues of writing and taste. I don't agree with much of it, but it's smart and on point. Some responses, including one exceptionally enlightend Okayplayer board discussion, were fruitful as well. I am particularly interested in people's objections to my ideas: some I find informative, some particularly uninformed, some amusing in their absurdity.

Since my schedule didn't allow me time to join into these discussions, let me now respond to some of the sentiments that were common among my critics:

THEM: Saying that you have to read books to write them is elitist.
ME: Yes, it is. Similarly, I feel strongly that only doctors who've studied medicine should practice it, only pilots who've had flight training should fly planes, and only cooks who've eaten food should be cooking. And I only buy albums from musicians who've heard a lot of music before they made their own. But I'm just snobby that way.

THEM: Not everyone needs an MFA.
ME: No, they really don't. The vast majority of great writers didn't have them. But for many like me, it can be of great assistance. It's just one route though, one I related because it was helpful to me. If you want to know how to gain some of the benefits of an MFA without going to one, check here. But let's repeat this together to avoid confusion: no one is saying you have to have an MFA to be a good writer (in fact, I've never heard anyone say that, ever). But you do have to read books. Sorry.

THEM: Not everyone can afford to get an MFA.
ME: True, and neither could I. That is why I paid for the entire thing using the guaranteed federal loans available to all U.S. Citizens, loans I'm still paying back. Please send donations to Mat Johnson's Sallie Mae Student Loan Fund. Phones are standing by.

THEM: Why does he just talk about Black literature, why doesn't he talk about white lit too?
ME: Why must every discussion we have be referenced to this other ethnic group? This is a discussion about African American literature, which is surely worth discussing exclusively from time to time. There are many similarities between what goes on in all of literature, and if you want to discuss those issues there are many sites out there to frequent. African American literature has its own peculiarities, its own context and history, and that is what this discussion is about.

THEM: I'm a commercial writer whose trying to pay my bills, this ain't got nothing to do with me.
ME: From a business standpoint, your market is now being flooded with books you have to compete with. The only way you can make your books stand out is by improving the quality of your work. But more importantly, why would you choose to be inept at your chosen profession?

THEM: He just hates contemporary fiction.
ME: I grew up on Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, V.C. Andrews, Roger Zelazny, and Clive Barker. Today, I enjoy writers like Thomas Harris, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and China Mieville. Walter Mosley crosses all kinds of genres, and I've been enjoying him for years. I love the wave of smart comic book writing from Garth Ennis, Brian K. Vaughn, Reginald Hudlin, and Warren Ellis. Good writing is good writing. I just don't like unimaginative, cliché-ridden writing.

THEM: That's stupid, a lot of published writers started as self-published writers.
ME: Yes, I know. In fact, in black commercial fiction that's nearly become the norm. But the issue here is not what words are on the bottom of a book's spine, but rather what words are inside that book. There are some contemporary writers who started by self-publishing yet have continued to push their craft. A good example of this is Brian Egeston, a writer who has always cared more about developing his talent than cashing in. I've read him over the years and have been inspired by his continued growth as an artist. Read a sample of his most recent novel to see what a self-taught, self-published author can accomplish, and if you like it please support him by buying a copy.

THEM: He says he's an excellent writer.
ME: Actually, I don't. I'm a capable writer, but I don't think any writer is capable of judging whether he or she is "excellent," or "important" or "great." Beware those that tell you they are. There are writers that I do know I am more advanced than. That is not because I'm particularly special, but instead because their writing is of such poor quality.

THEM: He's just player-hating commercial writers.
ME: Trust me, I'm not hating the players, but I am seriously hating the game. I actually like most of these unskilled authors as people, and to be honest find that I have a lot more in common with them caste-wise than many of the lit fiction crew. But I do wish they would stop looking at sales figures long enough to work on improving their writing and editing. I do wish they would demand quality from themselves, and that others in the industry demanded it from them.

THEM: Yeah, give it to them Street Lit people.
ME: Actually, I wasn't even thinking about them; I was thinking about bad writing in general. I do find it amusing to hear the Chick Lit writers complaining about the Street Lit writers the way everybody used to complain about the Chick Lit writers themselves. I wonder whom the Street Lit people will complain about in five years?

THEM: He's just jealous because he's not filling his pockets.
ME: Oddly enough, I actually do okay financially. I'm far from rich, but for the most part I manage to support myself, my wife and my three great kids off of income from writing and the teaching of writing. I've been very fortunate. I don't believe writers shouldn't be compensated, I just think that writers shouldn't become so obsessed with getting paid that their work suffers as a result.

Thank you for your criticism, I do appreciate it.

Best,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Lesson #7: The DIY MFA

You don't need an MFA to be a better writer.

It can help. If you're at really good program, it can help a lot, speeding your growth by years. But it's not necessary. An MFA does not make you a writer, like a medical program makes you a doctor. An MFA is not some magical award that bestows powers on its recipient, real or ceremonial. In fact, the MFA didn't grow in prominence until the 1960s, so if you're a writer without an MFA, you're in really illustrious company.

What a good MFA program can offer you is the following:

1. Curriculum: A regime of reading and writing that can spur literary growth.
2. Mentoring: Access to established writers who can offer you advice and guidance.
3. Peers: The benefit of working with other students who are at the same stage in their development.

