After invoking the ‘10,000 hours to mastery’ thing a few times, a friend has pointed out, with characteristic grandmotherly kindness, that Malcom Gladwell’s idea is, in a word, non-scientific. Or rather, wrong.
Or you could say, total bullshit.
One very good reason for this is that Gladwell isn’t a scientist; he’s a popularizer who summarizes scientific thought. This in his own words:
“I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research … for ways of augmenting story-telling. The reason I don’t do things their way is because their way has a cost: it makes their writing inaccessible. If you are someone who has as their goal … to reach a lay audience … you can’t do it their way.”
Critiques of Gladwell’s idea that 10,000 hours turns anyone into a pro are easy to find on the web now, though they are a bit harder to find than positive reviews of his work. Gladwell responded to this criticism by saying: “No one succeeds at a high level without innate talent.”
Which makes you wonder… where the hell did that 10,000 number come from in the first place, if not a close read of the actual science?
The answer contains a sliver of hope for those toiling away at stuff for what feels like a long time.
Looking at great classical musicians, you see people who practice. A lot. The kind of practice that the 10,000 hours suggest makes someone great. However, a recent study has found that practice accounts for only 20% of the success of these musicians. Leaving something else to explain the other 80%.
Some call this thing talent. But who knows? It could be beneficent angels or aliens. Whatever. What science doesn’t know, science doesn’t know, and that’s the point in being careful about Gladwell, and in fact, most popularizers of science. Sometimes telling a good story means playing with the facts.
So where did that idea come from? That time invested equals mastery?
People often work hard at things they are good at, and I say this like Gladwell, based on anecdotes, life experiences, and intuition. It seems often to be true.
People who are good at things often seem to work like crazy on them.
So. If you find yourself wondering about that 10,000 number, and trying, and failing to figure out how the hell you even count hours, to become a writer, when every single second of experience can be thought of as content if not practice, you can take comfort in the unscientific idea that your sticking with writing puts you alongside people who do succeed.
But this doesn’t mean you will succeed at the highest level automatically, without (mystery ingredient X, which I still refuse to call Talent. Let’s call it The Practice Multiplier. No. Let’s just call it ingredient X. That is more fun.)
Bottom line, which is why I think ingredient X and its lack shouldn’t stop you: Writing is Good. Writing is good for you, for me, for people who never publish a word, for people who sell a few poems or stories, for bestselling authors, and everyone and everything in between.
Writing is mindful. Writing is a kind of meditation. Writing reveals what you love. Writing reveals you to others. Writing is catharsis. Writing creates empathy. Writing is therapy. Writing won’t bankrupt you unless you do it all the time and make no money and insist the world owes you a living for it. (don’t do that.) Writing creates little in the way of greenhouse gas. Writing makes books which for many people are one of the main reasons to go on living. Books make culture. Culture makes humanity.
I will, with a clean conscience, advise writers to keep writing, for as long as they find it meaningful. If they are very sad, about their writing, about its reception, and find no joy it, I’ll agree they should stop, but not without suggesting they first attack that sadness head on, to see if something else is the cause. Though quitting for a while is fine.
I quit for 18 years. That was a mistake.
Did I write for 10,000 hours overall, in my first try, before I gave up? Maybe. Am I a professional now? According to SFWA I am. My few dozen sales might make me look professional to some. I’m gonna say I write at a professional level, though I do not make a living at it. Some days I add the word Yet, to that sentence, and other days I think, “oh. I must lack ingredient X. I am doomed.”
Notebook from the 90s, before Clarion and my 18 year block, which I don’t really blame on Clarion
I sat down and wrote a new short story.
Done.
So that was fast. But seriously… To talk about how I defeated the block we have to agree that I was, in fact, blocked, and that I have in fact, beaten that block, and then, I need to generalize something out of that experience that justifies hitting the ‘publish’ button. Which I might not do.
There! That’s a part of it, isn’t it? I don’t know if this essay is worth publishing already… so why write it again? God knows people smarter than me have defeated far more serious blocks, oh, not only smarter, but much better writers, so, use the Google, go read them.
Never mind about me, my writing, this essay, okay I’ll quit now this was a waste of time. God I’m an idiot. Why are I doing this again?
And there it is. See? I let it out. Christ it’s ugly.
TRIGGER WARNING: I’m gonna spew my whole ugly internal monolog below; this will seem crazy and awful to some and familiar to others; the steps for beating the block are tucked inside a mind trying to write this article. And what it feels like to break out, bit by bit, like a baby bird chipping out of its egg with its pathetically tiny beak.
Being blocked is how you talk yourself out of doing something you kinda sorta love to do and kinda sort really wanna do but can’t do as much you kinda sorta wanna do.
It’s a way you talk to yourself that you’d never talk to anyone else. Unless the person you’re talking to is aspiring to opiod abuse or child molestation. Or joining a stupid religious cult.
Hm. Is writing a stupid religious cult?
There! There it is again! It’s never far from me. Always within arm’s reach.
People who have never had blocks, really, who have neutotypical brains and good work and study skills like to write essays about defeating procrastination and they often start with sound simple advice you can’t act on. At all.
Because you’re a weak ass fuck.
Imagine the beach house you will buy when you’re a bestselling author! Clip a picture out of a magazine and put it on the bulletin board next to where you write!
Look. That works for some people. And I’m making fun of it, like a dick, because, here is rule 1 to getting out of your writers block–
Your solution may be unique to you. Keep trying everybody’s else’s ideas as best you can till you figure it out, but don’t be surprised if the first few attempts don’t pan out.
My own list is idiosyncratic. I’m weird. If you think it’s stupid laugh at it and me. It’s okay. I can’t hear you. Huh, the voice changed in this list. Never mind. keep going.
Find someone who likes what you do and listen to them for a period of time about your work. Look at positive reviews. Imagine people out there that might like what you might do.
Okay, that didn’t work,those people were you friends or family or the occasional odd stranger on the net, who knows you only through your work, whose opinion ought to mean something, but this isn’t working so on to the next.
Lower your standards. Prime the pump. Push out the brown water that collected in your creative pipes. (I know. Eww.)
That sort of works, doesn’t it? You’re not ready to believe in 3. Christ I’m an idiot. This numbering reads as a kind of ordering and this is the wrong order. Is there even a right one?
Let that go.
Play. You’re playing at the thing. You’re a dilettante. That’s okay. Dabble. It’s your hobby. Roll around in the misery of these words for a bit while you dabble away, you weak ass dabbling piece of shit hobbyist motherfucker who will never be professional, you. If it’s working. If these words make you sad, fuck this shit. Go to the next.
