What if they gave a writing career, and nobody came?

Except for the tip of the iceberg, this could be me.

Baffled: why isn't my novel on the bestseller list?

This article from The Baffler (link at the bottom) is way too long to even quote here, but it has some interesting ideas in it.

To a point.

I was irritated at the way she delivered a long-winded dissertation about how society makes everything our own individual fault and how narcissism/self-absorption is the only defense (paving the way for "remedy-of-the-week" packaged solutions, available online for a price), THEN she abruptly switched directions and wrote in a rather smug way about how practicing yoga/radical self-care has completely revolutionized her life, lifting her neatly out of the quagmire she has just written about.

She seems to be praising, practicing and extolling the very thing she was dissing only a minute ago.

It's the same feeling I get - and how I wish I could just stop reading these things - about articles I see on Facebook that talk about "The Miserable, Lonely, Traumatic Life of a Writer" - only to find out, near the end of the article, that the writer is either J. K. Rowling, Stephen King or a clone thereof. Meaning: yes, it was hell at first, but now I'm in the chips big-time, so I thought I'd throw you dogs a crumb or two of my deathless wisdom so YOU can drool over my unreachable success.

Hey! I was once like you, lonely, unsuccessful, stigmatized, and probably fat. I mean it! Then I joined another species and began to accumulate sales/literary awards like a snowball rolling down a hill.

I always feel the tide turning in these pieces - I know it's coming. It happens at just past the 3/4 mark. They're about to abandon us. Any time. Their compassion for us or whatever-it-is is about to evaporate. A Grand Canyon of exclusivity is about to open up between them and us. So much for their ability to "identify" with us literary peons who, if we finish our novel at all, will never find an agent; or who, if we find an agent, will never find a publisher; or who, if we find a publisher, will never find a publicist; and who, if we never find a publicist, will somehow, and mysteriously, never find ourselves at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.

Aim at 100 rejections, the articles say. Or a thousand! The implication is that if you persevere and persevere, if you never give up, never give up, never give up the ship, and (of course!) never take any of it personally, one day success will inevitably come. It simply has to, after all that perseverence, doesn't it? It's the law of physics or something.

But the awful truth (and I realize this is a totally taboo and unpopular thing to say) is that it might not: in fact, by the law of averages, it likely won't.  With every rejection you receive, the odds of success become slimmer, not fatter. It means more and more and more editors are telling you that they just don't like your stuff, increasing the odds that it is basically unpublishable and you should just go home and do yoga.

Saying this is the ultimate taboo because it makes you a party pooper. But I had a favorite line from a Moxy Fruvous song (until I found out, to my horror, that Jian Ghomeshi was in Moxy Fruvous):

"Everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing
But no one talks when the TV's on."

This was long before the ubiquity of self-publishing, not to mention all those talent shows on TV. The only point I am trying to make - and please don't throw rocks at me - is that for every person who performs on America's Got Talent and the like, hundreds or even thousands of people audition and are rejected. Each and every one of those people believe they have what it takes to win, to be a star.

They don't.

Does that mean you shouldn't try? Don't take advice from me, please - Ms. Three Failed Novels! At least I finished my novels, sent them out a billion times, found a publisher, and saw my books (all three of them) on store shelves. This filled me with satisfaction and pride. But that was that. All the other shit didn't happen. No New York Times. No glass slipper.  I did get absolutely glowing reviews for the first one, it was considered worthy of major awards and compared to Alice Munro, but nobody bought it. My fingertips just brushed the brass ring, but I wasn't able to grab the prize.

Why? Hell if I know. And it happened two more times after that.

So am I bitter? Don't know. A realist? Definitely. "It's always so hard to leave Paris," a friend of mine recently wrote on Facebook. Myself, I find it hard not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oh, I know that collecting 100 rejections is an exercise in self-toughening that might serve you if you were ever in a plane crash in Antarctica. But they might just lead to 101, or 102. There is no guarantee you'll have a sudden, remarkable breakthrough that will cause millions of people to buy your book.

And believe me, if they don't BUY it, you've pretty much failed. Publishers have to go home and buy groceries too, and if they keep taking a bath on your books, they may be a little bit reluctant to take a bath on the next book, and the next. Everyone has to survive. I am not blaming publishers, at all. In fact, I'm not blaming anyone. But unless you are in the tiny fraction of a percentage that makes a go of it, these are the facts as I see them.

