Storytellersunplugged

By
Richard Steinberg for Steve Savile

“En kedja är inte starkare än sin svagaste länk.”

Steve Saville is off showing us all – by example – how to be a human being; so I’m gladly filling in for him today, as Brian Knight will this time next month. As many at Storytellers Unplugged have volunteered to do in the coming time, for as long as it takes Steve to get back to us. Why? Why will we (who all are overburdened with work already) take on the added burden of a second essay in a given month?

The answer’s quite simple really: because as humans, the price for our admission to humanity requires it. Because as writers, our commitment after that to our work and our personal world, must be to other writers.

It can be a dark and hostile world out there, with fanged shadows gibbering at us from the impenetrable shadows that linger in the corners of our soul and the edges of our perception. On rare occasions, an editor, an agent, a friend or loved one will be there to help you through the literary shadows and death-pits. But, for the most part, if you choose to be an honest by-God writer – of novels, books, short stories, essays, songs, plays, poems, whatever – you will make your way through the gloom and despairscape by yourself.

There is you and the page (or monitor) and that’s it.

Terrifying.

Exhilarating.

Lonely.

Unless there suddenly appears a light – or a series of lights – that may or may not illuminate anything of import, but at the very least lets you know that you are not alone.

In the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

I make no claim (even remotely) of being a “great man.” I’m a writer who has had more success than most and considerably less than some. I’ve been gifted with a certain talent, worked my ass off to gain a certain technique. I’ve been blessed with an agent/manager who is also my primary reader/editor and my dear friend, and I’ve had to work harder than a so-called “white collar” worker ever should to promote and sell my writing.

But eleven years as a solely living off my writing income writer has placed me in a position to be one of those lights.

That’s why I’m here at Storytellers – courtesy of the gentle and stylish persuasions of fellow contributor Janet Berliner, and the class & patience of fellow contributor Dave Wilson – to take my place alongside your road to publication along with twenty-nine other lights. Twenty-nine other writers of novels, short stories, computer games, musicals, graphic novels, textbooks, and most everything else.

But dear, gentle readers, there’s more to it than that.

I’m here – in the midst of the finest literary company I have known for a great many years – because a writer (more successful than most, considerably less than some) was there for me.

I spent days lost in the pages of Writer’s Digest; not so much in the articles as in the quotations pages. I was desperate to learn something, anything about the hardest part of being a writer:

How to capture magic, then display it – not brutalized by its capture – to the world?

And there never seemed to be an article about that.

Then, one day quite by accident, in of all places a cycling magazine, I found this:

“You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell,” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott’s response to a young and struggling writer of his time who was also seeking to capture and display a little unbruised magic.

He died before I was born, after a troubled life and only a modicum of professional success. But there he was, speaking to me – from his heart to mine – lighting my way for at least a little while.

And, in the end, that’s why we’re all here; thirty lights from different parts of the country/world, from different genres, different ages, genders, economic standings, politics, even different viewpoints on writing.

Because all the lights shining in a row in just one color would put you to sleep, not wake you up.

And waking you up is our good willed intention!

We all have our own secondary or even tertiary reasons for doing this; for adding another assignment to our already overloaded worksheets. Mine include wanting to think more about the process of writing, and to try to improve my rather abysmal essay skills. For some, the secondary reason is better exposure (by osmosis) of their product, or to take advantage of the opportunity to hang (beit in a cyber manner) with others of our ilk . . . particularly since ilks such as ours are kinda hard to find unmounted and not hanging on a wall.

As our primary motivation is an understanding that as someone was or was not there to light our way, we all have a responsibility to help light yours.

Many of our Unplugged Storytellers work full time jobs that consume their time or pay more of their way in the world than their writing does. Off the top of my head I flash on John Rosenman being a fulltime College Professor (as is Stan Ridgley) Justine Musk is a full time Mom which means a fulltime referee with greater demands on her than Arthur Mercante or Richard Steele ever had, Dick Hill is the top audio reader in the audio book field, and David Niall Wilson spends much of his days as an evil computer genius.

But they all, we all, somehow find time to be human flashlights for Storytellers.