While guaranteed federal loans make it possible for virtually anyone to attend even the most expensive of these programs, the realities of people's lives often do not. So a graduate degree is not for everyone, obviously.

That said, not being able to get an MFA is no excuse for being a bad writer.

No, that's not true: it is an excuse, but a lazy one, contrived by lazy writers. It's easier to say, "Some of us couldn't go to school," than it is to say, "Some of us need to get off our butts and start working if we want to be taken seriously." If you are content with being a hack, please read no further. But if you are truly willing to do the work necessary to grow, here is how you can use the MFA model without going to a graduate program.

1. Curriculum
Go get a library card and start reading. Read good books, not just books that make you comfortable. I suggest starting in the past at the literary roots and moving forward to the modern era. This goes for the genre writers as well. If you want to write romances, read Jane Austin. If you want to write horror, read the original Frankenstein. If you aim to write mysteries, go for Poe. It doesn't matter if you like these books : if you don't like them, then learn by figuring out exactly why that is. Take pieces from the parts you do like and move forward. Don't avoid books just because they're written by white people: talent doesn't come color coded.

If you want a structured academic syllabus, search online. Many college professors now have their syllabi on their web pages. Some even include writing exercises. If you just want to look for good books, try one of the many 100 Greatest Books of All Time lists and start making your selections. It is impossible to run out of worthwhile books in this lifetime.

It doesn't matter whether you plan on being a bestseller or a literary sensation, either way you have to know your craft to write well. Writers who don't know their craft are, by definition, hacks. If you want to be more than that, you have to do the work required.

2. Mentors
It is easier to gain access to established writers than you might believe. For casual advice, try going to readings and talking to writers there. Every bookstore nowadays has a reading list, so check your local listings (cliche). While famous authors usually speak to packed houses on a regular basis, the vast majority of lesser known authors (like me!) are ecstatic if they get more than a dozen people in the room. Most of the time we don't. I usually talk for hours with whomever shows up. If you buy me dinner, I'll talk even longer. I like helping people, and it's better than going back to the empty hotel room.

If you want your work critiqued by an established author, try attending workshop seminars. These are available everywhere in America at community colleges, writing conferences, and special writing events. Many are reasonably priced, and some are free. Some cater specifically to black folks, such as the Callaloo Writing Workshop (free), The Hurston/Wright Writers Week, or Cave Canem for you poets out there. I've heard that VONA is quite nice, as well. And there are many, many more non-ethnic writing events to get involved in.

I've personally taught at Callaloo and at the Hurston/Wright, and I've remained in contact with students from both, offering advice when I can, for years afterwards. I'll be at the Hurston/Wright this summer, and if you're in my class I will be happy to help you with your novel.

These workshops are also great places to meet your peers, which will help you with the following:

3. Workshop
Form a writing workshop. Get five or more people to meet regularly and exchange work. Do it in person, but if you can't do that do it on the Internet. Don't make it a support group where everyone tells each other how great they are: be honest, fair, and thorough. Tell each other what is working in their work, and what is not. Push each other along. Suggest texts to each other, or assign them. Start each session with a quick writing exercise. Hold group readings annually to celebrate your progress, and gather others to the fold.

In the end, it's not about the title or the certificate. It's about the work. It's about learning your craft and finding your original voice. It's about listening to the literary conversation so that you can join in on the dialogue. It's about pushing out all of the bad writing in your system so that you can get to the good stuff.

To be a real writer, someone who creates work truly worth reading, takes a tremendous amount of work and years of dedication, regardless of genre or style. Where you choose to do that work, or how you choose to do it, is ultimatley up to you. But not whether you have to do that work or not.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Lesson #6: In Praise of Black Pop Fiction

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Black Commercial Fiction Movement.

In the beginning of black fiction, there was only literature.

That was all that large American publishing houses would publish nationwide. And even in that category it was extremely difficult to get published, because there was a feeling that white America would only buy so many books by black authors each season, and that no black buying audience even existed. So only the very best black authors were published, and it was a given that any fiction published by a black American had literary merit.

Then came The Color Purple. While the book first found an audience among white middle- and upper-class feminists who identified with its depiction of gender politics, as the book gained momentum with first a Pulitzer and then a major motion picture, a black audience formed behind it. A simple novel written at an elementary school reading level (no big words, complicated story or sentence structures), it attracted a whole new, non-traditional reading audience. Suddenly everyday black women, excited to read a book about themselves written in an accessible manner, were buying up the The Color Purple across the country. And once they were finished reading that slim novel, they wanted more.

Into this burgeoning market came Terri McMillan. Smart, astute, and commercially driven, McMillan is rumored to have once told a fellow writer of the Womanist era, "Y'all ladies are good, but I'm not trying to be good. I'm trying to be rich." Waiting to Exhale made McMillan's dream a reality.

In a marked departure from anything on the market before that period, instead of dealing directly or indirectly with issues of white racism, Exhale was set in an insular black world in which white people were little more than an afterthought. Instead of dealing with working-class black life, Exhale's characters were affluent, accomplished, and comfortably middle-class. Instead of being a sophisticated work of literary art with the poetics and weight such as the novels of contemporary Toni Morrison, stylistically McMillan wrote in a simple, motion-by-motion pulp fiction style more like Danielle Steel.