As for self-publishing, well. . . I won't get into that, except to say "ditto, and double".

Is this gloomy? Or realistic?

You decide. But you will note that I have not stopped writing.

http://thebaffler.com/blog/laurie-penny-self-care

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

SHUT UP!: Advice for New Writers

So what do I have to report? I get pulled back and forth – or in several directions, at least – between setting up a cleanly organized, professional-looking blog (and they DO impress me sometimes) and the scrapbookish/bulletin-board-like mess I choose to keep. It is tenderly attended to and fed regularly, which I always think is the best/main thing about a blog. There is nothing worse than eagerly following a link, and finding out the last post is dated 2011.

But I always read these strident exhortations (mainly on Facebook) to never do the things I regularly do, i. e. have inconsistencies in it, stray from the (single) topic, and (gasp, horrors) use different fonts! One “how-to” article even listed specific fonts one must NEVER use, and most of them were fonts I use all the time. I use different fonts because I love different fonts. I match the font to the tone of the article. Why not? Am I selling widgets or am I selling chunks of my soul?

Most of my posts get fewer than 20 views, and I only have 39 followers, pathetic really, in fact I think it's the worst I've ever seen for a long-running blog, but I have to stop and think what it would take to get more views. Homogenize. Emphasize publicizing the novel (a lot) harder. (OR NOT! See below.) Even at that, it wouldn’t work because good luck doesn’t stick to me. My stuff is always obscure, but it HAS to resonate and express my own world view/soul. 

One would think, OK then,  it’s patently obvious that you need to follow your own path and forget about everyone else. Right, and lose money on all my novels and disappoint my publishers because I don’t know the secret handshake! Funny how things that applied in your childhood drag on and on throughout your life, haunting you. An outsider then, an outsider now, largely because I wouldn’t or couldn’t conform. I always thought (naive me) that publicity should pull potential readers toward the product, rather than push the product aggressively up their nose and down their throat.

I wish I didn’t have to do any of this at all. I am at the point in my life where I don’t need to be told I’m good. I know I’m good, and there is no ego in that. Why would I be wasting my time and energy, not to mention the time and energy of publishers and potential readers, if I was no damn good? But being good, even damn good, isn’t the issue here. If deep in prehistory the storyteller sat alone by the fireside with no one to hear his or her story, humanity might still be writing with a sharp stick dipped in a little pile of dog shit.

Lately I keep finding articles that exhort writers to stop doing certain things – the most recent one being, pushing yourself on potential readers via the internet. The title even contains the words SHUT UP!, a message to all writers who indulge in such blatant prostitution.  The article blasts the idea at us that if you want to sell the first novel (and I hear this over and over again now, as if it’s an anodyne against all evils in the writing field), then JUST WRITE THE NEXT ONE. They don’t explain how, or why, that undertaking will suddenly/magically burst open the barriers on the first novel and send it leaping up the bestseller list.

The subtext seems to be “you publicity whore, why do you even CARE how many copies you sell?” Either that, or once you stop caring about it, success will automatically drop into your lap, one of those New Age beliefs where you just have to wish on a star to get what you want. (The subtext here is that good writing will automatically find an audience, just because it's good. It amazes me how many people believe that.) Then comes the kicker – always – that the writer of the article used the internet copiously to sell her first book, because, though that was allowed back in 2006, you can’t do it any more because it is no longer 2006. It just makes you look desperate and like a know-nothing. 

Then comes even more of a kicker, the revelation that she already has several bestsellers out – likely some sort of homogenized series about dragons and witches, probably having sex with each other – and is much sought after for writers’ events, where “really, I have no control over how much awe they feel for me as they seat me at the head of the table”. Seriously – not a trace of irony in the whole thing. 

But here’s the kicker to the kicker: I went on this author’s Facebook page, and NEVER have I seen more sickeningly aggressive hype for her next book. Splat, splat, splat, splat, post after post after post slapping you in the face.  But hey – SHE gets to do this because she is already a bestselling author! I know if anyone even notices this post, they are likely to say something like, "belt up and quit being jealous," and /or  "just follow your heart, it won’t make any difference anyway”. (Or, assuming this is a wide-open call for advice rather than an expression of frustration, tell me just what I am doing wrong.)  But to avoid being caught up in this, to not care at all how you are rated (and everything and everyone is rated now in the most callous manner possible) is nearly impossible unless you wear blinders and ear plugs. We all must swim in the waters in which we are forced to live.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

My hero bares his nerves: hopelessness and hope in the writing life

When I renamed my blog after Harold's professional moniker, I made a vow to myself that I would not write "essays", that in fact I would write whatever-the-fuck I wanted to, always, because at the time it was all I had. So here lies a bunch of thoughts, along with a sinking, fainting hope, a glimpse of a deer; no, not a doe but a buck, magnificently muscled about the neck, which I feverishly pursue even in full knowledge of the spiked collar around his neck which proclaims, pursue me not, nor touch me; I belong to everyone, but not to you.

