Mark David Major Author Of Mars Rising: aWritersWords
Posted on November 10, 2011 by valentinetti
I’ve had people tell me they are between books, looking for something new to read; a new author, a new genre. There are more writers than ever before: More good writers, more not so good writers. The choices of things to read are enormous. The purpose of interviewing a writer is to give you, the reader, a chance to hear from the writer directly, to hear the writer’s own voice. Mark David Major has written for academia, professional journals, poetry magazines, and newspapers for more than 20 years. Born and raised in St. Louis, he is a graduate of Clemson University and the University of London.
What is your philosophy or writing?
Writers have to recognize there are usually two audiences that need to be addressed. The first audience is, of course, the writers themselves. If you don’t love what you are writing, then how can you expect anyone else to love it, too? And if you don’t love what you are writing and the story you are telling, then really, what is the point? This is universal for all types of writing. The second audience is, of course, the reader. For certain types of writing, addressing this audience is easy whereas for others it is more difficult and fluid. In writing academic, professional or newspaper articles, it is relatively straightforward to understand the audience because you are writing for readers who have a certain level of experience and/or education that can be anticipated or easily augmented by references and so on. By contrast, for poetry there is an audience of only one. Poets can only write for themselves and hope that others will find beauty and meaning in the words that are relevant to them. I’m always amused by poetry magazine submission guidelines that ask you to read the magazine to find out what there are looking for. This has very little to do with good poetry and much more do with selling magazines. In Chicago, they call that ‘pay to play’. Pay to play only leads to the worse kind of homogenized, bland kind of ‘corporate’ poetry. For fiction, a writer has to look at the kind of books and stories that have withstood the test of time. In today’s world of publishing, what is ‘popular’ is too often the result of focus groups and marketing studies. To be a good writer, one has to look to what has been proven over time to be good, what has endured, and not necessarily what is merely popular. The publishing industry is always trying to capitalize on the next-to-before-last big thing. Write for yourself and the ages, and the rest will take care of itself.
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