The literary world didn't know what to do with this book: it was smart, but it also had workman-like prose, and was not particularly deep or nuanced. On the one hand, it was clearly a bit of pulp fiction, but on the other hand, it was written by a black person, and almost all mainstream novels by black authors were assumed to have literary merit. McMillan's intended black female audience, however, knew exactly what to do with it: buy it. By 1992, the book had sold 700,000 copies. After a movie was made of the work, those sales creeped up towards 3,000,000. McMillan was rich, and a star. She had not only written a bestseller, she had identified an entirely new audience of black female book buyers that was enthusiastic, armed with cash, and massive.

Hence "Terri's Children" were born. In an effort to cash in on this boom market, publishers started actively seeking the next Terri McMillan, and an entire group of would-be writers stepped up to the plate to give it a shot. Overnight, waves of books with brightly colored, illustrated covers hit the stands, mimicking Exhale's cover. Many of those who still couldn't get published, published themselves, going after that same market. Unable to get into the large chain stores, these self-published writers hand-sold their work at hair salons, churches, and pretty much everywhere that black people congregate. Using these nontraditional methods, these writers were able to sell thousands of books and attract the attention of the mainstream publishing houses, who then snatched them up.

For publishers, it was great deal: each self-published author came to them with a pre-existing audience to take advantage of. Better yet, it was also an audience that had proven that it would buy pretty much anything, no matter how poor the quality. With this group, there was no need to scour the market for the best new writing, then spend a year editing the text, a very expensive process. All the publisher now had to do was find any halfway readable manuscript within the genre, stick a "Terri's Children" style cover on it, and this audience would run to the store with cash in hand. So that's what the publishers did.

In reaction to this commercial wave, an entirely new industry sprouted up overnight. At a time when Barnes & Noble and Borders were effectively closing down small bookstores across America, black bookstores that served this niche commercial market were opening up. In New York, black imprints started popping up at every major publishing house. And the more money this industry made, the more would-be writers came with their books, eager to cash in and be the next big star.

By the time I published Drop in 2000, it had become basically assumed that all black writers wrote Terri McMillan knockoffs. That year, I was introduced at a reading at the Harlem Book Fair with the aside by the MC that, "It's good that brothers are writing books too, because we need to get their take on relationships also." Despite the drop in quality of the black books now being published, the same assumption of literary merit left over from the previous publishing ages was still prevalent, so many acted as if the dominant commercial authors of the modern era were writing on the level of past literary greats (see Lesson #5). This was an opinion shared not just by the writers themselves, or even their readers, but also by some of the editors, agents, bookstore owners, and other industry insiders who were flourishing from the commercial fiction wave.

By the millennium though, nearly a decade after Exhale's success, so many writers had come to McMillan's gravy train that the market was completely oversaturated. Even those writers who found early success in jumping on the bandwagon saw their advances and audiences start to diminish. The market had gone from starving to bloated. Since quality was never an issue, it became nearly impossible for many of them to distinguish themselves amid the now massive crowd. The only thing to do was to look for the next bandwagon. Zane's success as an around-the-way-girl Anais Nin sent many commercial writers in the direction of erotica. The success of Sista Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever proved that "Urban Fiction" or "Ghetto Lit" was the new way to make the big bucks, so a new wave of commercial fiction writers wandered off on that path to the best seller list. For the most part, the groundbreaking era of Terri's Children seemed to be coming to an end.

At the height of this period, I found these commercial books to be trite, cliche-ridden, and unimaginative. Some I found embarrassing, some boring, some unreadable. Occasionally, I came upon a good one in the bunch, but that only made the overall mediocrity of the rest of them stick out even more. Overtime though, with distance, I began to view these writers and their books differently. Sure, the writing in these books was bad, but what I came to realize was that it was never about writing. It was about money. More specifically, it was about class.

At a time when African Americans were moving in record numbers up into the middle-class, the black commercial fiction movement reflected that both in its content and in its very being. Terri's Children never comprised a literary movement: they were part of an entrepreneurial movement. These authors were not really writers: they were small businessmen, looking to identify and serve a consumer base so as to build and maintain wealth. Much like the corporate Hip Hop artists of the same era who rapped about being CEOs and set up their own record labels, many of these writers did the same by setting up their own agencies and publishing imprints.

In the white publishing world, there is a general understanding that there is a difference between commercial and literary fiction, and as such Jackie Collins and Joan Didion should not be judged on the same merits. In the black American publishing world, in part because of our general aversion to any form of criticism, that line has been considerably blurred, and often willfully ignored. This has not only done a disservice to the African American literary canon which has been repeatedly defamed by those who would seek to lower its standards, it has also been unfair to those commercial fiction writers who have succeeded on their own terms, and not been given their just due for that accomplishment.

Judge solely as an entrepreneurial movement, the era of Terri's Children was a very successful and historic one. In a largely stagnant and dying medium, Terri's Children managed to create a new audience where others said none existed. Instead of relying on mainstream publishing's lackluster business model, they created their own, promoting it creatively and teaching the entire publishing industry about how to build an audience for books in the modern world. Terri and her Children effectively proved that black Americans will buy books, books about black people and dealing with issues important to black people, if given the chance to. Most importantly, they proved that we as African Americans can support our own literary world, and that we don't need to pander to a larger white audience in order to be successful.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Lesson #5: The Difference Between Commercial and Literary Fiction

Or: Why I No Longer Go to the Harlem Book Fair.

