Storytellersunplugged

This is another piece experienced writers may want to ignore, since its observations are self-evident to anyone who’s actually experienced the business of writing. My rambling on the subject might drive you mad. Trust me, I know who you are. Some of you are my friends. It’s okay.

Or, you might be offended by certain characterizations I make about the profession. But it’s just one person’s opinion, so don’t sweat it. I’m offering this one to folks who may still be struggling with what it means to be a professional and an artist.

Let’s start with the happy part. I like writing. I love living in the world of my imagination, exploring dreamtime realities and translating them into stories for this world. I also like seeing my name in print. I know, it’s an ego thing, but there it is. It makes me feel like I belong, however tangentially, to a club, to a community of other writers and readers who dig this kind of stuff.

Then there’s reality.

I don’t love writing. I don’t want to spend any significant part of my life locked up in a room writing stuff I’m not personally invested in. Non-fiction doesn’t interest me. Neither do media tie-ins, or whatever genre is hot at the moment. I like doing Storytellersunplugged because it allows me to examine the process of writing, which I hope will help me write better stories, and because it lets me share things with other writers so I feel like I’m passing something along. But other than that, I don’t feel the drive to write about other things in life that I love. Which is bad for business, if I was running a full-time business over here.

I also lack an easy facility in the art of writing. The stuff doesn’t necessarily flow quickly and coherently. I need time to think, feel, observe. My instrument – my set of verbal skills, or perhaps the connections between the different parts of my brain – is in need of some oil and the gingko just ain’t doing the trick.

So lack of love for all aspects of the physical and intellectual act of writing, combined with a certain level of talent and production capacity results in limitations which must be overcome if I’d wanted to make a living at this game.

I still have hopes. There’s always hope. A character or story may take-off, connect with a larger audience, and suddenly an income stream is generated and I can make a living off of what flows naturally from my imagination.

But there is also reality.

When I was young and hanging out on college campuses, a friend related a story about a teacher in a writer’s workshop in a small, exclusive college who pointed out to the class that there weren’t any real writers in the room because real writers were already working and making a living with the craft.

Harsh. And not entirely true. There are plenty of great writers who have come out of the writing workshop industry that has emerged over the last few decades to replace, in part, the pulps and magazines that were the writers’ old learning grounds (and, like modeling schools and gyms and the host of other strip-mall consumer industries, to service and profit from both those who genuinely want to write and the general whims and delusions of a bored and restless public – part of the hustle of business) .

And there are great writers who enjoy and thrive in the workshop environment, who need and depend on peer feedback to make their stories better. Chances are, these people would still be the informal, unpaid storytellers for their families and communities if they were born before the nineteenth century developments in printing technology that opened up opportunities and markets for product – newspapers and books – and the job of writer.   If they were lucky enough to be born into the right kind of family, they might even have added their voices to the literary movements throughout history and also made some money.  Or, they could have been part of the Church’s service industry.

But for those born to write, in this day and age, I think the teacher was partly right. There are writers out there who have the talent, passion and business sense to jump in and make it happen. They don’t do workshops. They sell what they write and don’t look back.

On the other hand, if you jump into the writing game and it ain’t working right from the start, if you’re not connecting immediately with editors and audiences, with the work conditions and range of tasks you might be doing, then there are realities to be faced.

You need training. Yes, you may have talent. Passion. Discipline. Those factors knock out a lot of people right from the start. But there’s more work to be done. And maybe the work feels different from what you thought it might be like. Adjustment must be made.

So storytellersunplugged and other writer blogs and workshops and writing programs and books and magazines and the whole vast network of training and advice is out here waiting to help improve your skills and craft.

But the business aspect of the job of writing is less publicized. Talking about contracts and relationships with agents, editors and publishers can get touchy. There are all kinds of special deals floating around and no one wants to give up their good thing – some writers have a word rate below which they won’t work, or ask for the money up front, or have their own contract or other standards for doing business. Of course, these writers are good and reliable enough to demand these things. But there are writers just as good and reliable who don’t have the same criteria for doing business.

The kind of business mind set I’m thinking about here goes beyond the “send your story to the highest paying market for its type and work your way down” kind of advice, though that is certainly a good place to start.

Advice on finding agents, contracts, publicizing books through tours and media appearances are also part of the business, but not the heart of what I’m trying to reach here.

What I’m thinking about is a kind a kind of entrpreneurial spirit, perhaps competitive or even predatory, a hustling attitude that incorporates a powerful belief in one’s work, as well as its value and its right to survive and thrive in the marketplace.

It comes naturally to some born with the talent to write. But the attitude has also driven terrific talent away from publishing (in my own journey through workshops, I’ve met a few people who were brilliant but had no tolerance for the rituals and ceremonies that come with putting a book out – for some, there’s just not enough money in the process to make it worthwhile).

The attitude embraces a curiosity about how publishing works, and explores opportunities to inject the writer into the system to make it work for one’s career. The hustle jumps on new technology, seeks out opportunities like a shark in bloody water.