Start something great, that has been inside you, waiting to get out, that you have returned to, in memory. Remember those ideas, that were too big, that you couldn’t do, that needed research, that you had to be a better writer to do? Start one of those. Oh, and skip the research. Do that later. Life’s too short.
Oh. You’re just dabbling. You didn’t do the research! So this is nothing. So… hey the pressures off. Keep going. Don’t look at your feet. Don’t be the centipede that forgets how to walk because suddenly it’s all complicated, oh, it is complicated, oh, I CAN’T RESTORE A MAN’S BRAIN, JIM! THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE TEACHERS IS FADING!
Oh, you stopped. You looked at your feet, didn’t you?
Search for other people’s inspirational crap. Read it. Be annoyed that none of it is really working. Begin to panic.
Well. there’s that crap you managed to pump out, the play stuff. You can edit that. Make it better. Not good enough to send out maybe. But you can make it better.
Edit. Start to like the stupid crap more than it deserves.
Edit more. Start to think maybe someone would like this thing, someone could buy it.
Get frustrated editing and start something new. Oh, you’re being a loser, you should be finishing that thing you started and submitting it. Write more raw crap instead. God. You have zero discipline don’t you?
Finish original thing. Well. Abandon it.
Send first thing out. For fun. To get a rejection and feel like you’re in the game.
Keep playing and start the next thing you believe in before you get the first thing rejected. Start two, three… or a hundred if you can. Forget I said a hundred. Just start two! Wait! One is enough!
Look at your feet. But keep walking. Think, Holy shit. Am I blocked anymore? My feet keep walking. Now stop looking at them.
Don’t write for some time. Start again. Nope. Not blocked. Only lazy! Lazy lazy lazy. Hey. Be a bit less lazy. Read productivity essays. Be annoyed at the people who write them, and those they work for. Those judgemental neurotpyical assholes.
So, you’re not blocked anymore. Now. Don’t stop writing long. Remember to play, do fun things. Remember to edit those things when you feel like you can’t write. Remember to fall in love with the things you edit, because hey, you made them better and that was some hard work, wasn’t it?
Remember to play, to work, to wonder, to be critical, to be kind, to be hopeful, to despair a bit knowing that you can get past the despair, let go of expectations, do it anyway, have expectations, do it anyway, be broken hearted about rejection, keep going, be briefly happy at small success, look at others greater success in social media and experience burning jealousy and angry self loathing at your jealousy, but hit the ‘like’ button anyway, keep going, keep going, keep going.
You have inertia now. Object in motion.
I was gonna map this shit onto my little career, he says, resisting the quotes around the word, but you don’t care, you haven’t read my work most likely, so suffice to say, my most loved novella was that thing that I wasn’t qualified to write that I was ruminating on for 18 years. Know that I did no research until I was well into it.
Know that it became the cover novella in a magazine that has been around for 40 years, and that these flagship magazines in the genre linger for decades, and that people go back and read them, for decades, and that one day, after I am dead, someone, will pick up that story, and read it and have a good time with it, and think briefly of the man who wrote it, and I’ll be there, in his or her mind, outlined in the magic fire of the world that came alive in me that I made come alive in them.
He won’t wonder if it was worth writing.
She won’t care that it took me eighteen years of dithering.
They won’t lament the novels I didn’t write in that period.
Nobody agonizes over the missing novels of Raymond Carver.
They just enjoy the short stories.
Go and make the thing now. Or play at doing that. That future reader will thank you, after you’re gone. The payoff might even come quicker, but it doesn’t have to.
Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. Man gotta ask, why why why?
And centipedes never forget how to walk. That was a metaphor. For a thing that never happens.
Ponder that. Whoever made that metaphor was a fucking asshole! Think this while you take that first step without thinking.
And write.
P.S: I’m Okay. I’m fine.
P.P.S: Okay, this edit is a month past the original writing of the post, and it turns out I was NOT fine. This is the post that made me realize I was white-knuckling it, pushing hard through a lot of negative stuff. I’ve been working on this lately, doing CBT, mindfulness meditation, and taking meds at the right dosage and it’s changed my outlook.
I debated about taking this thing down, but decided to leave it up, as it represents how people can be fizzling flaming train wrecks inside and still be performing, still keep moving and working.
But it doesn’t help, to be like that.
If you are, work on it.
And if you’re all about goals? Then do it to help the writing.
A friend of a friend, an avid reader, now has the time and space to give writing fiction a shot. He’s super smart, and an avid reader. I was asked, how would I recommend he go about it?
Decades spent writing, worrying about writing, workshopping, taking courses, reading craft books, staring into space, submitting, not submitting, writing a ton a day, not writing for 18 years, crying silently in darkened bathrooms, has given me a super valuable perspective on this.
My advice is worth more than you might imagine given my modest professional catalog. Why you ask? Because like you, I am weak-willed and not that special. And yet, look above.
Since 2012 I publish most of what I write in nationally distributed professional magazines. Multiple stories and or novellas a year.
So. Listen to me.
The Truth that Will Set You Free
I’m gonna say stuff that is so simple it’s stupid, and yet, I have to say it, because so many people I know who say they want to write, and publish, don’t do this.
Read short stories.
Sure, you can read short story collections by authors you love. That’s okay. You can read themed anthos, that’s good, too. You can read Year’s best’s–that’s also good. Read the award winners! Why not! Read old award winners? Cool. Read anthologies in adjacent genres to your target genre? Also cool. Read classics, from a century ago? You have my blessing…
Do that and while you do that, or afterwards, get some actual fiction magazines being published RIGHT NOW and read them.
Read these magazines cover to cover. Finish the stories whether they grab you or not. Read the whole damn thing.
Maybe this is obvious, that you would do this, but in my experience, it isn’t. I didn’t, for years. I read year’s bests and single author collections. And so I wrote these stories that didn’t fit into the moment, into the magazines, my dialog with the genre as I had known it growing up. Stories influenced by classic… older, authors. Mostly old white guys. Writing in the old white guy voice to the young white guy in me that loved reading the old white guys.
I wrote. I didn’t sell things. I got sad. I stopped writing.
I never stopped reading. Novels mostly. But no more short stories for a long time.
Then… I started up again, and this time, I walked to the newstand at Copley mall and picked up an issue of Asimovs, one of Analog, and one of F&SF and I went home and I read all three. Then I read Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, online, for free.