A couple of years ago, there was a panel at the Harlem Book Fair called "Black Male Writers: Continuing the Legacy of Ellison, Baldwin and Wright, or Just Hanging on the Coattails of the Sistahs?" With a title like that, there was really no chance it wasn't going to be an hour and half of pure stupid, and of course it was. The guests (and I don't blame them for the title) were E. Lynn Harris, Brian Keith Jackson, Kenji Jasper, Nelson George, and Omar Tyree. I showed up a bit late, scammed my way into the already full hall, and caught the tail end.

Omar spent the majority of the time trying to talk over everybody else on the panel, talking about how his books were "new American Classics," bragging that he took one month to write them and eleven to promote them, and pushing his new book imprint and other snake oil products. An audience member indignantly wanted to know why the "so-called" literary writers didn't go on tour constantly like the more commercial ones did (implying they were uppity), and Brian responded that the goal of the literary writers was to make money off academic speaking engagements, endowed chairs and college reading lists.

The panel ended with Nelson George saying to the room jokingly, "There's no difference between commercial and literary fiction, because Sumner Redstone gets paid from it either way."

Now, I like Brian, and I think he was angling his answer so that the audience member could understand how the lit fiction writer manages a livelihood. And I have an immense amount of respect for Nelson George: Buppies, B-Boys, Baps and Bohos was like a bible to me, and I was heavily influenced by his concept of post-soul culture. But let us be intellectually honest about this topic, if only to honor the legacies of the literary giants mentioned. Or, to use the vernacular popular fiction is so fond of, All y'all need to stop lying.

The truth:

The purpose of commercial fiction is to write a bestselling novel.

The purpose of literary fiction is to write truth.

Why are these two intents so different? Because you don't give people truth if your goal is to get money from them. If you want to cash in, you tell them what you think they want to hear, what will entertain them, what will confirm their views of the world. You try not to piss them off, avoid anything too difficult or uncomfortable that will make them turn away. You don't try to do something new, you just try to do a new version of a proven seller.

In literary fiction, you say what you want to say. You don't think about the market, or at least not while you're writing. You hope that if what you do is good, that that will be enough to find it some kind of audience. Therefor, instead of focusing on publication and marketing, you focus on trying to become a better writer.

Now, if you want to be a bestseller, you go for it. But if you make it, don't then start trying to front like you're a literary writer, trying to lower the standards of the canon so you can fit your work in. Just be happy with the bed you made, the hefty advances, the huge print runs, the mass appeal.

On the other side, you literary writers, you get the prestige, the respect, the nice reviews and the chance that your work will be read by generations to come. So stop whinging about how nobody reads your books, or about how small your advances are. What the hell did you expect? If you want to support yourself, get a job. And die happy that you've tried to put truth on the page, a reward in itself.

Best,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Lesson #4: Black Lit is for White People

In one of the comment sections on another piece, a librarian made the astute point that she found it difficult to get her younger readers to look past the works of "Omar Tyree, Eric Jerome Dickey, Zane etc." towards more literary fiction. The reason? This pop fiction is set primarily in the present, while African American literary fiction is usually set in slavery, or elsewhere in the historic past. That's a really interesting hypothesis, so let's test it out.

A literary novel's success is not judged by sales, but by critical praise. There is no higher praise, of course, than the literary award, which makes writers into literary stars. Therefore, a closer look at the four major American literary prizes over the last 25 years will give us a good cross-section of the most successful African American literary novels. They are as follows:

Pulitzer Prize
2003 Known World by Edward P. Jones
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker

PEN/Faulkner Award
1991 Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
1984 Sent for You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman
1982 The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

National Book Award
1990 Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

National Book Critic's Circle Award
2003 Known World by Edward P. Jones
1993 A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

Surprise. Our librarian is right: all but one of these books is set in the historical past. More specifically, Beloved, The Chaneysville Incident, Know World and Middle Passage are all set in part during the slave era. The Color Purple, Sent for You Yesterday and A Lesson Before Dying are set in the earlier 20th Century. Only Philadelphia Fire is set in the modern era. Four out of eight of these books are set in part during slavery, or 50%. Six out of seven are set in the past, or 88%.

Stunning, right? We all live in the contemporary era, and of course many a fine and brilliant novel has been written in the present. In fact, I would guess that most literary fiction is probably set in the present. So what's up with the Lords of the Niggerati? Why do we set almost everything in the past, then?

Well, we don't. While there are many great African American historical novels, there are also many fantastic African American novels set in the contemporary era as well. Books that have nothing to do with slavery, don't focus on white racism as the center of their narratives, and deal with the myriad of other ideas and experiences our people have in this country. You just never hear about them: they don't get big awards, they don't get reviewed by major papers, and their authors, people like Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett and Gayl Jones, write for decades in relative obscurity.

