When You're a Jet, You're a Jet All The Way

Up until a year ago I had a different website to promote (and I use that term ironically) a comic book series I was working on at the time.  On that now defunct site, the artist and I also ran a weekly webcomic in addition to our superhero venture.  Useless Degrees At Work starred ourselves and was all about trying to get a superhero comic published.  In one of our very first webcomics we brainstormed how we might attract traffic to our site and eventually become such a phenomenon that Marvel would come knocking with handfuls of cash.

Like most of the conversations we had in those early days, we can now only laugh at our childlike understanding of the process which we had embarked upon.  We didn't have the first clue about marketing online content.  I had some vague idea about needing to include words that are regularly searched on Google but that was about it.

USELESS DEGREES AT WORK (Cody Andreasen & Morgan Wolf)

I realized today when mentioning the title of this blog to someone, that I hadn't advanced much further since then. (Titling your blog after your proclivity for somewhat obscure punctuation marks does not exactly jettison you into the mainstream.)  I still have very little idea what needs to go into online marketing.  It is partly this complete lack of understanding that makes me shy away from the idea of self-publishing--because I feel unequal to it.  While I might be able to publish a blog post--I don't know that I have the skills (or personality) required to hustle my way to sales in the vast sea of self-published material.

Since my digital skills are fast being out-stripped by my toddler relatives, I have found myself consigned to politely knocking on traditional publishing's locked doors.  Does it have to be this way?  No, I don't think so.  The world is full of stories of people who defied the conventional path and through hard work and perseverance hacked a life for themselves out of an unfriendly wilderness.  While that sounds very inspirational--TED Talk worthy, even--it also means it is very hard.  As in, almost past the point of believability, hard.  Like, if my life were a movie, people would be walking out at this point because it was both boring and discouraging.  (That's why the hard work scenes in movies are always montages set to music--you've got to keep the audience upbeat about the protagonist's chances.)

The fear with self-publishing is that it is somehow settling for less. It is the implication that you couldn't cut it in the big leagues of traditional publishing--your work doesn't stand up to scrutiny--and that you are therefore having to resort to self-publishing after exhausting every other option.  You will certainly find this attitude expressed by many within the publishing industry.  There is also the fear that you will somehow damage your chances of becoming a successful writer by walking down the self-publishing path.  I know these attitudes exist, but I am beginning to wonder how justified they are.   It isn't as though traditional publishing hasn't polished its fair share of turds for publication, either.  And, just because something sells, doesn't mean it has met some high water mark for quality.  While there are no gatekeepers in self-publishing--you will certainly find a wide variance in quality--there are also no opinion makers.  No one else arbitrarily determines what is 'commercial enough' or speaks to the cultural zeitgeist.   The success of your work rides on the merit of your ideas and the value of your structural format.  Mostly.   Then there arises the question of marketing.  How do you get your work sampled by enough readers so that you can eventually support yourself? If you are like me, you joined Twitter because you read enough stuff online telling you should connect to those in the publishing industry that way.  I have seventeen followers.  I once hit eighteen, but I guess that individual got bored and left.  If I have to support myself off those seventeen, it's going to be a lean living for a long time.

I think writers assume that the marketing question will be answered by traditional publishing--by the budget and expertise of those already established in the industry.  This might be the case, but perhaps not to the degree that we might expect.  The number of literary agents looking for writers with established social media platforms (Read: a large following on Twitter.) speaks to the changing nature of the game.  Even traditionally published authors need to be their own promotion department to some extent.

The perpetual teeter-tottering back and forth over whether to self-publish or not to self-publish can really be argued sensibly from either position.  And, as a writer whose publishing credits are minimal, I am not equipped with the insider knowledge to understand the industry's complexities in order to make an informed decision about which way to jump.  Should I really be so afraid of the self-publishing track?  Because part of me has begun to wonder if the whole situation is really just a turf war between Traditional Publishing's Jets and Self-Publishing's interloper Sharks.  There's been a lot of name calling back and forth and pretty soon we're going to have to have a rumble.  Until they sort it out, I'll probably just be at my desk.