Now, I’d read years bests for a decade. Or most of what was in them. And these magazines were the places most of the years best stories had been selected from.
But reading the actual source magazines was a completely different experience. The uncollected, uncurated, unawarded stories were vital for me to figure out how to do this.
Why Does Actually Reading Magazines help you Sell Your Work?
If you do this for six months, read three or four magazines consistently, cover to cover, your brain will map out the story-space for each publication, AND the superset story-space of them all.
What The Hell is Story-Space?
Story-space is a higher dimensional construct–my own invention— an n-dimensional manifold, a candy colored rainbow lens flare that you can crush down and stuff into a glowing gem on the infinity gauntlet.
Storyspace has a zillion dimensions.
Characters. What kinds of people? Aliens? AIs? Demons? Angels? Robots? Farcical fairy tale creatures?
What historical time periods? Alternate history? What milieus? What kinds of worlds? What kinds of dystopias?
What kind of plots? Puzzles? Character Arcs? Literary epiphanies?
Nitty gritty. How is AI, information technology, space travel, FTL climate change, handled? How do people handle traditional elements… vampires? Clones? Cyborgs?
Brandnames. Song lyrics. How is it done? How are people doing it now?
If you are writing literary fiction… what are the limits of how unlikable the characters can be? (Hint: They can be utterly detestable!)
Collect literary epiphanies in a used Atloids tin. Detail in dry erase marker on your fridge what makes each story epiph. Or write it down in a pocket sized spiral notebook with one of those orange half pencils they give out on miniature golf courses. If you use a ballpoint pen this won’t work.
For any kind of story, in any genre… how much sex is there, and how is it rendered? What words are used for the naughty bits?
How much violence is staged, and how graphic is it? How much action? How much dialog? How much introspection? How much narrative info dump?
Ever notice how short stories and novels don’t include car chases?
As you read each story the question isn’t so much did you like it but rather, what in the story do you think was liked? What is expected? What feels fresh? What feels classic and familiar… or timeworn but well crafted and easy to read?
What’s hard to read, challenging… but dense with meaning?
Can you Sum Up Why I should Read Magazines in One Paragraph?
What will happen to you, as it happened to me, is the subconscious machine in your head that makes all your shit up will enter into a dialog with the literature you read, the stuff you’re reading now. That is being written now!
That editors are buying now.
Depending on what kind of person you are, you may end up writing to market, or, you may end up shaking your story fist angrily and farting in its general direction. Fixated on what you want to add to the moment, what you think your genre is missing. Maybe you are an underrepresented voice and you bring that to the field. Maybe you’re not. That’s okay. Both things are okay.
Maybe you’re genre mixing, smashing; maybe you write in your unique voice purely idiosyncratically, because you’re a genius. Well, good for you!
I STILL THINK SHORT STORY UNIVERSITY WILL HELP YOU. AND YES I HAVE GONE INTO ALL CAPS AND I’M SORRY. I’LL STOP NOW.
Whatever happens, you’ll know what you’re up against. And you’ll be informed by the moment.
So. You’re reading. Now what?
The Most Obvious Advice Ever Given that Nobody Listens To
Write.
Write a lot. Write every day. Stop watching TV if you have to. I know that sounds harsh, but everything is on demand now and you can watch it later. Read and write. Eat, do self care, bathe now and then, make a living, don’t neglect your kids or partner, and yeah, maybe you don’t have as much time as you’d like, most people don’t. What time you have, read and write, every day.
Share what you write with people who also write and talk to them.
Fancy word for that is workshop.
Google how to find them and how to run them. Read my descriptions of workshops on this blog, in the sidebar, it’s a category. And if you live in a place without workshops, or your schedule doesn’t permit it, join my mailing list if an online video conferencing experience appeals to you.)
But before you start rewriting stuff, send some of it out raw to the places you want to sell to. Send out enough to know if you’re a genius who doesn’t need workshops, classes, craft books. If everyplace you like rejects what you send?
Then you need workshops.
Worry about ruining your good name? Use a pen name on these test submissions. Ruining your name isn’t really a thing, but it’s okay if you’re afraid of that.
Google how to write covers letters. Google how to find markets. I could cut and paste links here, but you know, google this stuff yourself, you might find something I don’t know about. Submission grinder is a great resource.
Read writers guidelines. (Google Magazine Name plus Writers Guidelines or Submissions. This is usually faster than using the site-nav.)
Obey the guidelines with regards to file formats, word counts, multiple submissions, simultaneous submissions. Don’t do anything cute to try to get attention. Don’t send stories in the postal mail in pizza boxes. Or use stripper themed delivery services. Don’t collar editors at conventions and shove smudged manuscripts at them. These things rarely work.
Submit the stories the way you are supposed to. What’s in your cover letter? Google that. Or skip it. No cover letter for you. See if that works or not. Why am I being so cavalier? Because you are going to write a lot of these things.
They’re not precious anymore.
Use a tracking website to track your submissions, Submission grinder is free, or you can pay for Duotrope, or you can do it yourself in a spreadsheet. If you use Submission Grinder, the data is shared and you can see how fast people are selling stories and getting rejected, you can see a sample of that data, and this can be useful.
Or it can be a sick twisted obsession. Good luck with that.
How Much Must I Write to be in Short Story University?
Finish a short story a week.
Submit a short story a week. It doesn’t have to be a story a week, you can have a pipeline and be working on a few, editing some, starting others, but on average, a story a week flys out of your computer and into the world.
Very quickly you will have stories at all the places you care about, waiting and some you don’t even read. But you read the guidelines! So you haven’t sent anything absolutely terribly inappropriate; only stuff they won’t buy, which you can find out, for free, by them not buying it.
Should you read every market you submit to? Yes. Can you submit to them without reading while reading other markets in that genre? Yes.
How Do I Write So Many Stories?
By letting yourself write bad ones.
Don’t have any ideas? Google ‘writing prompts.’ Use them.
Or use your bad ideas. I dare you.
Don’t worry about publishing your stories yourself because they aren’t selling for the first year. Publishing is gonna take a lot of time and effort and short fiction doesn’t sell well anyway, so no. No. Just no. Indypub is not part of Short Story University. You can do Indy in your spare time if you want, but don’t let it decrease your output. Don’t let your publisher hobby make you drop out of Short Story University
How much money will you make the first year? Not enough to matter.
This is your apprenticeship, your college, your training course. If you do this for two years and have a 100 stories you have shopped around at 10 places each? That’s a 1000 submissions dude. (Math!)
