And I think I need to study fiction craft more. I had some really great essay writing teachers in college (Tessa, the Plummers), but although I took some creative writing classes, I never got a feel for the craft of fiction. I wish I could take your class!

Would you please have these friends of yours send their work into Zarahemla books? Well-written “break the mold” stuff is exactly what that publisher is looking for.

What we need is a better means of distribution, to get those good stories out to the hands of people who are hungry for them, whether they know it or not.

It’s called independent publishing and ebooks, neither of which alternative I have seen approached in LDS Writerland (except once), much less thoughtfully considered.

Do we really not have any Mormon authors who know the craft of writing? Are we all just a bunch of knuckleheads when it comes to placing pen to paper? I feel it is important to examine the whole picture. I personally place the blame for the state of Mormon fiction squarely on Mormon publishers, not Mormon authors.

Think about it. There are a lot of Mormon authors producing a lot of Mormon fiction. They send in their manuscripts, both good and bad, to two, maybe three Mormon publishing companies. These three companies, with their handful of editors, decide what books become ‘Mormon Fiction’. These few editors are the ones who declare what is ‘Mormon fiction’.

But aren’t these books representative of all the manuscripts sent in to publishers? Aren’t these books the best of the best? Absolutely not. I attended a conference where one of the head editors from Deseret Book stood up and said, “We are not interested in publishing good books. We are interested in publishing books that are marketable.” They are a business, and they have to print what sells. It’s hard to take a risk and publish something different, when publishers already know that the standard fare, suspense/romance, sells so well.

All I ask is that you don’t look at the books on the shelves at your local DB or Seagull, and say, “this is the best Mormon authors have to offer.” Because it’s not. What is on the shelf is what sells. What is on the shelf is a safe bet. But I personally know of LDS authors who have written books that broke the mold, books I think are much better than the ’standard fare’ we see. But those authors got rejection letters. They were told they should stick to writing more of the same.

What we need is not good writers. I’m convinced that we have those. What we need is a better means of distribution, to get those good stories out to the hands of people who are hungry for them, whether they know it or not.

Hmmm. Methinks me feels a post coalescing on personal essays.

But for now. At the very beginning of my MFA program I took a class on dramatic writing from a documentary filmmaker. I was kinda disappointed that he was a documentary filmmaker because they just sorta, you know, film stuff and paste it together.

Now, seven years later (oh my gosh, has it really been that long?), in the midst of editing a documentary film of my own, I’m starting to see that making a story from real life is much more difficult than making one from scratch. It took 125 hours of video tape to capture enough of these people’s lives to make a good 1 hour story.

How many times have I thought, “If ONLY I had a scene with THIS in it!” Nope, I can only use what I have.