Why? Well, because the judges who sit on these award panels, the critics who write the reviews, the gatekeepers of the world of literary fiction, are almost entirely white. And white people have quietly decided that what black people should be writing about is racism. Or more specifically, white racism. Or even more specifically, on effects that white people have had on African American culture. That's right, they like it when we talk about them.

Part of this is historic: the black prose tradition starts with the slave narrative, which was a central tool of the abolitionist movement. It morphed into the novel with the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the success of which inspired black authors to use fiction as a protest tool as well. The protest novel has a strong tradition, finding its way to Richard Wright and beyond. Native Son, of course, is written for white people, to show them the error of their racist ways. For much of the 20th century, white America looked to black writers to hold a mirror to white culture. Much like a slave master would use his house slave to hold up his mirror while that master shaves.

It's not all racist, in part it is just human nature: people like reading about themselves. White people love reading about white people, even if the text is an admonishment. In fact, literary whites love that even more. For every defiant brother thinking he's sticking it to the man with his novel about white racism, somewhere there is a white liberal reading it in masturbatory glee as he basks the masochistic nature of it all.

Black writers who write good books about the internal black world, or whatever esoteric interest attracts their attention, are usually ignored by the predominantly white literary establishment. On the other hand, black writers who write good books about slavery or white racism in general are rewarded greatly. They're often given awards, fellowships, national critical attention, and heralded.

Now, if your book sucks, focusing it on slavery or the effects of white racism ain't going to help. But if it's a really good book about white racism then the literary establishment is prepared to whisk you through the velvet ropes to the Literati's Champagne Room. And they're serving rave reviews in there, awards and fellowships too.

Case Study: Edward P. Jones. Ed Jones is a brilliant writer, the kind a generation is lucky if it gets. Now Ed's first book, Lost in the City, was a collection set in contemporary Washington D.C. It was also superb, and rightly so it won the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Lannan Foundation Grant. Based on the number of awardees and total past grant amount, it seems that the average grant for the Lannan is $68,000. These are impressive honors that anyone would be proud to receive, but they are not really star makers in themselves. For the next seven years, Ed worked as a proofreader at a tax magazine, living in obscurity. Then, in 2003, he came out with Known World, which is set in the slave era and features a black slave owner. While not (in my opinion) better than his last book, Known World was rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize, and Ed Jones was promptly (and deservedly) given the MacArthur Award. The Pulitzer is America's biggest prize. The MacArthur pays $500,000.

Now, this is certainly not to dismiss these books or their authors in any way. It's also not to say we shouldn't write about the past, white racism, or slavery (by the way, I have a slavery book coming out this February, and you really should buy it). But it does raise serious issues about the ongoing affect of white patronage on African American literature.

By contrast, the commercial fiction people are writing books for black people. That is their intended audience, that's whose needs they are trying to cater to. Most of them don't know a damn thing about writing itself, but they do know who they're writing for. The result is we have vastly different topics discussed in African American literary versus contemporary fiction. Instead of countless stories about slavery and racism, black commercial fiction is concerned with relationship issues, the pursuit of the middle-class dream, and inner city violence. In other words, what the majority of black Americans actually care about. It could be argued then, from a nationalist standpoint, that African American commercial fiction is the true African American Literature. (Although I myself wouldn't go that far.)

So what is literary fiction to do about the distorting effects of the white normative gaze? Simple. That is why the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards are so important. In contrast to the big white awards, here are the Legacy picks for the fiction prize for the past five years:

2006 My Jim by Nancy Rawles
2005 Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? by Maryse Conde
2004 Hunting in Harlem by Mat Johnson [editor's note: I heard this one is really good]
2003 The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda
2002 Erasure by Percival Everett

What is the percentage of books dealing centrally with slavery and/or set primarily in our a racially charged past? One out of five, or 20%. Now, doesn't that sound more like right?

For African American Literature to realize its potential we need more black critics, black awards, and black grants. Ironically, that will ensure that we will be judged not by our race, but solely on the quality of our work. Only then will able to choose our own black literary heroes.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

PS-
A note on those non-slavery books that won the Pulitzer, PEN/Faulkner, and National Book awards, so as not to exclude them from this critique. A Lesson Before Dying dealt in part with white racism as well, just not during slavery. The Color Purple was initially made a bestseller by a white feminist audience (Alice Walker wrote for Ms. Magazine at the time), finding a black audience after white folks made it famous. And only John Edgar Wideman's work neither catered to a predominantly white audience nor dealt with racism as its central topic. How then, you ask, did Wideman manage to win not only one but three major prizes by breaking the mold? Simple: he is that fucking good.

Lesson #3: How Self-Publishing is Ruining a Generation of Black Writers

Or:

Why I Am a Much Better Writer Than Omar Tyree. And Why Omar Tyree Is a Much Better Business Man Than I Am.


In 1994, I came back to Philly after a year traveling through Europe and Africa as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. It was a far from triumphant return: I was heartbroken about leaving a London that I adored, had just ended a disastrous eight-month relationship, and had nothing lined up for my future. I landed back in Philly broke and depressed, and went from continent jumping to working as an underpaid temp at the electric company.