Six phrases from Anne Lamott about Writing

"Puns, for me, are not playful.  They are just about rage." 

I recently attended Donald Miller's Storyline Conference in San Diego and had the privilege of hearing Anne Lamott interviewed at one of the pre-conference events.  It was nourishment for my writing soul.  It was validating and encouraging and challenging.  She talked about the process of writing and how it involves wrangling all of your neuroses and paranoias as each one tries to distract you and dance on centre stage.  She talked about the unforeseen, yet inevitable hypochondria as well as the negative self-talk that can be crippling.  I felt like I had found a kindred spirit.  Someone who, like Dorothy Parker, can say with her tongue planted firmly in her cheek that she hates writing but loves having written.  And yet, despite all of these somewhat negative sounding characteristics of writing life, she talked about writing as a calling--a sacred trust--an honour.  It was the love-hate-love talk of real experience.

"Being a writer is a debt of honour.  Just do it, because otherwise you'll feel bad." 

Anne spoke frankly about the need for validation and how a writer will never find it 'out there'.  She talked about differentiating between the desire to be a writer and the desire to be published. It was a message that I desperately needed to hear once again because as much as I find fulfillment in the pain-staking process of writing--I also regularly fight the battle of justifying my work to my real and imaginary critics.  You think, "If I could just get published, people would stop doubting the validity of what I am doing and stop asking when I am going to 'start working'."  You think that publishing will be the thing that protects you.  Even if you make no money at it, you think that you'll be able to hold your head up because you can say you are published.  (At the very least, you imagine that people will stop feeling like they have the right to ask what you are doing for money.  "Prostituting myself.  Why do you ask?")

"You are never going to get the validation you crave.  It isn't out there.  It's in the writing."

Every publishing story you read to encourage yourself through the depths of writer's depression inevitably has the opposite effect.  They end up being about the debut author who wrote some story down on a napkin, never revised it, sent it unsolicited to some literary agent and wouldn't you know?  Six publishers had a bidding war for it.  The napkin story just took off and everyone loves it and the movie will star Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.  Each of them will likely get an Oscar for their performance. (Everyone except Leo, of course, because he predictably gets shafted year after year.) It is hard to remember that those stories are the exception, not the rule.  It is hard to keep your perspective about the value of writing.  It is hard not to feel like a fraud and failure and not wonder if you've given yourself a case of carpal tunnel syndrome just for kicks.  (Because why else is your left hand feeling weird and tingly while your right hand is stone cold like a corpse's?)  Sure, those napkin stories exist but they are like those people who can seemingly take drugs without the addiction ruining their lives.  They are the goats that lure the sheep to their destruction.

"It's an excruciating industry because such great things happen to such awful people."

Writing, like anything worth doing, takes a lot of effort.  Just the repetitive act of sitting down to write is a battle every single day.  Why is it so hard?  I don't know. Why is it so hard to make yourself go workout? Why is it so hard to eat good things rather than junk? We know what we should do, but we'd rather not do it. We would rather waste our time doing anything else.  Every time I succeed in doing the right thing, I feel like I deserve a standing ovation--except, I'm usually alone but for the cats, and they aren't a species to waste praise.  But I keep fighting the battle, sometimes winning, sometimes losing and wasting my day on email and Twitter and despising everyone I know on Facebook.  Eventually, after a lot of hard work there is something to look at.  At long last there is evidence that you don't waste more time on the internet than the average cubicle dweller.  Here is a manuscript.  It is a heady accomplishment.  It feels like you've hiked to the top of Everest against all possible odds.

But it is the days after this victory that bring about a new variety of disconsolate confusion.  You thought that writing and reworking your manuscript into something coherent with structure and heart was going to be the most difficult part.  And it was, in a way.  However, you slowly realize that those were the challenges that you had the stuff to meet.  You can write.  You can edit.  You can heartlessly cut out great swaths of excellent material that no longer fits.  You can do those things even if they feel really difficult at the time.