So. Lately on Facebook, which I have mixed feelings about, I've seen a few posts that speak to me, whether for good or ill. One particularly poignant piece was about a young woman, a university student, who experiences chronic low-grade depression which sometimes becomes disabling under academic pressure. Not one health-related agency in the school would help her, in fact they all looked either puzzled or embarrassed when she asked who she should approach, or just shrugged her off with "I don't know" (perhaps the worst of all, as if she was the only person in the world who had been diagnosed with some mysterious and untreatable disease).

What's that about? Is no one allowed to be damaged, to need surcease? Are we all supposed to be constantly stoking ourselves for the feverish race, the incessant jockeying for position (nowhere more in evidence than in academia)?  Or are people just craven in their inability to risk compassion?

I saw another post which frankly ravaged me, a poem I've quoted here several times:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

I know about that feverish chase, for it has occupied a huge chunk of my life to date. In writing a novel about the incredible life and career of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, I became enraptured, even inhabited. I felt I not only knew him, but was with him. (If that sounds totally nuts, I hope you'll at least read the book to find out for yourself.) And yet, there was always some aspect of him that was elusive, even unknowable.

Fainting, I rushed through the bracken, falling and getting up again, sometimes catching just a glimpse of the impossibly fleet deer with the glancing diamonds about its neck. Thomas Wyatt in his insane passion for the doomed Anne Boleyn knew of this, I am sure of it. The drivenness, the hopelessness, the failure that just stokes the fires of pursuit. 

Well, why not do something else, then? I realize with no small measure of horror that I'm really not much good at anything else. I have spent my entire life pursuing something that would appear to be doomed. Thus the Wyatt poem doesn't just speak to me: it screams in my ear, run. . . RUN!

And yet, and yet. I am still filled with a fizzy excitement about this book. I can't help myself. it relit the flame for me when I was sure I would never write a novel again, or at least one that I felt I could send out and sell. Blogging was a consolation, and, for a while, my longstanding gig as a book reviewer, until even that outlet dried up in the wake of nearly-nonexistent books sections filled with "canned" reviews. But surely I would never again allow the heartbreak of full-length fiction to take over my life. 

On Facebook I read of professional magazine writers who can no longer write for magazines, and I see why. I don't buy or read them except in my dentist's waiting room, but when I do, I keep searching for content and find virtually none, just the glossy flab of more, and more, and more ads. The actual magazine starts some 50 pages in, if it starts at all. Someone has deemed that readers want a brief chunked-up Facebook-type read, skip, skip, skip. I know I should not be so contemptuous of this, because the truth is I do it myself.

According to Facebook, and let's face it, Facebook is a different Facebook for everyone who is "on" it, things are pretty bad in literary-land, even in the once-comforting groves of Academe where you are no longer allowed to express your pain (perhaps part of the happy-face syndrome of social media). It's a crap shoot, though (more crap than shoot), and as people incessantly tell me, it has always been that way. A line from Dylan Thomas insanely jumps into my head: "My hero bares his nerves along my wrist". What does it mean? Jesus on the cross? Heroin abuse? Sex? Death? The Colossus that was toppled or washed away in a tide of booze? Thomas had every advantage a poet could have, was lionized and widely published and even (gasp) appreciated, and yet, like too many poets before/after him, the result of his "success" was that he went broke and died.

When I am in this turquoise/cobalt state I listen to too much Shostakovich, and as is normal for abnormal me, I fixate on one work and play it to death. Lately it has been the towering Fifth Symphony: not just any version, but the revered Bernstein interpretation from the 1960s. My hero bares his nerves, indeed. Bares his ache. I'm not sure what Shostakovich was like, though I remember reading that a great deal of his music was written for Mother Russia. Perhaps that even explains the triumphant ending of the searing, almost-unbearably dysphoric Fifth. OK, let's go major here, because really, we don't have any choice.