My sole plan for salvation during this time, for rescue, was to write a novel, then use the money from its sale to return back to my former life in Brixton, the one I was forced to leave behind. I had never written a novel before, nor published anything else. I wasn't intending on writing anything too edgy, just something commercial enough to get me one of those phat publishing advances I'd been reading about. My intended novel would have a lot of hip hop, some violence, sex, all the stuff that sells. Nothing too demeaning: something like the movie Juice, but as a book.

For the entire year, I worked on this project. I obsessed over it. I worked on it at breaks at work. I became depressed if I wasn't producing on it, and obsessed over page counts as if the day I wrote page 200 I would magically be beamed back to my old life in South London.

Still, despite my desperation, the more I wrote, the more I remembered how much I loved literature. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to be a real writer and not just a cynical profiteer. So about halfway in, I started trying to write something that was actually good. That wasn't false stereotypes and cliches, bullshit archetypes and slang. I started to try and write something that reflected my reality, comprised of real emotion and honesty.

Eager to get it moving, after I reached page 200 I had the thing bound at Kinkos and sent to the literary agent of a friend of mine. After that day, whenever I left the house I checked my voicemail obsessively, waiting for the call from the agent that would serve as my reprieve. Finally, I did get a call. The agent wanted to talk.

I went up to NYC on the Amtrak from Philly, so eager that I showed up at the agent's office a half hour early. Then the agent and I went out to lunch at a fancy restaurant in the Village. Mariah Carey and Tommy Motolla were at the next table, not talking to each other. They were divorced a month later, I think.

There at the table, in a rushed aside, the agent told me:

"Half of the writing in your book is really good, fantastic. But the other half is just horrible. Just complete shit."

"I totally agree. I know that now. That's why I'm going to go back and rewrite that first half completely and-"

"What? No, no. That first half is great: really gritty, really urban. It's the second half that's horrible. It's dull pretentious crap. That's what needs to be changed."

I was heart broken. My dreams of a major publisher seemed squashed. Not wanting to be a literary coon, I ignored the agent's advice. I worked even harder to try and make the manuscript the way I wanted it. I called the book White Chocolate Melts: I tell you that because I think that sums up just how fucking awful the thing was. It was hopeless. I learned a lot about being a writer when I finished trying to edit the thing, but no agent was interested in that book, let alone a major publisher. With my options running out, I walked away from it.

What I realized though, in the months ahead, was that the agent had been right: I was good enough to write shitty commercial pulp, but I didn't have the skills to write a serious work of literature. To get those skills, I applied to an MFA and began my own program of reading and writing. I started the long, still ongoing process of trying to grow as a writer.

For the next four years, my energy went into pushing my craft, raising my skill level, and generally becoming a good enough writer that mainstream publishing had to open its doors for me. The result was I become a much stronger writer, and eventually sold a novel to a major house.

Now, all this first happened in '95. The self-publishing craze was in its infancy, with writers like Omar Tyree just starting to make noise as they found success first as self-published authors. The World Wide Web had barely happened, and self-publishing sites like iUniverse didn't exist yet, let alone the print-on-demand technology that was just around the corner. If I had hit my wall just three, or even two years later, all of those self-publishing options would have been available to me. As desperate as I was, I don't know if I would have said no to the idea. I don't think I would have known to. At the time I was working on that book, I actually considered it good enough to be published. I might have jumped at any opportunity not to take "No" for an answer.

If I had chosen to self-publish, that four years would have been spent on learning book marketing, promotion, publicity, audience identification, and all of the other many aspects of the publishing world. My time would have been spent traveling around with boxes of books in the back of my car, hand selling the thing to black bookstores and barbershops and churches, attending every cheesy promotional event I could find just to get White Chocolate Melts out there, no matter how flawed it was. I would have created press packets and done mailings and been out there schmoozing, trying to sneak my way onto every local TV and radio station I could find.

And at the end of that four years, I would probably have several books, having written them in a month or two to expand my product line. And with no real time for craft and my attention completely focused on the market, each would have sucked roughly as much as the first one. Having spent the bulk of my energy on the commerce instead of the art, I would have remained the same shitty writer I was when I started. The moment I chose to self-publish, I would have ceased to make substantial growth. I would have virtually calcified.

This might sound like conjecture, but it's not. I say this because I saw a generation of black writers fall into this trap, authors that could have been original voices that added to the canon, who instead became literary canon fodder. They went pop, blew up, and then almost instantly started vanishing, their worth dwindling with their sales.

Sadly, instead of working actively on getting better, many of this crew instead try to falsely justify the merit of their work. Just like it was impossible in the early 80s to find a disco band that admitted being a disco band, it is rare to find a black commericial writer that will admit that they are a commercial writer. Instead, they often try to argue that their work represents the best of African American literature, on par with Ellison, Baldwin and Morrison. It would be funny, if it wasn't so sad. And so insulting to those writers they claim to emulate.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Next Up:
Lesson #4: How the Black Commercial Fiction Boom Can Save American Publishing

Dear Black Commercial Fiction Writer, You Suck! (But I'm here to help.) Lesson #2: Water Torture

How I Know You Suck, Why You Suck, and How You Can Get Better

Let me say first that there are some truly gifted, stunning commercial writers out there with work well worth indulging in. And that also there is an overwhelming supply of boring, self-indulgent, derivative literary writers out there to avoid at all costs. This series is aimed specifically at my brethren on the literary chitterlings circuit that has evolved over the last fifteen years: Terri's children, Zane's hoes, and most recently the bastard CHUDs of Donald Goines. The vast majority of these folks I've found to be very nice people, but also very bad writers. Yes, I'm talking about you. Now that our first lesson has temporarily removed the dollar signs from your eyes, let us discuss craft.

