We all have negative voices in our heads. What they say varies from person to person. In people who are depressed, or anxious, or bipolar, these unwanted thoughts can become part of a downward spiral that drains the joy from everything, including writing.
If you are wondering why you can’t write, which you used to love, and also find yourself uninterested in anything, except sleep, you may need more than writing advice.
If you are a person of faith, be careful about getting treatment for depression based solely on that. Here are some things to look out for. (this link is to a Christian site that might help you figure out what to avoid. In general, I’d say look for someone secular, but that’s me.)
Okay, now that you know you aren’t clinically depressed, you’ll find that your automatic internal voice still says things you know aren’t true about your writing…thing. Career. Avocation. Hobby. Calling. Reason for living. Whatever you call it.
You can talk back to those voices, challenging them with more rational statements, that you will find that you will start believing over time, if you are like most people. Why does this work?
Because brains are stupid. Seriously. This shit sounds so dumb. But it works.
I am not a therapist and this is not therapy, but this practice can work help you shut off the useless self talk.
Thirteen Things I Focus on Now.
My writing isn’t me. It is a thing I make, that I can start or stop making and still be me. I can change how I make it and what it is about, and still be me.
My publications don’tcreate my value as a human being. I am the same person whether I ever publish another word or not.
Self-directed work isn’t easy. When I choose to do this I exhibit strength of character, because I have no sure knowledge of any external reward. I have done a lot of this work. I am strong. I can keep doing it as long as I find it meaningful. I never have to stop. And I don’t have to continue if it makes me miserable.
Other people write more than me. That is okay. That does not diminish my value.
Being upset about making money with fiction is unproductive. I may one day make more money with my fiction. I may not. My worth as a human being remains unchanged.
I have no control over what happens to a given piece of finished writing, beyond submitting it or publishing it myself and doing standard due diligence. I can’t make others read it, understand it, nominate it, love it, remember it. Once published my piece of writing has a life of its own.
If I want to be an indy, I will have to learn a lot about marketing. And keep learning, because indy changes constantly.
Every individual rejection or disappointing indy launch is only one data point. Any individual rejection could be pure noise. In some cases, dozens or hundreds of rejections may turn out to be noise. My strategy must look at trends and large amounts of data and not be paralyzed by individual events.
The fastest way to collect more data is to finish and submit or publish more work.
Submitting work that isn’t as good as I can make it in a reasonable time frame isn’t a winning strategy. I must find a balance between speed and quality I can live with.
Books that break and mix genres and defy norms and reader expectations can be successful, but this doesn’t happen often. When it does, it’s magical. This is how new genres are born. But it’s an uphill battle.
Writing what you love is a good way to find energy, but…
Other people may not love what I love. This doesn’t diminish them or me. Not all writing is for all people.
If you have self-esteem issues, writing about imposter’s syndrome is oxy-moronic because it presumes one has accomplished something in the first place. Complaining about it is humble bragging about not taking your own awesomeness seriously. And now you’re begging for sympathy from many who would kill for the rewards you’ve reaped.
It’s hard not to translate this as, ‘please compliment me now.’ And it’s hard for people desperate for their first success to empathize with your inability to feel yours.
But every sale, every market broken into, creates this brief period of relief from imposter syndrome, and it’s how you know you suffer from it. For a few hours or days you feel like a ‘real writer.’ And then the damn imposter thing rushes back in like the tide.
Then… absurdly there’s also survivor’s guilt.
Folks newly validated by the tiny handful of professional short fiction editors desperately what that the validation to be meaningful; at the same time, to embrace it wholeheartedly is to embrace a system that is making about 90% of their writing friends temporarily frustrated, intermittently sad, or consistently miserable.
Here’s a buncha bullets, things to think about, as you wrestle with these two feelings. Here are things to tell the folks not yet at the stage to feel like an imposter. Tell them these things as you turn away from your guilt.
Your good story is wrong for the market. I have sold a ton of stories to Asimov’s, and still get rejected there. I still write stories she knows aren’t for her readership. How does she know? She gets letters. Responses. Reader polls. She knows her readership better than me. The solution to this is to keep reading the market, if you enjoy it and want to be there. If you don’t, you have nothing to feel bad about. I’ll say it again, read the market. One more time… read the market.
The market bought six stories just like yours last week. Your stories can be triggered by current events, the way you interpret the event metaphorically is influenced by genre. If we wanna say our work is 30% the moment, 30% genre conventions, and 40% magic secret sauce, you are creating stuff with a 60% overlap with everyone else. A topic, a theme warrants a certain number of stories per issue and no more. Editors may be stocked up.