And the rest of the time he wrote movie music, which was probably kick-ass, and there's nothing wrong with that because 95% of movie scores are dreck. But he was keeping body and soul together, was he not? Nothing wrong with that. Or so it seems. We have no record of what he thought about it.

And as for Bernstein, once a magnificent bubble of brilliant ego, he deteriorated with the years, and NOT because after years of hiding he decided to come out of the closet. He deteriorated because, like Dylan Thomas, he drowned in alcohol, falling off the podium and propositioning young men at random.

Harold Lloyd didn't sell out, or at least I don't think he did. But in spite of the fact that he certainly didn't need the money, he made one last grab at a comeback in a strange film called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.  This was shot in the early 1940s, and if Harold's "boy" of the 1920s was dated with the advent of sound, he was downright archaic in the '40s, when Tracy and Hepburn were working themselves into a comic fever. It's not that he didn't look good - he did - but in a sense, he was a 50-year-old boy, a man trapped in amber and stopped in time whose career and love life had not advanced in more than 20 years.

I didn't like this film, nor did the public, but what ruined it wasn't just Harold's legendary clash with the smart and snappy director Preston Sturges (who is named Sterling Prescott in my novel). It was the opening, in which for the first time we see the Glass Character deeply depressed. I still can't watch it: Lloyd is a subtle, mercurial and often brilliant actor, which is the key to his comic genius, and when he plays depressed, it's depressed. It's painful. We don't want to see the Boy that way. The picture was supposed to be a continuation of The Freshman, but since when was the Freshman supposed to turn out like this?

He chased after a successful comeback, and ran and grabbed, and for all his phenomenal determination, he didn't win, the prize slipped through his fingers. To his credit, he did NOT drown himself in alcohol or otherwise go insane, but turned his formidable energies to other things, positive, life-affirming things,  including philanthropy.

Is there a lesson? I am no good at lessons, or I wouldn't write at all. I simply have to do this, though I still don't know what "this" will mean. It took me three years of pain to find a home for Harold, I was beginning to lose all hope, and now this, another chance! I'd rather feel the pain of success (with all its attendant horrors) than the existential funk of failure, scrambling around to find meaning in it all.

My hero bares his nerves along my wrist

That rules from wrist to shoulder,

Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,

Leans on my mortal ruler,

The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull

Ache on the lovelorn paper

I hug to love with my unruly scrawl

That utters all love hunger

And tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart

Tread, like a naked Venus,

The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;

Stripping my loin of promise,

He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from the box of nerves

Praising the mortal error

Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,

And the hunger's emperor;

He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

What your mother never told you about writing

If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.

Poppy Z. Brite 


Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?

Bennett Cerf

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. 

William Faulkner

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Gustave Flaubert


Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein 

It's tougher than Himalayan yak jerky in January.

Richard Krzemien 

Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.

Rosemary Mahoney 

A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populace with his pants down.

Edna St. Vincent Millay


Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Paul Valery 

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

Jessamyn West


I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. 

Oscar Wilde 

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.William Zinsser 


Easy reading is damned hard writing.

Anonymous

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Burn the chair! Burn the chair!

This is a chairy tale, but a nasty one, a Grimm with a bad ending.

I hate office equipment. I wish I could type inside my head, make the words float out on to the page or even suspend themselves in mid-air like in Stephen Hall’s Raw Shark Texts. Instead I’m left with typing, which is as awkward now as it was in the class I took in high school. Imagine being a typing teacher all your life, trying to teach a bunch of sullen kids a boring skill on the “qwerty” keyboard. This incredible anachronism, still almost universally-used, was designed when the typewriter was first invented and was meant to slow typists down, because the only way to correct errors back then was to spit on the page or cut the typo out with a sabre.

So. The chair. My office chair always sucks, and I’ve been through a few of them. There is always something seriously wrong with them. For years I played musical chairs with my husband. “This thing is made of vinyl!” I’d complain in the summer, peeling my shorts-clad legs off the seat like Velcro. So I’d get his fabric-covered one for a while, the one with hard plastic arms that bored holes in my elbows. The proportions just weren’t right on this thing, so I ended up with backache and fatigue.

Not to mention eyestrain. Let’s get into eyestrain, shall we? Being an author, I’ve had to edit manuscripts. Back then anyway, we used a marked-up hard copy and a computer copy and sort of fixed one using the other. So I needed some sort of stand to hold my papers, double-wide, and still see my monitor.

God.