THE WATER METHOD.
True story: When I was about 10, my cousin Alex and I both went to his kitchen with the expressed intent of retrieving a glass of water. Once we got there, however, I went to the sink, and he went to a jug of spring water on the counter. My cousin Alex was more middle-class than I, and when he saw that I was drinking Philly tap water he saw fit to mock me. I, in response, told him that he was a stuck-up punk, and that water was water. There was no difference between tap and spring. To prove how silly he was, I devised a test.

Taking two identical cobalt blue drinking glasses, I filled one with tap water and one with bottled spring water, and then had Alex enter the room and try to identify the spring water. The glasses looked identical, and tasted identical to me: like water, nothing more. The first time, the spring water was on the left, and Alex walked in and choose the left. The next time, the spring water was on the right, and Alex came in and picked the one on the right. Again and again, much to my confusion, he got it right. I thought he was cheating, so sent him further and further away, but every time he came back he knew instantly which sample was which. I began to suspect that Alex had tapped into to some mutant physic power, but besides that I had no explanation.

Later that week, my mother's friend told us about a natural spring that ran about an hour north in the mountains where one could bottle for free, so we took a day trip there. Filling up a dozen gallon jugs, we brought back enough spring water for a month. And then, I began to drink it.

A few weeks later I went back to my cousins' house. Again, Alex and I went to the kitchen for a glass of water and again, this time just to be defiant, I went for the tap. It was the first time I had sipped Philly tap water in almost a month. I put it to my lips, and what I tasted was shit. Pickled shit, with floride thrown in on top. It was utterly undrinkable; I had to swallow a glass of spring water just to wipe the funk out of my mouth.

Today, I get the same feeling when I read a lot of the crap that lines the shelves of the fiction section in our black bookstores. Don't get me wrong, I don't read the whole books. But I don't have to. After a diet of good literature, I can see everything that is wrong with them just by reading their first paragraphs. Your first paragraph is the welcome mat to your text, it's where you try to seduce the reader to go further, where you strut your best stuff and hope they choose to come inside. If that first bite is stale, it's not like the rest of your bread is going to be any better. And it's not. And that's not because you're stupid, or are devoid of talent. It's because you know so little about literature that you don't have any idea what's good and what's bad, what's new and what's worn out. And you can always change that. Here's how:

READ. READ. READ.
Writing, art in general, is about bringing something new, something different. Otherwise, what's the point? (If you said to make money, repeat Lesson #1.) Innovation is the key. This is true of all types of writing: that is why Terri McMillan was memorable, and most of her offspring were not. That is why Donald Goines was the shit, and most of his literary offspring are just plain fecal. But how can you do something new if you don't even know what's already been done? Literature is a conversation. You ever try to join in on a lively conversation without having an understanding of what the others have been talking about? You repeat things they already discussed, bring up points they already discredited, and generally throw off the rhythm. Awkward, right? Yup. Just like your prose.

Most of the writers on the black commercial scene don't read. When asked about who they do read, they recite the names Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, or Toni Morrison, but never anyone who isn't taught in the high school curriculum. There are a ton of fantastic, gifted writers just within the African American dialogue to choose from (let alone beyond it), but you never hear them say they read Ishmael Reed or Gayl Jones, and they're just the living writers. I don't think they even know who Wallace Thurman or Nella Larsen, Ann Petry or Chester Himes are. This is because they haven't read anything since high school, or at least nothing worth bragging about. Most of the black commercial fiction writers are primarily entrepreneurs, with college degrees in pragmatic things like engineering and marketing, but with absolutely no education in literature. When they discuss writing, they have no idea what they're talking about historically, critically, or practically. They can speak English and type, but that's about it.

Read good books and figure out why they are good. Read bad books to figure out why they are bad. Don't try to simply copy something, but instead try to see what pieces you can take to build something new. Something that nobody's seen before.

I know this goes against your very business nature. In the business world, creating a potentially lucrative product is about identifying an audience, and trying to meet an already expressed demand. In that arena, everybody wants to be second: the second in line to cash in on a proven success. Hence, Terri's kids started trying to do copies of her work to sell to the audience she created. The focus was not on innovation, rather on repetition. But this is why, by and large, the books themselves weren't that good. And why they are already being forgotten, their sales steadily diminishing as the next genre fad is jumped on.

KILL THE CLICHES.
All good authors know that writing is the fight against cliche: whether in language or ideas. Please declare war, already. Many commercial writers are so clueless to this basic reality that they even use cliches for titles (with a little ebonics thrown in for good measure). Comb your writing of well-worn catch phrases, worn out imagery, and mundane, unchallenged thought. Replace all those with new, original, honest descriptions and takes on reality. That's all you have to do. Give your work its own vision.