When you have ten stories out? Every day… you’re one day away from, maybe, selling your first story–or your first two, three, or four stories.
You’re in the game! IN THE GAME I TELL YOU!
If you do this for two years, taking 4 weeks off for good behavior, and have the 100 stories and the 1000 submission entries and you haven’t sold anything?
I will buy you a drink, or a meal, or a huge cartoon mallet which I will let you hit me over the head with. It will be padded. I won’t let you kill me. But you’ll want someone to hit. It can be me.
I won’t get hit, though. You will sell stories. I know you will. There is simply no way you can’t. Because nobody does this for long without some success. Absolutely nobody.
Success may be getting twenty bucks and getting published on in some webzine, at first. It may be like that for some time. I’m not promising you miracles. I don’t know you. What I do know, from doing this for decades, is that people who read a lot and write a lot sell stuff sooner or later.
Thats’ it. This has been called “Dare to be Bad,” (Google it) by two writers who have been editors, who rejected all my work in the 90s. They’re great at what they do, both the writing and the editing. (sniff). The writers are KKR and DWS. Again, use the google. If you aren’t committed enough to use the google you can’t be a writer. Seriously
There is nothing in this article that you didn’t know. I have told you nothing. And yet, you read this. Because you want to do this, and you haven’t, you haven’t committed, you haven’t finished watching Game of Thrones, you have a hard job and a time-sucking family and you’re busy and have medical and mental health issues and…
I get it. But you’re reading this inane article still.
Oh. And after you throw out your TV? Turn off your social media the first year. Turn it back on when you start selling and then, if you keep up the output, roll that conversation into the conversation with the texts themselves you are having.
If you stop reading or writing, stop social media-ing.
Why the Short Story Obsession? I Write Novels. Or Have Started One…
Oh. Why am I not talking about novels, when most people read novels and most of the money is there and there are actually more professional first novel slots than short story slots?
Because you can’t write novels fast enough to learn how to write, most of the time.
You’ll be trapped in your novel’s voice, its logic. Its craft level. Until you finish it and workshop it and submit it. If you write a lot, if you write 2-6 novels a year, and do what I said, with the short stories? You’ll be fine. Maybe. But you probably won’t, because you don’t have the time.
How do I know? Twenty years of workshops, conventions, and being an underachiever, that’s how.
You’ll bog down, unpublished novel person. You’ll pick at it. You’ll wonder if you should start anything new. You won’t. You’ll finish it… sort of. The one person you give to read it won’t get to it for a year and you’ll stop being their friend. I’m not joking. You’ll be super angry. You’ll find some new people to read it and they will tell you things that break your heart.
Hey, you didn’t do this in a week. This took a year. So you’ll have to find other people to look at it. Maybe pay them. Maybe in a class you’ll take next year. So until then, watch a lot of TV and post to facebook every day. And fuck those people who read the thing. Or couldn’t read the thing. Don’t they know how long you worked on it?
You’ll realize, you’re doomed. You can’t do this. You’ll publish the book yourself.
Nobody will buy it.
You’ll find yourself crying quietly in darkened restrooms.
Don’t do that. Okay, I do know people who skipped shorts and just wrote novels and they were fine. But… look I’m not that special a person. I am not a paragon of willpower. Remember that guy that cut his arm off to escape when he got trapped mountain climbing? I’m not that guy. (I had a character do something like that once… it was awesome. That novella didn’t sell…)
The folks I know who skipped Short Story University? One threw his TV out the window and sold a novel before he came to Clarion. None of his clarion shorts sold. He went on to become a bestselling author.
Some people just aren’t short story writers. But you know, he wrote six in six weeks.
The other one I know of wrote five novels in a few years, knew they were bad, sold the sixth, and is a pro now.
So that is possible, and if you do that? Again, I owe you a drink, a meal, or you can hit me in the head with the cartoon mallet.
I recommend Short Story University. It can be attended for free, if you want to use libraries and other free services, craft books instead of classes, free internet interactions rather than conventions. You can part time it, an hour or two a day, or go full time it if you are bloated with privilege.
It will be worth it. Two years. It’s an associates degree. 100 stories. 1000 submissions. You want this. You can do this.
Now go and do it.
POST UPDATE!
Since writing this I’ve had a lot of traffic that makes me think there’s a need here, specifically for the Workshop part of my advice above. My course would help transfer workshopping meta-skills to folks who aren’t in major markets, who don’t have local writer communities to draw on. If this interests you, PLEASE JOIN MY MAILING LIST so you get the course announcements in time to take them.
So when I first started to write, I wondered if I would ever be good enough to publish anything. Like being a professional basketball player, olympic athlete, or rock star, nothing seemed guaranteed. I tested well in school, but had had… problems in the real world. (Author heroically resists an over-share. Succeeds for now.)
What I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that once I sold that first professional story…? I’d be off to the races. Nothing would stop me then.
Author stares into the distance. Shakes head. Sighs.
Anyway, I sold that first story in 1993, to a man named Charles Ryan, who ran a professional SF magazine called Aboriginal SF. A name which spoke to the idea that the SF was primordial, pure. not that it was written by Aboriginals. It was the 90s. He was a great guy.
After selling him a story I first-read for him, which was an eye-opener. Read a 1000 manuscripts that seared my brain. I digress.
So I sold that story, and then, off to the races, failed to sell the next half dozen stories to him, or to any bigger markets.
This drove me nuts.
Robert Heinlein had bragged that he sold everything he wrote, from his first short story, which sorta kinda was and wasn’t true… and I’d read the writers life stories of Asimov and Larry Niven and many others and had a timetable in my head for how my career might go, should go, if I was Truly Meant To Do This.
Then, as now, midlist authors were giving up writing and becoming accountants or real estate brokers, and USENET, the ancient social media before the web that almost nobody remembers, was a place where they shared their tales of woe. Which I consumed uncontrollably. I saw this sad story writ large, everywhere, all the time.
Long story short. I never saw the trajectory I wanted, back then. The one I needed. The one that made the struggle of this seem…. sustainable.
My next story, after the first I sold, which I thought was WAY BETTER, everyone hated, for good reason, as it was an impossible to rescue discrimiflip story. I won’t go into it. I am happy it was never published.
Shudder.
Now, remember how I mentioned that I was always actually kinda succeeding? I was selling to national slick magazines at this time. In fact, I had two editors who loved my work who published between them pretty much three quarters of the whole SF ‘semi-pro’ press. Magazines paying a pro rate, or close to it, that hadn’t jumped through some hoops at SFWA yet to be considered pro.