You haven’t broken in yet. (This is the hardest to hear.) Magazine editors are always looking for authors because there isn’t much money in shorts so many of their writers move on to novels. But making a living as a novelist is damn hard, and writers can work shorts into busy day job schedules, so lots of people just keep churning out shorts. Editors end up with stables of people whose work they like, who the readership likes, so buying their stuff makes a lot of sense. The reality is, you are competing with hundreds of people for a very small number of ‘new to the magazine’ writer slots.
So. Confront your survivor’s guilt, by helping your fellow writers to act on and believe these bullets! Get them to read the markets they want to be in (especially if you’re publishing there!) Nag them. If they realize their work doesn’t fit? They can stop torturing themselves! Find other markets, or write novels, or indypub or write something different.
The other two bullets can be defeated by brute force. It’s a numbers game, and some are luckier than others, but eventually, you break in, and then, the system is tilted a bit toward you. So. Write more. Submit more. Support your workshop friends to do these last two things, as long as they are doing the first.
The two feelings, imposter’s syndrome and survivor’s guilt are at odds with each other, represent different distortions you must address to prevent them from robbing the joy from your writing life. Having both at once is a sign that both are distorted–they are mutually contradictory.
You aren’t an imposter if your survival is meaningful, non random. There are no lottery winners with imposter’s syndrome. You bought the ticket. You were lucky. That’s all winning a lottery is.
If you want to think your publication is random, you won the lottery, if you want to feel guilty for your success, fine, you can do that, but if you also get imposter’s syndrome, then obviously your brain is fucking with you.
Your happiness really has nothing to do with how much or little you publish, or the fairness or unfairness of publishing. In any possible permutation of success or failure you can feel any number of difficult and negative, and baseless emotions.
Rejection is frustrating, but it in itself doesn’t make you unhappy. You do that to yourself, with your expectations. Success feels good, fleetingly, but you can suck the joy out of that too, with imposter’s syndrome and survivor’s guilt. You are doing that to yourself as well.
I know it sounds stupid, but you have to seek out rational responses to these feelings and study them until you believe them, honor them, remember them, repeat them, challenge your internal voices with them in a litany that eventually diminishes them.
But for me, it’s about paying it forward; helping your fellow travelers, for me, is how I stop worrying about my own Imposter thing, which is why I lay this out here. Your mileage may vary.
To write enough, given your own talents and deficits, to become a successful writer, you must protect your head. Don’t suck it up. Don’t tough it out. Confront this shit. I quit fiction for eighteen fucking years. I’m the expert on how not to think about these things. and if all this seems silly to you, if nothing I have written here connects to the way you think, dear God, count yourself lucky.
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If you found this essay inspirational, interesting, amusing, whatever, join my mailing list. I mean, if you want to. I can’t make you. But I’m asking. Because you read this, and that means I sorta love you. Um. Okay, this got awkward. Boundaries! This is the link to my mail chimp page.
Setting goals is one of those human potential, secrets of successful people, business best practices that the artist inside us distrusts instinctively.
A rigid goal might subvert a process!
A goal might obscure the forrest for the trees!
Nowadays though, as working writers share their lives in detail, word counts, workflows, goals are all around us. Nanowrimo demystified the ‘pumping out a shitty first draft’ thing. Writers of my generation may have imagined a golden creative life that didn’t include nine-to-five agony, production schedules, meetings, outlines, external inputs. Writers blissfully pecking out masterpieces lashed only by beneficent muses… Ah. The dream!
The reality is now more visible.
So, tabling the dream of taking a month break from you day job to bang out a bestseller that makes you rich, what goals are left?
TL;DR. Live. Read. Research. Write. Get feedback. Edit. Submit. Repeat.
Every bit of writing advice you’ll ever get boils down eight things. (if we throw learning into living or researching. Heck. Maybe it’s nine things.) Do all those things and you’ll probably get wherever you are meant to go.
Bye now. Drive safely!
But if the devil is in the details, when does one attempt to do something like getting into SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America, or any other professional writers group with a difficult entry requirement?
Typically, this is after one has written a bunch of stories, gotten feedback, submitted a few to many places, maybe had a little interest, maybe sold one or two to non-professional markets.
All of a sudden you are looking for goals. Milestones.
What good is SFWA as a goal?
So I googled some generic business person goal self-help and read a ton of them. I translated them into SFWA specific thinking, but before we get to that we will answer an even more basic question.