I hunched and squinted as I tried to see the damn monitor, jacked up abnormally high to make it just visible while I shuffled papers.  I got used to agony in my lower back, the price of my art, perhaps. The truth is, I just didn’t know how else to do it.

“This thing is a piece of shit!” I’d cry in the winter, as the cold plastic froze my arms to my sides. So once again we went through the old switcheroo.

This latest chair, a garage salvage with a nest of spiders living under it, created more problems. I began to slide down farther and farther on my spine, at the same time hunching forward because I couldn’t see my monitor at all. “Why do you do that?” my husband would ask. “I need my paper stand.” “Why?” “I might need to use it again.” “Why?”, and so on.

Another switch of chair. Finally, when my bizarre posture had actually given me medical problems, I decided I needed a Brand New Chair that would fix everything. Since we’re cheap, and since they had a nice selection at a good price, we went to Costco. Like the Three Bears, I had to sit in each one to see which of them was “just right”.

Amazingly, it was the second one I sat in. Like a first-class airplane seat (and how the hell would I know what THAT felt like? I’m guessing), it just cradled my body, but kept my back straight. The arm rests were lavishly padded to match the curve of forearm and wrist and hand.

I! Loved! That! Chair! I loved it in the morning, I loved it in the evening, I loved it –

Then I got it home.

My keyboard rests on a tray that pulls out. Keeps the dust off n’ stuff (supposedly, but in reality my keyboard is just as filthy as everyone else’s). Every time I pulled up to my keyboard, the deluxe first-class arms of this thing pushed the tray back in.

But it got worse. The new chair wouldn’t go down far enough. I almost felt like a little kid with her feet dangling up off the floor. I could not believe this. “WHY WON’T IT GO DOWN?” I screamed. “It’s as far down as it will go.” “This was designed for a six-foot man!” “Why didn’t you notice that at the store?”

I didn’t notice ANYTHING at the store. My ass noticed it felt good, that's all.

The deluxe padded arm-rests were worse than useless: they were a hindrance. You don’t sit back and lounge in an office chair. You work from it. You keyboard, you mouse, you do stuff. You roll it forward and back. (And that’s another thing. That big plastic mat-thingie underneath the chair just kept sliding all over the place. The casters made dents in it  that the chair kept falling back into, and they were about a mile back from my computer. My wrist was in agony, like a toothache. Everything was wrong.

“So (sarcastically), do you want another chair?”

Bastard!

He had groused and grumped about buying a proper plastic floor mat with those little teeth in it to grip the carpet, refusing to even consider it because it cost something like $40. 00. I kept trying to explain it to him, how the casters were cutting into the rug. “Then pull the plastic mat back,” he said. “I’d need to do it every five minutes.”

I like my chair, I really do, and if I had a circular saw, one of those things with teeth all around it, it would be no more. Right now my tray with my keyboard on it has a shelf sitting on it, an old shelf left over from one of those really tacky particle-board book cases. My monitor has one under it too, to jack it up at least an inch to make up for the fact that the chair is too high up and can’t be fixed.

Now I am nagging him to PLEASE let me get a proper mat so the thing won’t slither and slide all over hell’s-half-acre like Bambi on ice. He gets this squinched-up, disapproving look on his face (I can read his mind: “God, what a waste of money”), doesn’t even make eye contact with me because I know he does not understand my needs.

He complains all the time that I spend too much time at the computer. I have this little habit of writing. In my entire life, I have had maybe two people understand what I do, and my husband is not one of them. He thinks I play at it. Everyone thinks I play at it, that I pretend and delude myself that I’m “doing something”. So how can my back hurt, I wonder? If it isn’t even “work”? And why won’t I come out of that room and go to Costco with him to look at bulk sausages and stuff?

To all but those two people, ANYTHING would be better than doing what I do, the waste of time. Even having books out is futile, isn’t it? Some sort of Hemingway fantasy? (And didn’t Hemingway end up shooting himself in the head?). Why do you need a special chair, for God’s sake, and a plastic floor mat with little dit-dots on it so the chair won’t buck and heave under you like a wild horse?

I threw my keyboard at the wall once, so that the underside is secured with masking tape. I have slammed innumerable mice, and thrown a few, which is satisfying because the cover pops off and the battery goes flying across the room. I can’t throw a chair, can’t lift the thing, would like to throw a husband but he is rooted seventeen feet into the ground. Not getting it. 

While I sit there mousing and hurting. Mousing and hurting.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

War is hell (but what is writing?)