But I was fixated on getting into the officially pro markets, the big old ones, and getting a golden ticket from a few people. Namely, Gardner Dozois, Ellen Datlow, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stanley Schmidt, Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
So I quit for 18 years. (Tech work at a hundred bucks an hour was my consolation prize… oh. So long ago.)
Then, miraculously, in 2012, no longer distracted by the software sector, I broke through in all the markets, now helmed by new editors, that I had ever thought I needed to go Off To The Races. Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Interzone were buying the 10th, 12th, 15th, stories I’d sent. The first ones, I mean, after the hiatus. My rejections were all in the 90s. Unknown to these editors. Who only read the stuff I’d read, after the aborted high tech career and the parenting interesting children thing.
So…. Am I Off to the races? Yes… and no.
Writing is a long game, life long, and to some degree, it never gets easier for anyone than it is for you right now. Each phase requires a different kind of self-motivation, a new kind of resilience, or belief in yourself, in your work, in the value of this enterprise. Your peer heroes struggle, your hero heroes struggle, the Greats all struggled, this isn’t really easy for some of us. Most of us?
All of us?
I say this not as a giant downer, but as an explanation for something you’re going find, in writing communities, in writers, in publishing, in your peers and in your heroes.
A ton of super smart people with weirdly battered egos. Many, many easily insulted people. Many chips, perched on many shoulders.
What is the practical upshot of all this?
Be kind to everyone. Everyone, in your writing journey. To the editors who reject you. To the ones that buy you. To the people in your writing workshop you envy, for their skill or publication. To the people who are new and making a lot of mistakes. To the people who have done this forever who still don’t seem to have a lot to show for it. To the people who have almost instant success. To the people who make a ton of money. To the people who make no money. To the people who struggle to get the time to do this. To the people with nothing but time.
This is a weirdly easy and weirdly hard thing to do.
And when everything you have done, all your accomplishments and all your work feels empty or hollow remember that every day you begin again, like that first day you started, not knowing what would happen, what could happen, on the page or to the pages you wrote.
You’re alive. You can write. The words form in your head without conscious volition and your fingers wiggle and you are somewhere else and also very much there staring at words and wiggling fingers.
Whatever plan you had will fly out the window as you careen wildly, drunkenly, down your path. Keep going. Improvise. Wing it. Fake it till you make it. Dream. Despair. Dream again.
Be a hermit. Come out of the cave and awkwardly interact with other writers. Be kind! Be kind! If people seem mean to you, remember, Weirdly Bruised Egos!
Keep writing. Be Kind. Your successes will glow briefly and whatever doubt you had will return and let that go, because you know, you always wrote with doubt. You don’t really have to believe in yourself. Or your work. Just do it and let the doubts slip around you, let the pain of expectations never met fade. So you were never a rock start and never will be one? Join the club. Oh, you had friends who became rock stars? Good on them.
Be open to your work. Let it flow through you. Let it be what it is. Not for you to know how good it really is. Oh, but try to make it better!
Write. Write. Write some more. The blank page is infinite. Inviting.
Reflections on a lifetime lived in worlds that never were and never will be
I live in a house with a few thousand books; not a curated library of the best thousand, but just the ones that have accumulated, that weren’t from the library or read on an e-reader, or lent to someone and never returned.
Sometimes minor books picked up from the piles left on the street. Cambridge, my beloved city, is awash in old books. The used bookstores are mostly gone but the books are still sloshing around in cardboard boxes on street-corners, in little libraries, in thrift stores.
There was a time when I haunted bookstores, and looked at all the new books, looking for new books by the authors I read, because I grew up in a time and a place where such information wasn’t effortlessly acquired. And I looked through old books, because why not, they’re cheap and I’d discover old books by an author I was interested in. Partial bibliographies in the front and back–generally of books by the same publisher.
The lurid covers of these paperbacks burned themselves into memory, and even for books I never read, I have this fondness, this love. Oh, I intended to read this! But should I read it now? Probably not. It won’t help my writing now. But I think about reading them anyway and seldom get around to it.
I grew up in a house of hundreds of books, that came and went, and SF magazines and the New Yorker. Reading the cartoons in the New Yorker made you feel sophisticated when you were ten years old. Hell, I still feel sophisticated reading them. God they’re good.
I lived in a time that now feels almost monastic. Four channels of TV. Three in focus. Commercial radio. A handful of first run movie theaters.
Kids these days wonder how the hell did we make ourselves read The Lord of the Rings?
For one thing, we grew up in this almost silence. You had your ten or twenty record albums, your tape collection… and that was it. Matlock was on, and you didn’t want to watch it, and it was a mile on the bike to the movie theater and nothing was good there most of the time and it was rated R and you could read your whole comic collection in a matter of hours and you did, you reread it over and over again, but sooner or later, you were bound for middle Earth.
I write this as a middle aged white dude in his fifties, one of the usual over-represented suspects, but maybe this is useful, to know how this happened, how we ended up in middle earth in part because we had nowhere else to go.
The suburbs were tender traps. Our parents had given up on religion. There were no street gangs to join. There was no culture to speak of that included you. Eventually there would be big name concerts from big name acts and trips to big cities to see big museums and see a play or two but mostly, we lived in this aching void.
We loved the Brady Bunch. Watch one of those things. Try to imagine how the hell anyone could love that show. Try to imagine that kid.
The Viet Nam War is winding down and nobody was gonna send my generation to war anytime soon and the sixties become the seventies and the seventies are ashamed they aren’t the sixties, unaware of how utterly worthless the 80s will be. How well they will be remembered.
Long story… long. We had books. Paperbacks. Full of futures.
Dark futures.
Other Worlds.
And bright futures of the past, a past that felt long ago to us, because we were young, but which were really only a few heartbeats back; the heady lunacy of the post-war American boom.
We had more current dark and weird and fucked up futures of the seventies, full of overpopulation and drugs and fear of totalitarian communist takeover. And sidewise jaunts into fantasy worlds that were full and complete and replete with meaning, with risk, with adventure and reward.
We made up a new kind of game, because of Lord of the Rings. Dungeons and Dragons. So we could pretend to live in that world all the fucking time. To escape from the weirdly safe silence of the suburbs, the streets without sidewalks, the cities with no mass transit, the car-based worlds that kids couldn’t traverse, that left us stranded in subdivisions with some random assemblage of kids from the block, poking through undeveloped land, playing in construction sites, climbing water towers. Roaming freely through a world we knew couldn’t hurt us, even when it could.