But trying to sell your writing to someone else? Somedays I think I would rather just bleed out.  There is no passion; no sense of accomplishment in this process.  It is like applying on jobs that don't exist.  Querying makes you feel more insignificant than you ever imagined you could feel.  You might need a support group just to get through it.  You will certainly develop a thicker skin.  However, just when you think that you're untouchable, a form letter rejection will throw you into a pit of despair filled with the ugliest words imaginable.   And, worst of all, you are shouting them at yourself.

"You don't give up until the miracle comes."

After a few wasted hours of stomping about and saying that you're done, you quit--you sit back down again.  Stop chasing publishing.  Stop chasing validation and justification.  Just chase the words down.

"All freedom comes from discipline." 

 Just get back to writing.

The Blank Screen Looming

I have a bit of practical advice to offer; hard-won after slogging through countless horrible first paragraphs. I want to share it because I think there must be other writers out there like me.  We're not the ones that can say irrational things like, "I sit down to write and hours pass and I feel so fulfilled!" I'm not one of those writers. Bless them.  I am the kind that is wracked with self-doubt and the desire to do anything but write. But we keep at it because perseverance and discipline are worth something.  We keep at it because, miraculously,  it is somehow possible to say things on a page in a way that life doesn't allow.  It means something.  Even if only to us.

Starting to write is just terrible.  You sit down to that horrible blank screen with the cursor blinking accusingly;  or that empty page that seems full of promise when it isn’t sitting right in front of you.  You start clicking your pen or tapping it.  You poise your fingers over the keys and start to write and the first word has a typo.  Such a bizarre one that you can’t quite believe the disconnect between your fingers and your brain.  How wide is that gulf?  You start to wonder if maybe you have a tumor and it is slowing but surely eating up the healthy braincells and turning them into monsters.  You erase the offending word and wonder if maybe you need to Google brain tumours to see if that might be what you have.  You know this is a stupid and scary idea.  But like that awful movie you want to change the channel from, you just don’t because...well, you can't bear to go back to that blank page.  Forty-five minutes pass. After sufficiently scaring yourself, you’ve already moved on to Who Wore It Best or movie news or something else totally irrelevant in order to put internet history distance between yourself and the scary medical pages.  

In a frantic wrench you close the Safari window and stare momentarily again at the blank page.  “Write!” You command yourself.  “Come on! You phoney!”  You stare again at the page.  You realize then that you have absolutely nothing to say.  That story you were working on yesterday?  You can’t remember what you were trying to do with it.  Suddenly everything seems like crap.  Everything you've already finished probably needs to be rewritten.  “Well,”  You try to pep talk yourself, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and all that.”  The page still stares at you--platitudes don't take you very far when you are trying to jump start your productivity.  “What is the matter with my left hand?” You wonder. “Do I have carpal tunnel already?”  You are almost overcome with the desire to Google carpal tunnel just to see if you have the symptoms.

No. No.  You need to start writing! You have a word count goal to meet.  You have got to start.  You write a sentence.  Any sentence in the hope that it will get the juices flowing.  Again, it is full of typos.  What the heck?  Your fingers feel so disconnected from your brain.  Almost shaky.  Out of practice.  You start writing crap.  It is horrible and melodramatic and you know that you will have to delete it.  You know it because if you died and someone found it, you would be, actually, literally, mortified.  (As an aside, can we just all agree that the word ‘literally’ is misused to an embarrassing degree?  No joke, I heard a very intelligent person who was working on their masters say that their roommate was ‘literally on another planet...’.)

All of this brings me to my advice.  Before you start writing on anything that matters, open a blank document and just start typing.  It turns out, like the rest of your body, your fingers and your brain need a warm up before they dive into the actual work of the day.  Just start writing.  It will probably be stream-of-consciousness garbage that no one else should ever read, ever--but it will get your fingers and brain functioning.  Don’t correct your typos.  Don’t edit as you go.  Resist that urge and you will see how your fingers warm up and you stop making so many mistakes.  It is astounding how obvious the need to warm up is. I now keep a separate warm up document and add to it every morning.  It usually takes about 700 words to get my fingers and brain in shape to work.  And, come to think of it, it is usually those first 700 or 800 words that feel most like blood from a stone. 