FLIP IT UP.
The benefit of reading books is the language, particularly in this age of movies and television. If the language is not special, what is the point of reading? I love watching TV, now with my iPod I can watch it anywhere I go. If you're not going to dance for me, I'm going to watch Lost reruns instead. So learn to get some rhythm to your prose: we have a jazz heritage, you're welcome to use it. Stop giving pages and pages of pure motion-to-motion description so that your books read like a script: "Lorenzo walked in the door. He turned on the TV. He wondered where Kim was. Maybe he would call her..." Go on a riff, a tangent, whether in prose or subject. Watch your word repetitions, try not to let the same word echo in a paragraph. Once you've learned the rules, bend them. Stop trying to plow through to the ending so you can get your next product on the shelves, and enjoy yourself.

PUSH YOURSELF FURTHER.
Let's take this from our history: as a people we have had to push ourselves further, harder, than others around us. Please take this ethic to your writing. The fact that you wrote 300 pages doesn't mean your words are worth the paper they're printed on. There is a difference between writing and typing. Stop thinking that just because you sold 10,000 books in three months, that you're a good writer. That doesn't make you a good writer, that makes you a good salesman. Edit. Edit again. Push yourself further. Anyone can improve. Just look at me. I used to suck really really bad. Now, after years of dedication and hard work, I don't suck nearly as much as used to.

Sincerely,
Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Up Next:

"Lesson #3: How Self-Publishing is Ruining a Generation of Black Writers"

or

"How I Almost Became a Bad Black Writer"

Dear Black Commercial Fiction Writer, You Suck! (But I'm here to help.) Lesson #1

The following is the first of a series of pieces I will be doing over the next few weeks.

Forget About the Money

When I sold Drop, I was paid $50,000. You heard me, $50,000!!! Just for writing some words on a page. Sounds like a lot, right? And it is, probably more than I deserved. I was officially one of the very few lucky ones, those of us who get financially rewarded for doing what we would do for free. But an advance is just gross profit, to see how much I really made we have to do some subtractions to get to the net.

First, my agent gets 15% percent, even before I see it. That's okay, she's worth it, and more than pays for herself. So we're really starting with $42,500. Then, there's taxes. Let's be generous and say I only got hit with another 15% (I have a good CPA), so now we're down to $36,125. Still, not too bad. Now we have to figure out how long it took me to write the book. Drop was literary fiction, which takes a lot of time because it's written on inspiration, which means it can't be cranked out. It's okay though, because I wrote Drop in two and a half years, from inception to final edit, so that's pretty quick. So now we have to subtract our earnings by half, to $14,450. Uh oh.

Now, to get good enough that I could write something anyone would pay for, I went to Columbia's MFA in Writing, which didn't give out full scholarships. So to attend, in addition to working two jobs the whole time, I went roughly -$47,000 in the hole in student loans. Maybe I could have grown sufficiently as a writer without this experience, but it certainly would have taken me a few years longer. So after selling Drop, I was still basically bankrupt (as a corporate entity, that is).

Now I have to subtract for those two years of beginning writing I needed to do to get good enough to attend Columbia's School of the Arts. That brings my yearly wage down to $8,027.77.

That's right, $8,027.77. Fiscally, I would have done a lot better if I had just kept temping at the electric company. I made $6.33 there.

So, for Drop, I made eight thousand a year in salary, and went fifty thousand dollars in debt. So I bought some nice socks after I cashed the check, paid off all the family members I'd hit up during that time, went back for the visit to London I'd been dreaming about, then put the rest of the money towards writing the next one, Hunting in Harlem (which wasn't enough; by the time Drop hit the stores, I was broke).

So what do I have for my efforts? I have a book that I'm proud of, that shows my truth on the page. I have the accomplishment. I have the people who contact me and tell me they enjoyed something about it, that it validated them or made them see life a little differently. I don't know where the hell those socks I bought are anymore, but my book is right up there on the shelf, and in the minds of everyone who reads it. In the end, that's what it's all about.

Now, if I had written a cynical piece of market-driven crap in less time for more money, my bottom line would have been a bit better. Regardless of this fact, there is always a day when that money runs out. And when it did, then what would I have? Shit, I think is the answer.

Yours Truly,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

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Black Writer Complains of Being Ignored

No, it’s not me. It’s this guy. Langston Hughes knows rivers, and Alvin Aubert knows that the Norton Anthology of African American Literature screwed him over:

Your new compendium was touted as the big one and this is definitely not about sour grapes—its [sic] too far gone for that anyhow seeing as how the damned thing's already out; all the same, why in hell didn't any of you see fit to include anything of mine in your landmark new canon-making omnibus; could it be you just don't know how damned good I can be or that I even exist?

I have never read a word cuz has written before today, but if his poetry is anything like this letter, he officially has a new No.1 fan.

I don’t know what I love more: that he is openly indignant about his failure to appear in the Norton Anthology, or that he can’t believe that they’ve never heard of him or didn’t consider him important enough.

I understand. When you work your whole life on a body of work, you want that work appreciated, saved for future generations. Not getting into the Norton is like not making it onto Noah’s ark.

Of course, the typos that infest this thing are an argument against his inclusion in itself. A winning argument. That said, dude has a real voice. I mean, every time I read this I can’t help but I read it out loud, while doing an impression of Redd Foxx.

Alvin Aubert, you are a Lord of the Niggerati!