And we read books. A book a day, if you were a nerd like me who didn’t do sports and who had grown weary of the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family. If you were depressed and didn’t like school, you could manage a paperback a night if you stayed up to four. You’d be a zombie the next day and who cared?
Your books and your vinyl and the people you shared them with defined you. Comics and a few shows and movies too, but so few. So few. Star Trek. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star wars. Alien and Bladerunner. Every one of these will send a solid shiver up your spine if you came from when I did, where I did.
And the future? It was going to be post apocalyptic, or a post capitalist utopia spread amongst the stars. Asimov’s foundation or 1984 or Soylent green. Niven’s Known Space, but not Heinlein’s retro-futuristic history already falling out of sync with reality as he was writing books set on Lowel’s Mars, the one with Canals, long after such a wonder had been banished by the Mercury probes.
The solar system was cold and dead and only of academic interest and the stars were impossibly far away. The steaming jungles of venus and the canals of mars and the caves of methane ice of Jupiter’s moons were all pulp fictional destinations that never were and never could be.
So we languished in the bowels of a giant computer in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Decked out in bondage gear in the Road Warrior. In a few years we’d be jacked into an anarchocapitalist hell which some saw as a lovely thing indeed, but in those fading days of the first and second flowerings of the future, from the Jetsons to the Hip-trip millions of Stand on Zanizbar, we looked forward to the future with a perfect mix of dread and hope. Electric fear and sybaritic pleasure of world-cities and robot companions and immortality serums, alien encounters, strange new worlds to find and conquer.
Stacks of yellowing paperbacks now, stacked around me high and deep.
The future lurking with sharpened teeth in the dark. The eco-apocalypse refined. The cyber apocalypse omnipresent. The libertarian dream laying waste to the free world. The socialist utopia as dead as the dodo. The singularity beckoning. Post humanism looms.
And we come back to Frodo, and the ring, and the final hope, to turn away from something that will devour and destroy us, in these old and hard to read books by some old white guy who was shattered by WW1 and who put the world back together on the page and who tried to find a escape from a prison planet growing all around him.
And I am Rip Van Winkle, a boy who fell asleep after cavorting with the fairies and woke up with a white beard aching on this hillside. Having never found the ability or the need to put aside childish things.
Wondering what world to build next, in my tiny blip of electrons spinning in the cloud.
My comic book heroes stand astride the world; the game I played with dice and graph paper now fills a bazillion computers. The computer net we dreamed into being is unleashing monsters from the Id. The catastrophe we have been eagerly awaiting is unfolding around us. Finally here as the frogs go silent and the insects disappear. The technology needed to save us is booting up, but it will require a bloody revolution to derail this hell bound train.
And I hope I live to see it, the mirage shimmer on the horizon rising up all around me, the future revealed. The darkness full of diamonds. The cracks of doom ablaze. The one ring spinning into oblivion.
The world saved.
Living the dream, making new worlds, forever and ever.
My favorite historical fantasy—Call the Midwife. Valerie Dyer (JENNIFER KIRBY), Lucille (LEONIE ELLIOTT), Nurse Trixie Franklin (HELEN GEORGE), Nurse Barbara Hereward (CHARLOTTE RITCHIE) – (C) Neal Street productions – Photographer: Nicky Johnston
I’m watching the show Call the Midwife, which is a wonderful fantasy featuring people with modern values living in 1958-63 in a poor neighborhood in England.
In part, the show is about how awesome the national health is, as all these doctors and nurses make people’s lives better without asking for insurance cards, and that part rings true. Like Orange is the New Black, the show is based on a memoire which is only good for a season or two of episodes; once the ball is rolling, subsequent seasons are all crafted out of whole cloth and who cares? It’s wonderful.
The show illustrates how people of faith and ordinary people who aren’t as religious can work together with passion for the greater good, and come to understand, respect, and love each other. One arc shows a nurse becoming a nun; one arc features a nun leaving the order, and eventually, after a decent interval, becoming a wife and mother.
But she didn’t leave the order just for that!
Then there’s the sexism, racism, and homophobia all around them and our beloved point of view characters reactions to these things. One of the rules of the show is that it is okay for good characters to be any of these bad things for 50 minutes of airtime. By the end of every hour episode, though, they are completely turned around and think pretty much like us.
For me, this is the most powerful wish fulfillment fantasy on TV. It makes Star Trek look like a dystopia. Even TOS.
There are some longer arcs where people take time to come around. The thalidomide one. The lesbian couple struggling with their own internalized homophobia. Some family things.
Anyway, in their sexual assault program a nun is assaulted by a serial… assaulter. One suspect woman (sex worker / exploitation victim; the first term is falling out of use with some), one good housewife, (Consumed by guilt for walking away from her pram for a minute to get away from a screaming baby) and the nun, whose sin was thinking she got to ride around on her bike, that her wimple protected her magically.
Our nun wasn’t sexually assaulted; there’s only a few minutes where we suspect the inevitable has happened, after she is grabbed. But she wasn’t.
Her lack of sexual assault was a nod to the times. We work through her PTSD and loss of faith just fine without her actually being raped.
This is advice I’ve gotten from sensitivity readers on dealing with sexual violence; it is in the world, but you push it back a few notches from the characters we are compelled to viscerally empathize with. Peripheral characters and deep backstory can reveal a rape element.
This feels non-intuitive to those who remember Kurt Vonnegut’s admonition to torture our characters to see what they are made of.
But this is the new normal, and I work with this in mind.
Mostly, what I know now, is that a great deal of the art I grew up with is inaccessible to the modern generation, unless they’re odd birds interested in deep, historical study, the kind of people who watch Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will and of course, aren’t Nazis or KKK people, because those people have zero interest in art history and don’t bother looking at black and white movies.
Part of it is in being in the golden age of television; the modern generation isn’t compelled to experience classics with vile bits of offensive bigotry and assault embedded like shit raisins, because there is So Much Content.
The old man in me sighs. The young man in me nods. The artist in me resents the boundarys. The progressive in me thinks this is a good thing. Collectively, we get on with it and try to tell stories that matter, that are true, and that have meaning to a modern audience.
This includes of course, having a modern audience.
If that is one of your goals.