WRITING IS HELL

If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.

Poppy Z. Brite

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?

Bennett Cerf

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Gustave Flaubert

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

It's tougher than Himalayan yak jerky in january. 

Richard Krzemien

Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.

Rosemary Mahoney

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Paul Valery

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

Jessamyn West

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.

William Zinsser

Easy reading is damned hard writing.

Anonymous

Ahhhhhh, JESUS, not one of these blocks of quotes again, all about "the writer's life" and what sheer hell it is to write and about how you must shed your skin and ooze out quarts of blood and etc. etc.

It's not like that. Not like that at all. At least, not for me.

I love to write. Sitting down to work on this blog every morning is more fun than going to the beach. Hell, the circus! I don't worry about the quality of it at all. It's play.

No one wants to hear this, but I have to say, though I've had my share of struggles with the craft and was not really ready to try to publish a novel until well into my 40s, most of it has been pleasurable in a way that borders on the sexual.

I don't know why that is. Many of these quoters, not to mention gazillions of others, would conclude, "That's because you're a lousy writer." It took me a while to disagree with this. Actually, what it took was getting two novels published. It still breaks my heart that they ended up selling so poorly, but out of something like thirty reviews between the two of them, only one was negative.

My publisher at the time said, "It's a miracle, Margaret." I wanted to say: how 'bout twenty years of hard work? Yes, but hard work that still brought a smile to my face.

Writing is hell, supposedly - nearly everyone says so, or wants you to think so - but in my mind, at this stage, right now, what is really hell is trying to get it out there. I think I still have something valuable to share: in fact, I know it. Maybe I am being punished for this, although at the same time we're all supposed to be brimming over with self-esteem (see My Declaration of Self-Esteem, yesterday's post).

It's so weird: writers are supposed to be furtive (as if it's a secretive, even dirty activity). They're supposed to sweat blood: if there's an exhilarating flow to the work day-to-day that results in a work you are immensely proud of, you must be doing it wrong.

You've got to suffer. SUFFER. Big-time. If you don't, it can't be any goddamn good.

I suffer all right, but suffer in the process of trying to get my story into the hands of readers. Here, too, public perception is extremely odd. People react with a kind of embarrassment that you even want such a thing. Shouldn't you just be content to write it and put it away somewhere? What about the process; shouldn't it be its own reward?

I hate to go back to the old saw about the professional cellist or ballet dancer who has trained all her life, is at the very top of her field, and never gets to perform. Shouldn't she be OK with that? Shouldn't she just be content to play her Steinway in an empty hall?

Phhwaaaaaahhh!

Writers who want to share their stories are egotists, and if they actually want to make money, they are mercenaries. Never mind that they have bills to pay like everyone else.

It's odd, but I've noticed over the years/decades that the first thing people ask you when they find out you're a writer (and I never tell them any more because they always look so doubtful) is, "Have you published anything?" When I tell them, they invariably ask, "Did you self-publish?" (or "e-publish", that other free-floating form of the vanity press). When I tell them no, they look at me quizzically and say something like, "However did you manage to do that?"

It's kind of like my freelance work. I've written at least a thousand columns and reviews which have accumulated over 25 years or so. (No one believes this, either. But I wrote weekly pieces, which adds up to 50 or so a year. Do the math.) This is what I heard, all the time, but furtively, as if someone was opening their coat to show me dirty postcards:

"Do they pay you for that?" (in a doubtful tone).

When I say yes, they then ask:

"How much?" (Last time I checked, it was rude to ask someone who works at McDonalds how much they are paid. It just is not done.)

Then comes (incredulous):

(a) "That much?" (or, conversely):

(b) "Is that all?"

Anyway, this is turning into a load of complaining again. I don't complain about the writing process too much any more. Blogging has broken the ice jam and brought back the exhilaration I used to feel before everyone started trying to convince me that Writing Is Hell.

But I'm still on that road. It's called The Glass Character, folks. It's a novel. I think it's the best thing I've ever done. As far as I know, no one has even looked at it: my reviews mean nothing, I guess, because my previous two (PUBLISHED!!) novels didn't sell very well.

And yes, THIS is hell, and always will be. There are a gazillion quotes about how desirable failure is, about how we should all have as many failures as we can possibly manage because we learn so much from them and become Better People.

But in publishing, even one failure (or perceived shortcoming) can sink you forever.

Be warned.

Getting published is hell.

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225