I’m beginning to see that if anyone ever begins to follow this blog, that it won’t be for publishing advice. This is as it should be.
It seems to me that there are about three tidbits of information that are actually valuable in life and the rest is all fluff. None of us need more information. And besides which, providing it is about the most boring thing in the world.
For instance, I could tell you how I finally took the calendar off my wall in my office (it still held a snow scene for being on the month of February), and turned it to September, and than had the month I needed turn to October before I wrote anything on it. What I wrote were simple words: research, mailing, database, article, follow-up. You can guess what they mean about as well as I can. They’re telling me to do one thing on Monday, the next on Tuesday and so on. Since I never make lists or use a calendar I can’t yet tell you if these words will actually help me feel empowered, organized, productive or least of all effective. I’m hitting that place where I’m not sure I care.
That’s the only place from which you write words on calendars as if they’ll save you. Remember this. It is important.
Working with inspiration or some spark of creativity is the only thing that’s ever going to make you feel like your work has meaning. Banish me from the Anne Lamott writers circle for saying so (at least if you’re one of those writers who has to be told to sit down and write everyday). If you’re not a writer who needs to discipline yourself to write (which heaven help me I can’t imagine for never having been one), then you do not need to be told to write through the boredom. You are going to write even if all you have to write is your lament about writing stupid words on a stupid calendar.
If you are able to get an agent, and wait a year (or three), and find a publisher who still does marketing for you and does it well, then by all means do so. Do not put yourself through this hell. If you are going to write impatiently and take the route of least resistance, then you will likely end up like me, and be forcing yourself with whatever kind of list or organizing tips you embrace, to do a bunch of stuff you don’t want to do. And if you’ve gone around a certain bend, one of those that come with spirit or age, the kind that says if you have to work that hard, put in that much effort, it is not the right way to go, then you might have to face that place where your dreams are not aligning with your level of ambition. It is why the vast majority people with successful careers establish themselves when they are young and still have the tolerance and the dexterity to jump through the hoops. I am not that young.
I did, however, have a couple of very moving things happen in the past few weeks, and they came of asking for help. It started in one area – a request for help with a family matter – and it felt so good to have asked for help that I asked again in another area – and then some help I hadn’t asked for at all arrived unexpectedly and I felt as if I’d opened the floodgates with the first asking, and as if this was all the universe had been waiting for.
This only just occurred to me, and so like the words on the calendar I can’t tell you it’s going to be the answer, but it suddenly dawned on me that these marketing things are all, at this point, a matter of asking: “Would you like to read my book? Hear what it’s about?”
You can call the powers that be “the universe,” or “God” or “your friends” or even “the media,” (depending on what kind of help you need, which square of a day that you’re standing on, or maybe the contents of your wallet), but I was reminded of the power of asking, the honesty that gets you to do it, and the benevolence that it can, at times unearth. And that reminder gave me just a glimmer of hope, of a non-ambitious, what do I have to lose attitude (to replace my sour one), that comes down to basically, “It can’t hurt to ask.”
Oh, you think it will and you can get yourself all tied up in knots about it, but in the end, when you finally try it, it’s not so bad at all. And in almost every instance, no matter what your query, the nature of the universe, and even specific portions of it, are kind of set up in such a way that need, and response to need, are part of the picture (i.e., book reviewers do need to review books). Whether you phrase it as “help” or not, the chances are there’s somebody out there (including book stores, therapists, and friends) who’s got a stake in saying, “Sure,” and might even feel good about being of service even if they’re not salivating to do so.
So I’ll do a little asking.
But I also want to say that the walls you hit, the places where it doesn’t seem worth it, or where your skills don’t line up with what you need to do, are legitimate places and can bear looking at. We each have limits. They’re not necessarily lazy, slacker, don’t want to work that hard places for which you need to feel small and guilty. For every writer who publishes there’s probably a thousand who write very well and don’t ever try, and another thousand who try once or twice and give up, and a thousand who feel bad about it and a thousand who don’t.
Writing is a beautiful art. It’s full of heart and soul. It makes you feel more vulnerable than a bird that weighs less than a quarter. You’re probably already sensitive by nature, and you’re probably, when it comes right down to it, not bequeathed with too many extroverted genes. You write because you love to write and you spend a lot of time alone, and quite frankly, you like it that way. Having a “successful” book has never been, in other words, the reason you write.
A “small” book is not a defeat. Just read Annie Dillard (“The Writing Life”) if you want backhanded encouragement, or to feel that any book, any good book at all, is some kind of a miracle.
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