Honestly, I don’t know how I missed out on this crucial bit of information.  You know you need to warm up for a couple of minutes before working out.  You know that you can injure yourself if you suddenly exert your muscles without any attempt to prepare them.  It was like that time in my junior high gym class when I arrived late and missed the track warm up. When my group had to run the 100 meter dash, I just started sprinting after standing around and talking with my friends.  I pulled a muscle and determined I hated track and field.  Why do we think that our mind or our hands operate on different principles than the rest of our body?  Warm up, writers.  I promise it is a good idea. At the very least, you won’t scar yourself psychologically by looking up medical conditions on the Internet.

The Hard Way

There is only one way to learn the lessons that you really need to know: The hard way.

There is a story that makes the rounds of my family history wherein I, as a young child, told my mother that I didn't need to learn things the hard way. (Like my brother--it was implied.)  I could learn from other people's examples.  My mother was impressed with my wisdom on such things and unsurprisingly, I started to define myself as being someone who could look at the example of others in order to avoid failure.  Now, this was a great strategy for situations where failure involved really negative things like drugs or promiscuity or what have you.  It was, however, far too narrow a definition of failure to be really helpful in the long term.

Failure, it turns out, is the foundation of success.  Certainly, there are flash in the pan success stories, like the time at the Stampede where I managed to putt a hole in one without ever having picked up a golf club before.  But that hole in one--like so many random instances of success--could not be duplicated.  I couldn't do it again because I hadn't done it thousands of times. I hadn't taught myself through perseverance and repetition to hit a hole in one.  I didn't have the form or the muscle memory to do what was necessary when it mattered.  My hole in one was a flash in the pan.  A lucky shot.  There was no skill; no talent.  Just a random occurrence.  Those moments of brilliance are more of an argument for divine interference than any skill on the part of the individual who somehow managed in that moment to do something amazing.

My narrow definition of failure has been widening.  I used to be terrified of it.  I thought I would be judged wanting if I made a mistake.  I thought it would be better not to try at all than to try and fail.  I thought that if I failed at something the first time I tried it, it meant that I had no natural talent for the activity and should stop attempting it before I embarrassed myself.  So, if things didn't come easy, I didn't want to do them.  I didn't grasp that working at something (even if I never achieved any kind of excellence in it) was its own reward.  It was a mountain conquered.  I never conquered math because I didn't want to try and fail. Instead, I defined myself by the things I wasn't.  I just wasn't good at math.  I wasn't athletic because I didn't like the physical discomfort that came along with exertion.  I'm still not good at math--but I could probably apply myself and find that I was better than I thought.  I am athletic because I have put in the time.  I have put in the effort.  I have forced myself to be challenged each day and seen myself improve.   I don't want to be defined by what I am not because I am afraid of failure.  I don't want to take the easy way--because the easy way sometimes teaches lessons that should never have been learned.

Writing has made failure my companion. Time has made it my friend.  Failure is opportunity.  Failure is what true skill is built upon.  Failure is a part of the constant repetition that teaches you how to succeed.  You make the mistakes so that you learn how to avoid them in the future.  It refines you.  It tests your emotional and psychological fortitude.   It breaks you so that you can build yourself up better than you were before.  Sure, give yourself a few minutes or hours to feel down about it.  But then, persevere.  Push through so that you can fail at a higher and higher levels.  Define yourself as one who perseveres through difficulty.

 Learn the hard way so that you really learn; so that your victory isn't just a momentary spark.

You can't be a Pony at Horse Camp.

For a film about a bunch of young toughs, the boys in THE OUTSIDERS sure spend a lot of time crying.  As far as I could tell when I watched part of it on TV the other night, not a single one of them ever shed a tear for their idiotic names.  If I were known as Pony Boy, Two-Bit or Soda Pop, I would have some angst about it.  Perhaps that is the reason they end up in the Greaser gang--their silly names forcing them into thug life--desperate to prove themselves against their ridiculous sobriquets.

Watching it, I felt like cranky old Mr. Griffin from my week at horse camp one summer.  "Cry a little louder!"

Gang life is tough.

Horse Camp is tougher.

WTD?

