Full Stop saves you time, stress and money in achieving your goal of the perfect communiqué.
Over the years I’ve been party to many discussions regarding differences between editors and writers; the publishing and editorial consensus being that writers should be able to knock up a 1 000 word piece in about 30 minutes. Two thousand words might take a little longer, say 45 minutes, and that’s that for the day, time for a kafeeklatz with the neighbor, and maybe a movie this afternoon. Therefore a writer is privileged to be published at all, that work is simply a paying hobby, and he or she should be grateful (what they eat while being grateful, I’m not too sure).
Imagine my delight as a writer of sorts when, while reading Anne Thwaite’s biography of AA Milne, I came across a 1929 letter from Milne to the BBC regarding that institution’s attitude to writers and writing. The general opinion then seems not to have changed one iota. Milne tells the BBC:
Authors have never been taken very seriously by their fellow men. “A singer is a singer … a painter is a painter … but dash it all, a writer only writes, which is a thing we all do every day of our lives, and the only difference between ourselves and Thomas Hardy is that Hardy doesn’t do anything else, whereas we are busy men with a job of real work to do.
… you who read this would not think of asking a wine merchant … for a free dozen of champagne … but you would not hesitate to ask an author … for a free article for some ephemeral publication in which … you were interested or for permission to perform his play without the usual payment of royalty.
Milne goes on:
To the BBC, all authors are the same author. There is a “regular fee” for the author … the fee is what advertisers call “nominal” … “If you will let us do it for nothing we will announce to our thousand million book-buying listeners where your work is to be bought”. And if you don’t like it, you can leave it, because there are plenty of other authors about; and, if it came to the worst, we could write the things ourselves quite easily.
And this was more than 80 years ago! The more things change, the more they stay exactly the same!