Of course, the attitude can be comically inappropriate for writers without the skills and chops to back it up, just as the lack of some degree of hustle can be financially and even artistically destructive for the talented who don’t want to be bothered with business.

Agents, you say. They handle the business side. Indeed. Yes. They’re supposed to do that. But they’re also making a living off of you. Developing a relationship with an agent that works for both sides is not always easy. There is Tom Monteleone’s oft-told tale of proposing a novel about dinosaurs returning to the modern world through dna cloning, which his agent rejected because nobody wanted dinosaur books. Then Jurassic Park came out and Monteleone fired his agent.

In other words, handling an agent is part of the business of writing.

You could be like Thomas Pynchon, Michael McCarthy, J.D. Salinger and remove yourself from many public aspects of the business side of writing and still maintain a thriving career. If you’re good enough.

For perspective, let me end this segment with where I stand on the business of writing.

For starters, I loathe business in general, and particularly when it involves writing. It’s a failing, I know, like not being physically gifted but loving sports. Ebay bores me. I love money and the security and freedom it brings, but not enough to sacrifice the time to pursue other things that I love.  I went into the mental health field as a profession  in part because it’s not (so much) business.

I hate unenforceable contracts and the stone-faced lies and bullshit that come with them, banging on naive but enthusiastic publishers who don’t research or think through the money involved in publishing and make lots of promises and plans and wind up screwing everybody, or trying to get money out of the sociopaths and borderline personalities and, yes, the hustlers, who only want to screw creative types to make a buck.

I never wanted to make my living at the game. As I did my research when I was young, interacting with pros and editorial types, reading interviews and watching profiles on TV, I was…..hmmmm, how should I put it…..disappointed? Let’s leave it at that, for now.

At no point was I ever captured by the “romance” of writing, tempted by its freedoms, inspired by its rewards. And yet I always knew I wanted to write, and to be published. I wanted to tell the kinds of stories that I liked, and do them as well as possible so that they could live in someone else’s head. I also wanted be a part of that club, if only as the “unknown” person, the waiter, in a picture of famous writers of the time.

I knew at a pretty early age that what was inside of me wasn’t going to be a money-maker, and this has been confirmed at every stage of my life. And then, there were those stories of publishing atrocity – Philip Jose Farmer just had a retrospective in Locus, but I grew up with the story of his being ripped off, along with other wild tales from the pulp and magazine days. Man, the business of writing scared the hell out of me.

It seemed to me there were easier ways to make a living, and that if I pursued a career as a writer I’d have to stop writing the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. I didn’t dream about becoming an investigative reporter, or a copy writer, or what evolved into a technical writer. Using words in those ways didn’t mean anything to me.

My goal with writing evolved from the notion I had in high school about becoming a cult writer. Yeah, that was gonna be cool. Still working on that one.

I’ve published a bit. Consider myself professional because I focus on getting paid for my work. Even here, at Storytellersunplugged, though I’m not being paid to write, I’m learning, growing , listening to the long line of people here who’ve done things and been places I’ll never get to.  There’s a slim busines plan about researching my thoughts and feelings about writing so perhaps one day, I can make a little money teaching writing, or develop some of these thoughts into a coherent article or two. It’s a goal. But I still hate the business.

Yet I have to deal with it to get what I want. That’s part of being a professional.

Needs, wants, choices. That’s how I process life. But what do I know? Who the hell am I? What do real writers think?

I’ll leave you with some recent commentary I recently found:

Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, two old SF pros representing slightly different points on the optimistic/depressive scale, have been in the writing game for quite a while at a fairly high level; they also contribute a column for the SFWA Bulletin built on dialogues about various aspects of writing.

In an issue I have on hand (Fall, 2007, #175), the topic was “Abuses.” That is, the abuses writers suffer in the business. “I am hard-pressed even after all these years to think of writing as a ‘profession,’” might be the line that sums up Malzberg’s point of view. And Resnick frequently capped his explanations of various publishing cons with a variation of, “Well, you wanted to be a writer, didn’t you?”

(An important note, Malzberg also points out that it takes two to participate in any corrupt business practice – the perpetrator, and the collaborator; of course, the only realistic option in the publishing business world appears, in this column, to be not to try get published. And there are many days when this seems to be a perfectly reasonable choice.)

Last month’s Clarkesworld Magazine featured an article by the award-winning, sharp and sophisticated Richard Bowes, “I Like Writing But I Hate Being A Writer.” While not focused on the business side of writing, the piece does give a bluesy feel for the range of engagement a writer can have with the “profession.” The editor who commissioned the piece mentioned in his blog that his feelings are quite the opposite. For me, however, the title certainly sums up my state of mind.

Maybe I’ll come back to this topic again next time. If you want it to stop, petition Joe and Dave to throw me off the blog. Or send money. Yeah, that’s the ticket – send your cash contributions to storytellersunplugged and we’ll all share the wealth here at SU and I’ll stop talking about the business of writing.

Man, I knew I had some hustle in me……

.