Because as storytellers we all needed a little light in the past, and most assuredly will again in the future.

Writers owe writers.

Talent is a gently blown kiss from God.

Technique can be learned from any number of good books.

Inspiration, well . . . inspiration can only come from someone who has groped their way in the dark – who may still be groping along but is able to shout back to you in your dark about what it is you’re going to face, that they already have.

As a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, would be poet and awkward essayist, who has been published on every continent on the planet, I have learned more from reading these said sooths on a daily basis than I had in the years before. These Writing Lights are GOOD!!! LISTEN TO THEM!!! They will teach you, beseech you, direct and inspire you to find that inspiration which combined with talent and technique leads to Heaven or Hell, but definitely to someplace other than we are.

The primary goal of all writers, to move the conversation.

Beth Massie taught me about living in reality while reaching for illusion.

John Skipp reminded me to: “share the fucking love!”

Dearest friend and angel/demon on my shoulder, Janet Berliner, constantly reteaches me that you can’t write about life from memories that you don’t have.

Weston Ochse brings us tools for interpreting what is into what should be, or might be, or can be.

Justine Musk challenges and provokes exquisitely.

Thomas Sullivan regularly shows us all the criticality of passion and elegance.

John Rosenman understands writing like a coroner your insides; but his dissections lead us to such wonderful constructions.

Jeff Marlotte and Brian Knight who normally appear a day before and a day after my regularly scheduled column, challenge me by their lessons to work to exceed their insights.

And David Niall Wilson – our monthly leadoff hitter – has such a savage affection for writing and writers (eloquently displayed in each of his essays) that I cannot be uninspired after reading him.

I won’t go on and name the rest of these thirty spectacular lights, there’s not the space or the time. You’ve read – or should have read – them already. But please know that our presence here – unpaid, to dispel a popular notion of many – is, in the final analysis, because we have stood where you now stand.

It’s often dark, cold, frightening, lonely, perilous, confusing, frustrating, angering, and dispiriting. It can feel like you are making this journey in a vacuum that none has felt before.

It can taste like day old failure.

It can feel like a vise winding inexorably closed around your soul.

It can look like a black miasma that threatens to consume you whole.

But don’t worry.

Writers owe writers; and there are, at the very least, thirty lights here at Storytellers Unplugged that will be there to gently or harshly (as the lesson may merit) help get you through to that moment when you suddenly and quite unexpectedly realize all the shit and pain and doubt and frustration and despair were worth something.

For me, that moment came three days after the release of my first solo novel.

I walked into a Borders in Stony Brook, New York intending to talk to the manager about a possible signing. I’d already received my carton of books from Doubleday, had gone through the heady air of seeing my name and picture on the dust jacket and my words printed within. I’d even been given one of my most treasured gifts: a leather-bound first edition of my first novel.

So I walked into the store without looking for the table I knew my book would be displayed on; instead moving to the back and the Manager’s Office.

Then I saw it.

On a shelf, near the floor above the carpeted kick plate, was the dark blue cover with electric green letters of my novel, The Gemini Man. But what stopped me cold, took my breath away so much so that I had to stop and work to regain myself, was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck sitting right beside it.

Steinbeck . . . Steinberg. I’m sure the clerk who stocked that shelf thought nothing of it. How could they have possibly understood what it would mean to a writer, filled with doubts, passing by on his way to pretend to be confident to a bookstore manager?

But I knew instantly what it meant, and the power of that understanding stays with me to this moment.

It meant that whether or not I succeeded, was judged commercially successfully, was reviewed well, or sold three books and no more, I had taken my place as a link in the chain of writers that stretched from me back to the first cave dweller that had a thought and preserved it in stone.

“En kedja är inte starkare än sin svagaste länk.”

Swedish (in Steve Savile’s honor) for: A chain is only as strong as its weakest point.

Take your time, Steve. We’re all here for you.

And, gentle readers, we’re all here for you as well . . .

. . . and are honored to be. So that one day you too might take your place as links in the chain, and might one day become a light, shining for another literary traveler frightened of the dark.

But until then . . .

Believe!