If your immediate and unambiguous answers are negative, you don’t like the work in these markets and you don’t want to be in them don’t focus on SFWA as a goal.
You can still submit to these places. The great thing about SF is that as consolation for that no simultaneous submissions rule of most major markets, SF doesn’t do reading fees.
Submissions cost you nothing but the response time.
Maybe you are a part of this scene, and you can’t see it. Never count yourself out. Knock on all the doors. But if you don’t read and don’t like what’s being published and collected today, don’t waste time and energy beating yourself up about not selling to these places. It may not happen.
This doesn’t mean you aren’t a real writer.
If you are naturally a long form writer, concentrate on novels, for trad or indy. Most short indy sells badly, so just write novels if they’re in you; if you are attending Short Story University, consider working in a single consistent universe so that the shorts might find an audience after your novels in that universe start selling. (Again, you don’t have to take my word for anything. Try selling your own indy short spec pic if you want. Amazon doesn’t charge for publishing, but ancillary costs, cover and copyedit and formatting can cost plenty, and the charges pile up high for every title.)
Advantages of setting SFWA as a goal include.
Clearer Focus: The nebulous goal of ‘becoming a real writer,’ or ‘becoming a pro’ can now be turned into concrete activities with their own logic, workflow, and timelines.
Time Management: Having committed to the goal, the more time you put in the better, obviously, but other time issues include submission strategies, the response times of varying markets, coping with the genre’s prohibition of simultaneous submissions, creating strategies for dealing with slow and moribund markets, etc.
Peace of Mind: Having decided SFWA is a goal, and you’ll be doing the reading, research and work involved resolves some of the existential questions about your writing. Like, should I give my stuff away for free on Wattpad, or the web or at Amazon? No, that won’t get me into SFWA. Should I submit my story first to a new market that says it pays well? No. Wait on that. You can try them eventually with stories that have been passed on the markets that will get you into SFWA. That new market may be certified…. Keep an eye on it. Read the first issues. See if its a place you want your work to appear. SFWA isn’t everything, you may still want to submit there immediately. But be mindful of this choices impact on the goal.
Clarity: See above. You are accepting that the SFWA community is doing work you think is worth doing, work you want to do, work you want to be a part of. You are particularizing your love of writing, and your love of Spec Fic as it is currently being written today. Focusing the activity toward this goal.
Straightforward Metrics: As your stories are accepted, or your indypubbed book is selling, you approach your goal in discrete measurable steps. With a single sale, you can gain access to SFWA as an associate member, and while you cannot vote on the Nebula, you will gain access to the private SFWA forums. Getting into SFWA as a voting member subsumes this intermediate goal.
Freedom from Doubt: Should I quit spec fit and write horror? Mainstream? You know I could just write novels. I should just write novels. Wait. Am I good enough yet? I don’t know. Oh, I want to join SFWA. I’m halfway there. I can include SFWA and shorts in my long term plan even as I work on novels, too…
Community Goal Support. (referred to in some business person lists as ‘ease of communication.’) Goal established, patch into networks of people who share the goal. This group will gather and share information about themed anthologies coming down the pike that are open to all, or closed anthologies that are open to people you may come to know, people who may invite you in, or tell you who to ask for a pass. People who will share their data points, about editors likes and dislikes, response times and strategies. Duotrope and Submission grinder makes some of this less vital than it once was, but there’s still no substitute for the word straight from the folks in the trenches.
So, that’s the pre-amble, the prequel trilogy / Triplanetary to my Getting Into SFWA series. Next: Finding Markets, Submissions Strategies, and Weathering the Storm.
I feel like Stuart Smalley writing this piece. You should probably read it anyway.
When I was working on my psych degree at Syracuse University a long damn time ago, my abnormal psych professor told us about the diathesis-stress model of mental illness in the then-new DSMIII, diagnostic and statistical manual.
Basically, diathesis-stress posits some innate inner quality that predisposes you for some mental illness, but stress is what triggers the illness. Common sense, but if you read the link above, you see that once you pile enough observation on top of common sense you’ll reach non-intuitive insights.
Stress can be bad things happening to you. Stress can also be brought on by purely voluntary attempts at doing hard and traumatic things. Imagine a firefighter, who has chosen her profession, but who must, every day, gear up and send herself into the fire. Let’s say she’s never injured, physically. Oh, but she sees some shit. And she knows… she knows what might happen.
That’s stress.
Now, I don’t want to overstate this… but getting published and making money as a writer, any kind of writer, is hard. Very hard. Super duper hard. It’s stressful.
