Ever notice how insecure comedians are? They stand in front of an audience, make asses of themselves, and wait for people to laugh. If no one laughs, these same comedians dig themselves deeper into comedy hell by telling yet another unfunny joke, and slowly but surely the audience slinks away, leaving the poor saps on stage, spotlight on their bald heads, as they wonder why they didn’t become lawyers or business executives like their mommies wanted.

That’s the way it is for published writers as well. They expect someone to respond to what they’ve just written, and to respond in the “correct” manner. In other words, if published writers have written a sad story, they want their audience to whip out their kerchiefs, dab their eyes, and blow their noses—and not use the pages of their book for toilet paper. These published writers of sad stories are crushed when people are laughing instead of crying or dying instead of sighing.

However, it’s different for us folks who don’t want to be published in the first place. Let’s say you want to write humor. Furthermore, you are writing for those people who put coins in a parking meter and expect a gumball to pop out, or for those folks who can’t call “911” because they can’t find the number “11” on their cell phone. So if you don’t want to get published, you write lines to this audience such as the following:

(a) The ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter is an Eskimo Pi.
(b) The weight an evangelist carries with God is one billigram.
(c) A half of a large intestine is a semicolon.

and your uneducated readers responds thusly:

(a) What does geometry have to do with ice cream?
(b) I know some evangelists who aren’t heavy. So what’s your point?
(c) Semicolon? Heck, I hated it when I used to get my period.

You see, the trick is to know your target audience and to write something other than what your target audience understands or accepts. Good unpublished writers will realize that and shift their writing style to conflict with the audience they’re not trying to reach. Here’s another example:

to a sophisticated Civil War audience:
General Grant pulled out the semiautomatic hidden under his coat and sprayed the rebels charging his line. Then the officers under him yelled “Charge,” and all of the privates held up their Visa cards and ran toward the new mall in the South Carolina shopping center.

to preschoolers
Psssst! Do you want the real low-down on what mommy and daddy really had to do so you could get born? It’s all here, with pictures and everything.

to a Harvard-educated professor of English
Likes I say, professor, it don’t make no difference to me nohow as to why I gots to know Shakespeare. I mean like that English fruitcake he don’t faze me in the least with that high-falutin’ stuff he writes about. Just gimme my “A” in this here course, so I can get the hell outa here and make some bread, you know what I mean?

to a moron who hits his head against the wall because it feels so good when he stops:
Listen, I want you to tiptoe past the medicine cabinet because I don’t want you to wake up the sleeping pills. You got that ? (Oops—that’s not a good example because the moron would understand that.) On the other hand, if your editor is a moron, you better write something more sophisticated to ensure you don’t get your piece published.

I guess that’s all I’ve got to say today about not getting published. Get to know your target audience. Find out what they enjoy, what they want to read, what excites. Then don’t give them ANY of that.

Excuse me now while I open the refrigerator door. I want to see the salad dressing. Maybe later I’ll grab some of that Eskimo Pi and run around in circles while I eat it.

Copyright © 2003 by Tom Mach

Tom can be reached at:
tom_mach_writer@yahoo.com