The good news? I feel permission to strip mine older stories rather than pointing young people at them. Reimagine them. Revive them. Give them new meaning and mine the gold from them. The Count of Monte Cristo and The Stars My Destination. Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story. The Tempest and Forbidden Planet. The thing is, all those leaps across the centuries are due for another leap, now. Our stupid extension of copyright to coddle Disney Corp. and other bazillionaires IP (not for content creators, but for corporations) complicates things. You have to stay on the right side of the law. But still.
The past is a different country, they do things differently there. But if what you want to get at isn’t the struggle to communicate historical differences, if what you’re doing isn’t history, or historical fiction, or even if it is, you are free to tell stories that reach out to this moment in time.
An award winning editor I know told me that they ended up buying the stories that they couldn’t stop thinking about. This process takes time. Longer times for longer stories, often. Were they still thinking about the story, days later? Weeks later?
Those were the keepers.
Memory is a Darwinian space. There is a lot that we love that fades as fast as the flavor from a stick of chewing gum. Procedurals that can be binge watched leaving only a handful of images behind. Big Fat Novels that instantly erode into summaries shorter than the blurbs on the back cover.
And so part of my process includes thinking of things and not writing them down. Thinking of things and then seeing if they survive the passage of time. If they don’t drown in the torrent of images that my writer brain coughs up constantly.
What I call the kaleidoscope.
I’ve wondered sometimes if I might be described as ADHD, after having kids with that diagnosis. Our strategies for managing boredom and difficulty with routine are similar.
The kaleidoscope inside my head, bright moments of stories, climaxes and turning points of various sorts, have to be tamed, harnessed… without being broken. Becoming milestones between the dotted lines on a map.
Theres no shortcut, between the milestones. Well I mean there are. Tapping together the Ruby slippers; the deux ex machina, narrative summary, the prose version of the montage. The title card reading Ten Years Later.
But that doesn’t change the fact that you need story in your story, steps between the leaps, rising and falling action. Nobody buys tubes of Oreo frosting middle and eats them. You need the cookie. Single stuff, double, stuff, triple stuff, but still, stuff. Cake and Frosting.
Maybe your final milestone is pure epiphany. Maybe it’s character change we can believe in. Or preservation of character under duress. It could be a plot as intricate as a victorian pocket watch, the case popped open to reveal the perfect gleaning works.
In any case, your plot is a kind of map, and you’re going somewhere. Physically or mentally or emotionally. Maybe all three.
And in life and in story you’ll remember the high points and not the mundane details that link the high points together. That’s the work of life, the job of prose, and the chaff of memory, all the bits that abrade away and drift off, unwanted and unloved and absolutely vital.
Mostly… but sometimes it’s the little details that stick. Odd moments. Nothing plot beats stuck deep in narrative valley that are the parts of the story that remains.
I remember one of those editorial truism, that the beginning of a story hooks the reader, the middle holds the attention and the end sells the thing. Your brain will erase a ton of middle, the middle is thing that got you to the end, that made the beginning and the end make sense; but the middle is more than the means to the end. It has to be.
Otherwise the reader catches a glimpse of a miserable person on deadline filling out a form in a cubicle.
In the end, you do have to give readers something. Something the story has earned, for them. Something of the proper scale. Sometimes it’s mostly the journey. Sometimes it’s the view from the summit of Everest.
Anyone who knows me just did a spit take while reading that headline. Cue laugh track.
Hey. That’s what makes it a challenge.
100 days. Starting now.
Gonna project sunshine and fucking light.
I remember a study… so, toxic masculine stoicism isn’t a good strategy for getting through life, but there is an analogous inverted condition, of seeking solace in re-living trauma that makes some people sicker.
Of course, this is dangerous to generalize. It evokes someone barking ‘get over it!’ at the clinically depressed or shrugging off suicide danger signs.
I’ve wallowed in negativity and spirals into doom since my teen years. I’m probably wired this way. At any rate, there are things I can do to avoid making my negativity worse.
So I just deleted a negative paragraph. Right here, right now.
Hah.
Those old enough to have watched Stuart Smalley, the SNL character remember cringing, because you stared into the eyes of that sad sack and knew nothing that dude told himself in that mirror would do a lick of good.
Welp. That was negative! About Stuart. Who is:
Not me.
A joke. Not about me.
By a dude accused of sexual harassment.
I am one of over nine white males my age who haven’t been accused of sexual harassment!
So. Much. Winning.
Kurt Vonnegut, in one of his novels, wrote about a character that told holocaust stories as if he’d lived through them to anyone he could make listen. Absorbing and re-radiating that trauma at a personal level. The Holocaust was real… but he was lying.
Whoa, that escalated quickly, but in the current era, with Godwin’s rule on hold, I’ll allow it.
The rational part of my brain, the sadder but wiser part, feels compelled to acknowledge that publishing is hard; finding readership is hard; winning and not winning awards is hard; finding like minded writing friends that don’t tread on your nerves can be hard; writing and finishing and editing and submitting things is hard… but people do it. Saved that paragraph with four words at the end.
Hah.
Unlike dancing or boxing or playing football you can keep at it in your 50s.
You can’t really lose, unless you stop playing. Sure you haven’t won. Yet.
But there are people who break through later in life.
Like me. I broke through. I have published stories in the three SF digests. All three. There are genuine making a living professionals who only publish in one or two. Or in none.
I’ll spare you any more personal affirmations. That’s my one. This whole post is just another overshare but I’ll allow it. Its intentions are good.
Because at the bottom of the well of despair, there is this thing I have experienced a few times in my life, a kind of absolute freedom. Pure perverse joy. When everything feels impossible… you can do anything you want.
It’s sort of like those people with the broken sleep schedules who debase themselves back to normal by marching around the clock the wrong way round.
It’s a kind of grinning, feral glee, a love of life and creation rooted in its absurdity and futility. The terrible beauty in the capricious world all around us. The camaraderie of the foxhole.
I think maybe I’m there again.
The last time I was here I did very well. Not that I recommend it as a strategy?
What the hell. Whatever works.
I turn from the mirror to fix you, yes ,YOU, with a stare that skewers your soul.
Troubled narcissistic oversharing middle-aged white guy with white beard is looking at you.
You can do this. You can figure out what works for you and do it. Ignore people who are doing this in ways that make no sense to you, creating paths that you can’t follow. Find your own path. Be rigorous and ruthless but don’t bang your head bloody against someone else’s wall.
You can do this.
Maybe… not everyone likes you. That’s okay. Gather together the support you can find in your networks. Build those networks with care.
Protect your head.
Buck up. Remember the contestants on Ru Paul’s drag race, who say they didn’t come to the show to make friends… they came to win. Be fierce. Love yourself. Like yourself. Be okay with yourself. Transcend or ignore the self. Something. Figure that shit out.