I just don't know what I think of Charles Dickens.  I want to like him. I really do, because the man can turn a phrase and his description is some of the best out there.  But seriously, I am 500 pages into Bleak House and the plot is still maddeningly obscure.  It is like he got so wound up in laughing at the creation of the ridiculous Messrs. Boodle, Coodle, Doodle, Foodle…all the way down to Zoodle that he forgot he was writing a story about Esther Summerson and her mysterious parentage.  (At least, I think that is what the story is about--but I could be completely mistaken because chapters on end will pass without the slightest mention of her.)  Mr. Guppy, Mr. Snagsby, the Turveydrops and goodness-knows-who else are all so elaborately painted that I have forgotten their relation to Miss Summerson completely by the time their introduction has run its course.  Or, perhaps I never knew their importance.  Perhaps it was never revealed--and that I erroneously assumed I had missed the major connection that would bring all of these detailed descriptions into focus.  I simply don't know.  There has been an cavalcade of characters (each painstakingly characterized) with little to no context of why I should care about them.  They appear, almost as though the plot of Bleak House might be about them entirely; rattle on for tens of pages, then recede back into the mists having yet to make a secondary appearance.  Bleak House is one of those books that make me feel like a careless and inattentive reader.  As though I couldn't be bothered to remember from one chapter to the next who everybody is and why they matter--putting pay to the phrase "What the dickens?"

But Dickens still has about 500 pages left to wrap it neatly up together and so I will withhold my yay or nay opinion until the last page.  However, my previous criticism of the classics needing more editing still stands.  A new writer would never get away with that sort of thing today.  The feedback is always to tighten the plot, the dialogue, the pacing--so that everything included serves to advance your story.  This doesn't seem to have been as important back in Victoria's day; which brings me to another book I read, Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters, by N. John Hall.  Correspondence is an epistolatory novel which means it is written in the form of letters.  It is the story of a man who inherits a collection of letters written by several famous Victorian authors and through reading them, becomes enamoured with the writers and their works.  Correspondence, therefore, is a love letter to the Victorian writers.  Unfortunately, having recently slogged my way through George Eliot's Middlemarch and Charlotte Bronte's Villette and finding them much encumbered with tangential and incidental information that did little to serve or advance their respective plots--I couldn't share Hall's enthusiasm for the Victorians.  But I recently read in an article in Maclean's magazine which stated that our collective I.Q's have gone down fourteen points since Victorian times. So, perhaps Dickens et al. just make me feel like an inattentive and stupid reader because I am one. 

Spending too much time reading? How to kill your desire in hundreds and hundreds of pages...

If you read the websites of literary agencies, (which I do) you will often be given the advice to read widely.  There was a time when I considered myself a voracious reader.  However, last year I undertook a project to read all of the unread books on my shelf.  This is what I discovered: They were unread for a reason.  The undertaking almost killed my desire to read completely.  Invariably, all of the books that comprised my To-Be-Read pile were hundreds and hundreds of pages long.  There was Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Villette and  The Aenied--to name a few and they almost destroyed my love of books.  Perhaps if I had interspersed some more enjoyable titles into the mix, it wouldn't have been so devastating to my reading habits, but instead I slogged away--sometimes only a page at a time--and then almost stopped reading fiction altogether in an effort to make the pain stop.

I have learned a few crucial things as a result, though.

1) Certain 'classics' need a lot of editing.  And, if there is an abridged version of the novel you are about to pick up (Anna Karenina, I'm talking to you) you should most definitely read that version.
2) Not every book deserves to be finished. Some books are hard work but they are rewarding in their own way.  Others are not.  The Aenied was not.  Am I in a Greek and Romans Studies class? Nope? No reason to finish it then.  Anna Karenina had some reward, but man, she made me work for it.

Since I want to reclaim my love of reading, (and obey the dictates of literary agents) I have undertaken a new reading program and signed up for a library membership in order to accomplish it.
 Reading for pure enjoyment.  As a result of this new rubric, I've ploughed through several titles.

-Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
-The Age of Miracles by Karen Walker Thompson
-The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
-The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Now, instead of dreading my bedside table, I look forward to what is next.