SCHLOCK PILE:

Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again (JOSEPH EPSTEIN, September 28, 2002, NY Times)

According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them--and that they should write it. As the author of 14 books, with a 15th to be published next spring, I'd like to use this space to do what I can to discourage them. [...]

Why should so many people think they can write a book, especially at a time when so many people who actually do write books turn out not really to have a book in them--or at least not one that many other people can be made to care about? Something on the order of 80,000 books get published in America every year, most of them not needed, not wanted, not in any way remotely necessary.

I wonder if the reason so many people think they can write a book is that so many third-rate books are published nowadays that, at least viewed from the middle distance, it makes writing a book look fairly easy. After all, how many times has one thought, after finishing a bad novel, "I can do at least as well as that"? And the sad truth is that it may well be that one can. But why add to the schlock pile?

Mr. Epstein is delightfully brutal in the way that only someone who doesn't believe in equality can be. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 29, 2002 10:12 AM