Everyone knows that Star Wars borrows visual inspiration from the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Right?
I studied art in art school a long time ago, and had the one great professor there. (That’s as many as anyone deserves to get.) Larry Bakke, was the man’s name, and he had a rumpled suit, a dark scraggly beard, and gravelly voice, which he attributed to shouting at the students who insisted at sitting at the back of the auditorium for no goddamn reason at all.
He had one rule. Do not read the Daily Orange in his class, the student newspaper. He didn’t like the rustling sound it made when people turned the pages. He wondered how people could read a paper he could finish in three minutes for a full hour, too, but it was the rustling that drove him crazy.
One class later, he barked at someone hidden behind the DOs unfolded pages, “You, in the second row, leave now! My TA awaits you outside with your drop slip!”
God I loved this guy. My very own art-school Paper Chase inspired bastard.
He was about the idea of cultural literacy, the ways in which high culture infected popular culture and the ways in which culture was the lens through which we saw the world, the way art became reality.
Bakke states his thesis during his first lecture of his trilogy of interlocking courses, Art History–mandatory for all art-school students, Aesthetics and Advanced Aesthetics, optional. Bakke told us that while art in the nineteenth century was about nature, and retinal depictions of the human and natural world, art in the twentieth century was about art.
Full stop. Art was about art, had been since the turn of the century more or less, and if you didn’t get that, you were simple. Bakke would teach us the language of art, so we could do more than grunt about whether we liked any a given piece or not.
My aesthetic professor’s point wasn’t just about this episode, but it’s title. And what that revealed.
He had a complex lecture whose punchline was the the Star Trek episode Who Mourns for Adonais. This little bit from wikipedia perfect illustrates what Bakke is talking about.
The title is a quotation from the poem Adonais by Percy Shelley lamenting the death of John Keats, which is loosely based upon A Lament for Adonis by the Greek poet Bion. A part of the episode is shown in a scene in X-Men: Apocalypse.
So we see this theme, echoing down the centuries from ancient Greece, in a poem and another poem centuries later and then in Star Trek and then that episode turning up as a bit of window dressing in a big budget Hollywood film decades later.
Bakke’s thesis was that art was used by the powerful as a kind of weapon, to subliminally shape and control thought, and if you were ignorant of this, of the referents, of the weight of these traditions and this history of this language we all know, if only subconsciously, you were dangerously illiterate.
So you could be manipulated by art. Or you could understand it, know it, place it in context, appreciate the echoes. Get the bigger picture.
Art was important. He would show us, later on, clips from nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, and show us, again, how its imagery would be re-used at the end of Star Wars.
And now, as a writer and, uh, artist I guess, I find myself locked in a conversation with Science Fiction itself. The genre in which I have read one thousand or so books.
I am peering inward at the world SF created inside me. It’s unexamined assumptions. The genre’s lies and omissions and cultural blinders. The genre’s promise and positivism and relationship to progress and our technological future. Alongside the unfolding of history, the world SF helped make.
I’m currently beset by a supply side pulp hero spacemen falling in with progressive anthropologically sophisticated gender fluid utopian. Both stuck in the here and now wondering who the hell they are, where they came from, and what in the name of fuck all they are to do with the rest of their lives… knowing now what they learn from each other.
I don’t know if I’m shipping fan fic or doing the Alan Moore thing of reimagining fictive universes so deeply that I am making art about art. ‘
Or really if there is any difference between the two.
God I hope this one makes it through the meat grinder. Wish me luck.
They have been a part of my creative process… forever. The structure of a workshop, pace-setting by peers, deadlines, feedback, sense of an audience, and face-to-face human time, has been vital to me doing anything. Getting anywhere. Publishing my fifty stories and handful of novellas.
I am a profoundly lazy day-dreamy person. I need an office to make me work, but of course, as a writer you have to build that office from what you have available.
But workshops have shelf-lives; people come and go. There’s drama. Writers are odd, and some of us are toxic and keeping a group workable is a hard and thankless job.
The group I inherited in the 90s broke up after my Clarion, in a mix of personal and professional conflicts. I miss some of those people to this day. And for a time, I was the leader. Writing the most. Talking the most. Hosting the group.
Some of us are no longer on speaking terms. One I still workshop with. Another is a pen pal.
Writing relationships are like this. I guess all human relationships fall into these categories now. Non-people. Facetime people. People as texts, mails, and maybe the occasional voice or video call.
I love the workshop, every workshop I’m in, but as I reach this point in my career, what is the best use of my time? Peer group workshopping? Writing on my own and freelancing in an unrelated field, to make some cash?
Or writing and teaching?
The only professional writers I know have told me this about teaching.
Don’t do it. Full stop. You’ll write much, much less. Your career will be derailed forever and you will be doomed. You do remember how lazy you are, right?
A writer I know, a pro novelist, said this:
There will be one student in every class who will suck the joy from your body the way the salt vampire drained red-shirts on Star Trek. You’ll end up with painful aching extraction rings all over you psych. You will embody, all that is wrong with writing and publishing and teaching and perhaps, all humanity, to this guy–and it will be a guy– who will explain this to everyone trapped in your classroom. This is why he signed up for the course.
A Clarion teacher I chatted with recently mentioned not making a living with their writing / teaching combo career. Top of the field person.
But as I stare down the barrel of my approaching fifty-seventh birthday, I find myself dreaming about it. Listening and lecturing and moderating. Doing the workshop stuff I do in a slightly different way.
My parents were both college professors. Maybe it’s in my blood.
But… nothing in fiction has come naturally for me. Workshops made my own writing visible. Workshops revealed the beating heart of fiction. Workshops allowed me to see a story and the words on the page in a kind of double vision, as a continuous waking dream and as a series of abstract squiggles, reams of disorderly code designed for a fault tolerant information processing platform made of meat.
Increasingly, as I have struggled to become a more commercial writer, the sacred, holy quality of the work, the meaning of it, and its relationship to the meaning of my own life, has taken center stage in my own creative process.
Fucking me up, big time.
Other than the family which no longer needs my undivided attention, there is nothing else in this world more important to me than stories. Other writers stuff. Established writers. Aspiring struggling writers. My own efforts.
After invoking the ‘10,000 hours to mastery’ thing a few times, a friend has pointed out, with characteristic grandmotherly kindness, that Malcom Gladwell’s idea is, in a word, non-scientific. Or rather, wrong.
