The Bitter Quill

What the hell are we doing here?

Presumably, if you’re reading this blog, you love to write, or at very least you have a passing infatuation with the written word. Great. So write! But why try to publish? Why not just write for fun, make photocopies of your stories and hand them around to your friends and family?

The writing industry — especially the world of fiction — is like a giant tank of flaming acid filled with editors and agents and your competition, and also chainsaw-wielding mutant barracudas. Sure, there may be treasure on the bottom of the tank, but is getting there really worth it? Why are we struggling against the stream (of flaming acid!) to (if we’re lucky!) get paid not very much for a lot of really painful, difficult work? It’s like trying to make it in Hollywood as an actor or actress, except the parties aren’t as much fun and it’s harder to sleep your way to the top.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not quitting. I’ve committed myself to this insane course of action with a vitriolic fervor. But then, I’m notorious for launching myself at ridiculously impractical projects with a mad gleam in my eye and froth on my lips. The mere specter of a chance of hope of success is enough to drive me, foaming and gibbering, at my target. But I know that the chances of victory are small, and the odds of being disappointed, again and again and again, are great.

OK, I’m crazy. So what’s your excuse?

I found it funny that the evil, mustachioed, get–your–post–in–on–time-or–we’ll– tie–you–to-the-tracks Bitter Quill Powers that Be (else wise known as “Mike”) described me as a “new-media writer” in the introduction to last week’s post. It’s not that the bulk of the writing I do for public consumption these days doesn’t fit that bill — it certainly does — it’s just that in describing the writing I do I’m more apt to use the less formal moniker, “blogger”, because I find the term “new-media” particularly silly (ED: Oi!). There’s nothing “new” about writing. It may not be as old as cave painting or sex or spoken word or dancing, but as methods of communication go, it’s been around a good long while.

What new media blogging has done for writers is create a more egalitarian market in which to flog our wordy-wares. No longer do we need to tie up our lovingly double-spaced bundle of words and count on an editor to recognize our genius. With a push of a button we can take our ground-breaking tales directly to the public at large. And, with additional commenting tools at our (I was going to say “ink-stained” – but that doesn’t really apply in this case…but “keyboard calloused” doesn’t really have the same aesthetic lyricism to it, does it?) fingertips, we can get instant feedback from our audience, so we can hone and tailor or work and give them exactly what they want – and as often as they want it.

Frankly, it feels a bit like cheating to me. When you fantasize about you future writing career (wasting time which, I should like to point out, would have been better spent actually writing), do you dream about your photo on a dustjacket, attending book signings armed with a heavy pen and tweed blazer with leather elbow pads, of discovering your characters either changed someone’s life or featured heavily in their startlingly risqué fanfic (perhaps both), or about spending your time worrying about bloghits and site visitors and troll bashing and your Google Page Rank? Perhaps I’m a short-sighted luddite, unable to grasp that new-media is the wave of the future, or maybe I just give more emotional weight to words I can actually hold in my hand… but I, for one, feel as though I can’t count myself as successful until that byline is printed on paper.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: I don’t know what exactly I can say about Cynthia Taylor, except that I urge you to visit www.pinkhairedgirl.com for more of everything Cyn-ful (Aha! I bet that’s the first time that pun has ever been made! Wokka wokka wokka!). Cyn is a full-time student and a part-time ranconteur, and yes, her hair really is that color.

The mythology of writing tells us that Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry while living as a creepy recluse and completely shunning an audience. She instructed her sisters to burn her poems upon her death, wanting to insure that no one else read them. She was an artist, a poet writing only for herself and the love of words.

There is no way in hell I could ever work like that. Unlike Ms. Dickinson, I don’t see the point in writing without readers. (You also can’t sing all of my writing to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas.) I’m a blogger, not a diarist. If a tree falls in a forest, who cares if it makes a sound? Modern scholarship suggests that the whole creepy recluse line may have been a load of hooey with regard to Emily, anyway.

When I was in college, getting a Creative Writing degree, making myself write was easy. I had assignments and deadlines and workshops to write for, and no job to stop me from sitting around in my dorm room and churning out short stories. (Not to mention an eighteen-year-old’s charmingly naive belief in the Importance of said short stories.) At Oberlin, there was a system designed to churn out writing and writers, and while there may be a lot of justified complaints about the workshop system, it did get words on the page.

I had big plans for my life post college. Computer programmer by day, fiction writer by night, I was going to take the world by storm. Instead, I sent out four or five short stories, received four or five rejection letters, and promptly stopped writing. It’s hard, this writing thing. Hard to make time for, hard to keep doing in the face of constant rejection, hard to believe in the importance of words arranged and rearranged on a page. It’s hard just to make a decent sentence. I don’t think the high incidence of alcoholism amongst writers is a coincidence.

(Ponder: The way some sentences spring forth fully fledged, full of truth and beauty, and others are doggedly and insistently awkward, fighting back against your efforts to rearrange them. One of my weaknesses is my inability to get rid of those first sentences, the beautiful ones. My short stories eddy around them, meandering at the expense of plot, because I cannot bear to cut something pretty. I am indulgent in this, and thus you must forgive me this paragraph.)

I have a question for you, my fellow writers. How the hell do you keep doing this? How does this reconcile with jobs, with careers? (I have another life in which I’m a computer science grad student, and I love it just as much.) How do you find the time, but more importantly, the will?