Writing can be as stressful a thing as the depth of your passion for it.
The more you want it, the harder you push, the more stress you experience. God I know this is simple, but I’m only getting this thirty years in, so indulge me.
The harder you push, the greater the stress.
I was in a crisis, when I went to Clarion twenty years ago, because I wasn’t getting the reception I wanted for a group of stories. Whether or not I eventually published these stories professionally isn’t the issue. (Brag. I did.) The thing is, I had let my identity as a writer slip past my recognition as a writer and I existed in a world of pain and cognitive dissonance. I became embittered.
One of my instructors confessed that she had only considered writing as a career as the world nodded her on, with publication and awards. She hadn’t gotten out ahead of herself the way I had. This of course, made me feel much worse.
Deep in CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, I hit on an idea that is again, commonplace, but which I have internally sneered at. The idea that your self esteem is, or should be, contingent on nothing.
You see this in memes, about your self worth not being dependent on something. I always rolled my eyes at these memes. So. Hitler should have self-esteem? Me when I am doing nothing should experience self esteem? What a sociopathic joke.
So here’s the thing, and it knits together Christianity, Buddhism and CBT.
If you tie your self-esteem to anything, work or family or friends the state of the world, you are setting yourself up for disaster. If your work is the source of your self-esteem, then you will suffer, because no matter where you go, you’re failing to be the person the next rung up the ladder. For me this has meant, so far:
I hate myself because I never finish anything.
I hate myself because what I finish is crap.
I hate myself because the thing I thought was good was called crap by my whole workshop.
I hate myself because this thing I wrote was hated by that one guy in the workshop who hates everything. Because none of us are publishing much, I think he is right.
I hate myself because something that my workshop liked was called crap by a pro.
I hate myself because the thing a pro agreed was good was rejected by an editor.
I hate myself because something that me, my workshop, and my pro friend, all agreed was good, was rejected by all the editors we collectively care about.
I hate myself because even though I publish 10% of what I finish and submit, it takes years to find places to publish stories, and I don’t make much money doing this, and only selling 10% means I make, literally, a tenth of a cent per hour. (see how the goalposts moved suddenly?)
I hate myself because my published work–I now sell half of what I write–is never nominated for anything or anthologized or honorably mentioned in the back of the one big antho that everybody has read forever.
I hate myself because now that I get mentioned in the back I never get inside. Oh, I did get into one best of. But not that other one that’s older.
I hate myself because people who started publishing when I did now have successful novels and TV options, and I didn’t write a novel when they did. They did it. Why didn’t I?
So this is how far I got in this; at every step presume that I have achieved every goal beneath it.
Let’s talk about how this relates to Terry Pratchett. Here’s his Wikipedia brag paragraph.
The text reads, Tolkien’s Dead, J.K Rowling said no. Phillip Pullman couldn’t make it. Hi, I’m Terry Pratchett.
Look at the bio. Then look at the self-deprecating t-shirt. I’m not saying that Pratchett was consumed with self loathing. I am saying that if you make your self worth, your happiness, contingent on ANYTHING WRITING RELATED you will live in a world of pain. I have lived in a world of pain, off and on, in every creative endeavor, and I have spent my most of my life on creative endeavors, artistic, literary, hackery, entrepreneurial.
Talk to me, read me, and I’ll urge you to keep writing; I’ll share inspiration and stories of eventual ‘success’ (there! I’m doing it!) but you have to know that success never makes you happy. Remember Curt Cobain? And a billion other beloved suicidal geniuses?
My clarion instructor told me, that in the end, the world’s opinion on your work is only a greek chorus. And that is exactly what it should be. It’s okay for your goal to be becoming a great writer, or becoming a critically acclaimed author, or becoming a popular author, or becoming all three at once, even thought that almost never happens, just read the goddamn shirt, goals are okay, but if you are telling me that your happiness, or worse, your continued existence on this planet is contingent on some specific success in some to you reasonable time frame, I need to direct you to seek solace elsewhere.
I would never say ‘seek professional help’ because nothing makes anyone avoid professionals as much as this suggestion, but I’ll tell you that I did seek professional help and it got me out of this bind. Several times in my life.
We can support each other as writers, and accidentally enable this untenable thing, this mentality, as a family member might kindly enable a substance addiction.
So, if a pro tells me that every voice outside of the one in my head is a kind of greek chorus, I am allowed to define success however I want. Wait.
I am allowed to define my success however I want. I don’t need a professional’s opinion.
