Here it is everyone! A special thank you to author M. Clifford for taking the time to write up a post just for us. Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts!
Most of the time when people read my novel, THE BOOK (www.dontreadthebook.com) , they come away proud of the passion they always had inside for the written word and for storytelling. Some people close the novel with a fresh desire to read more paperbacks or to buy their books from used bookstores and sign the inside cover so that someone will always know that they owned that book and loved those pages. A lot of people ask me what my intentions were in writing THE BOOK and there are many. To follow through on my promise to give you a unique guest blog post, I'll touch on the one motivation I haven't discussed very much — the redemption of the storyteller. In my novel, I definitely glorify story and the ability to read it freely from an honest source. Reading is a private and very personal act. Authors are who they are because they love telling stories. Creating an arc and then another arc and then another until they reached the end of a much larger one that began somewhere in the beginning. I'm an intentionally self-published independent author. I've never sought representation from a major publishing house or even attempted to get an agent beyond a few query letters six years back. I'm sort of a rare breed in that I am passionately supportive of the indie author and I encourage them to get their work read, edited and uploaded so that story-lovers can keep finding things to read. Not everyone is a storyteller, even when they've written a book, and that's sort of the negative element to the benefit of being able to self-publish. Stay with me because I'll loop this back to the beginning and it'll all makes sense in a minute. I have often read books that are waiting for me to open them the moment I enter a bookstore. Stacks upon stacks of shiny covers waiting. I know hundreds of thousands have been printed and I almost feel a responsibility to take one for that fact alone. And then, when I get home and start reading, I have felt by chapter four that I've already listened to four different voices. Three other people have written a few sentences here and a paragraph there. I'm sure of it. Although publishing houses do a good service for the written word by printing and distributing and marketing high-quality stories, they are a still a business. A for-profit business. They will alter a story if need be, or convince an author to do so, simply to sell more copies. I wouldn't be surprised if there are authors today that, after submitting their work, get a reply like, "Solid book, but please make all your characters vampires. Send it back and we've got a deal!" That is obviously an outrageous, dramatic example. My point is that altering an original work is akin to someone being interrupted during the telling of a campfire story. I included a similar scene in my book, sans interruption. Campfire storytelling is a wonderful pastime where novels begin and the mind of the creative person is sparked toward a future in writing. The desire to tantalize and entice people around them, to get them to the edge of their log as they wait to find out where the man with the hook on his arm is hiding. Now picture this budding author telling his story, only to be interrupted by someone else at camp who thinks everyone needs to know that "one of the characters was also a vampire. Okay... go ahead now. Finish the story." Even though plenty of readers could find that to be more beneficial to the story, I think it is important for readers to know that when they buy a book from a bookstore, or from someone that isn't an independent author, they may not be getting a single story. They are getting one that has been edited with scissors and tape and red pen from multiple handwriting styles suggesting alternate story lines, characters, etc. When you read THE BOOK, it is 100% mine. Every idea is mine and every line is mine (other than what I reference from classic and contemporary literature) because no one has the ability to control my writing. Although this was not my main motivation, not even in the top 10, I do think it is important as we move into this new age of digital reading to discuss the future of publication. I would be lying if part of me wasn't afraid for the authors who have written stories that other people control. Who's to say that on the 50th anniversary of THE SHINING by Stephen King, the sales department at the publishing house will not only create a new cover, but alter the story to explain that the reason the main character went crazy and attacked his family was because of a full moon and that he was actually a werewolf or something. Sure it sounds interesting when you hear the idea, but Stephen King may not be alive when that happens, which means that he would be unable to defend the characters he created. Is that really fair to do that to him or his characters? In a sense, the publishing house owns those characters... so...
We see a lot of this today with Quirk Classics and their new release of Android Karenina. I'm not opposed to taking old stories and putting a new twist on them, I think it's really smart. I hope to dabble in that at some point in my future. It's fun and it's creative, but it only illustrates my point further. How destroyed would Jane Austen be to known that her characters were mangled and reformed into something comedic and disgusting? To know that the lines that she cried over, that mixed with the ink of her pen, were now spliced with a graphic image of a zombie tearing into the fleshy neck of some matriarch from a rich family while she's reading quietly in her stately home. The difficult thing is that there is not an easy answer for this question. That's why a lot of people have enjoyed discussing THE BOOK after buying it, because I ask a lot of unanswerable questions. Do we treat these books as just a collection of words? One after the other, after the other and the other, until there are enough pages to be clasped together and wrapped with a hard linen binding? Or are they unique works of art that must remain perfectly intact, structurally sound, exactly as the artist intended? Does it make it okay to chop it up and change it simply because enough time has passed? Maybe. It's a good discussion to have. What is great is that my book is gaining attention during the advent of popularity with these mash-up novels. I think that in ten or twenty years we'll really see how people go about augmenting this idea further. Here's the real truth in the matter: the moment you edit or add to an original manuscript, a line is crossed. Again, I'm not saying crossing that line is bad. But it is crossed and respect must still be given to the original. How far then do we walk past the line before it is too hard to get back? And, by then, when we reach the point of no return, will people even care? As an author, I know I would be devastated to hear that a hundred years from now someone could take my characters and change them any way they pleased, simply to make a profit. Those characters are pieces of me and I love them, as any author would. I poured my soul into them. But, in the same breath, although I would not agree with the actions of someone disfiguring my work, I'll fight to the death their freedom to do so. And maybe therein lies the real question — How much of this is an expression of freedom, and how much is a defacement of public property? The reader must decide, because it's not stopping anytime soon. M. Clifford