My writing friend Wendell had some disturbing news. He is pleased to deliver disturbing news. He’s that kind of writer. And friend.
“No one likes you,” he said. He sat, throwing down his notebook and pencil.
“Sure they do,” I replied. I am used to Wendell’s pokes and prods. Usually he just wants to poke and prod. “I am liked.”
“But not well-liked.”
“That’s Willy Loman.”
“Willy who?”
“From Death of a Salesman.”
Wendell does not enjoy being one-upped. “Of course,” he said. “I remember now.”
No he didn’t. Wendell writes sci-fi. His reading is almost exclusively sci-fi, and very little else. Nothing wrong with that. If your goal is to write sci-fi, the more you read the better. I assume.
I don’t read sci-fi, so I can only assume.
We sat in my ‘office’. This is one of a half-dozen small rooms provided by our local public library, free to the public, where one can read, write, or just sit and think. God bless the library. Wendell had been sitting in his own ‘office’. Easily bored, he wandered about until he found me.
I wanted to get back to work. “So what if I’m not well-liked,” I said. “Go find someone who is.”
“Oh, I like you fine. I’m talking about others.”
“What others?”
“Publishers.”
Now he had my attention. “What about them?”
“They don’t like you.”
“I write pretty good.”
“Pretty well. And it’s not your writing they don’t like. They don’t like you.”
What are we, in high school? I asked Wendell to be specific, and he was. First, he said, I was from the Midwest. And not even a city like Chicago. But truly the Midwest, with church steeples, corn, and cows. And you know what that means.
“What?”
“Trump.”
“For Pete’s sake, I don’t support Trump.”
“That’s not what they think in New York. And New York is where all the publishing decisions are made. They see you playing a banjo and attending Trump rallies, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Also, they don’t like your name.”
“What’s wrong with my name?”
“Irish. Catholic. Male. That doesn’t sound too good.”
“Too well.” I was disgusted. “It sounds a lot like discrimination.”
“Maybe. But they want the flavor-of-the-month. And right now that’s everything you’re not.”
“How about excellent writing? What about that?”
Wendell sighed and looked at the ceiling. Any argument with me eventually arrives at the same place. He is dealing with a child. He asked me to think about the competition. The big market fiction writers. The best sellers. I am a voracious reader of new releases. Were any of these well written, he asked?
Point taken.
There is a simple fix, he said. “Move to New York. Change your name to Kardashian. And become a fire-breathing liberal.”
“How good will that work?”
“How well? Not very. But at least,” he stood and picked up his notebook, “you’ll be liked.” He walked out, closing the door gently.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com