Oh, and you know why Christianity, and CBT, and Buddhism all have this idea, that the chattering nattering voice inside you whispering terrible things about your work ethic, your lack of talent, must be minimized? Washed away in the blood of forgiveness after repentance, or sometimes silenced with focus on the breath, or spoken back to with the calm and rational voice you might use for a friend?
Because it works. Shame and blame and punishment and self loathing and mental illness don’t help you become a better person. Or a better writer. This isn’t a moral observation. This is raw practicality, the birthright of successful and canny sociopaths, and the insight of great religions and the gold standard for secular insight-based therapy, all wrapped up into one package.
This is how you get shit done.
You will do whatever it is you are trying to do if you stop wasting your energy wallowing in unhappy, negative, counter-productive thought. Whether it’s being a better person, being a better writer, or selling what you write.
Or all three at once.
If you found this essay inspirational, interesting, amusing, whatever, join my mailing list. I mean, if you want to. I can’t make you. But I’m asking. Because you read this, and that means I sorta love you. Um. Okay, this got awkward. Boundaries! This is the link to my mail chimp page.
There are two kinds of people. Those who are writing, and those who aren’t.
The ones writing are writers. The ones who aren’t, aren’t… at the moment.
Many folks not writing at the moment don’t feel bad, though. They could start writing again at any time! They plan to! They know they will!
Professionals, people who make a living, kinda know they will write again, pretty soon, to avoid starvation. So. They have that going for them.
Wait. Is that good?
I have a friend who is a big-five horror novelist, teacher, writer, and all around great guy. He advocates never quitting your dayjob. Of never having to write something you don’t want to write, for money. Because that happens. A lot, for the non-rock star pro writing class, ie, most of us. He has been working on his second novel, for some time now. I think he has 1000 index cards. It will be great. It takes as long as it takes.
That’s one way to do this.
I have another friend who publishes between two hundred fifty thousand and a million words a year, which is basically a short story you might read in twenty to forty minutes every single day of the year. Of course she doesn’t write short stories, but novels in the 30-60k count, in series, in a few romance sub-genres. What is that? 10? 15? I’ve stopped doing the math on her.
They’re both writers.
I have friends who have never published, who have written for years. Some have unique perspectives and are having a hard time finding publishers because of this. They’re writers.
On indypub forums I have read the stories and explored the work habits of a new generation of pulp writers, working in many genres but often romance, as romance is more than half of all fiction sold. People who have escaped day jobs… at Walmart. In other big box stores. In food service. Office temping. House cleaning. People in places with little opportunity. Making a penny a word works, for them, a hundred bucks a day, to start, working 8 hour days a day in the mines, then an 8 hour day writing, the sleeping a few hours, every day. Once they have strong back catalogs, they reach the point where they go full time.
They’re writers too.
Try to let go of Writer as Identity. Embrace Writing as action, as the act of writing, as the act of research, editing, plotting, outlining, however you do it. It’s okay, to see your life as material; it’s okay, not write, too, it’s okay to call yourself a writer, and never write. But. That feels sad to me. I think part of the word aspiring is that. Often. People who don’t let themselves think of themselves as Writers and thus, who never feel they are truly writing. For some, the identity must precede the action. So the action is delayed and diminished and never fully begun.
What I’m really saying, to the aspiring writer is that by writing you arrive. The blank page waiting before you is the exact same page that has confronted every writer since the begining of time. Every writer you have ever read sits beside you, at computers, holding notebooks, at battered typewriters, holding quils, manuscripts stuffed into pockets on battlefields, holding ball point pens in shitty diners, at tiny desks in sheds, dictating into phones, standing in line daydreaming with focus, packed into subway cars, lounging in palatial hotel suites, living in trailers, in mansions, in rented rooms, in cardboard boxes.
When you write you’re a writer. So stop aspiring and sit down and write something.
It doesn’t have to be good, for you to make it better. It doesn’t have to be good, to learn something from the act of writing it. It doesn’t have to be published, to have been worth writing.
Let yourself do this. You aspired. That’s the first part. The next part is easy. If you let yourself. If you let go of expectation, of ego, of identity, of fear, of jealousy.
Let go. Write. Read. Live. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Whatever your destination, every step brings you closer, every word appearing on the page. Like this word. And this one. And so on. Write with me.
You are a writer.
So write.
If you found this essay inspirational, interesting, amusing, whatever, join my mailing list. I mean, if you want to. I can’t make you. But I’m asking. Because you read this, and that means I sorta love you. Um. Okay, this got awkward. This is the link to my mail chimp page.
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.
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.
