This bit is from an author, Jim Krusoe, who recently published a novel, “Erased.” He was asked for a list of songs that relate to his work. One of them is a Tom Waits tune. I love the story that goes with it.
Not surprisingly, I’m inclined to favor the mordant sounds of Tom Waits, poet of things closing and of hopelessness, and certainly Erased is about things shutting down, as well as opening onto unexpected vistas. This cut also makes me think of a time back in my youth where one night during an open poetry workshop we were visited by an improbably scruffy (even compared to us), odd-sounding guy. He read his poem, and afterwards I opined that it was good, but maybe not quite complicated enough to stand alone. “Maybe you should try writing song lyrics,” I told him. Waits looked me up and down, considering. “Well, man,” he rasped. “I’m working on it.”
Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.
Maybe that’s how it worked for you, Garrison. If so, count your blessings, because you’re lucky beyond all belief. Most writers don’t make enough solely from their writing to survive, much less thrive. That era of martyrdom isn’t disappearing (though I wish it would–the stereotype damages a writer’s ability to make a decent living), and self-publishing won’t kill it because it’s not rejection that creates the stereotype of the starving artist–it’s the economics.
The thing that seems to pass Garrison, and Brian … didn’t exactly miss, but didn’t hammer home was this:
It’s never been easier for an artist to get her voice out there. As a result, there’s an explosion of creativity happening RIGHT NOW, and it’s ultimately great for writers and readers.
It is hard for a new artist to find an audience. This is not new. But, just like every other industry that’s had its gates opened by modern technology — desktop publishers, font designers, television programmers, film editors, and electricians, just to name a few — the addition of new talent into the field is a win for every one of us. More people get interested in the field, more people start doing work, more good work gets done.
Further, the more work that’s out there, the more opportunities seem to appear. People begin to value the art, and want somebody good to do it. Just take a look at font design, for instance … or how much better visual storytelling got after cable, or MTV, or computerized video editing. New techniques and languages and histories are formed, audiences get smart to them, and the art continues to improve.
“The old model was you had to go through an agent, then the editor and publisher, then the bookstore to get to fans,” notes Harwood. “Now you can bypass all those gatekeepers and go straight to the fans online.”
Naysayers insist that the problem with self-published books is that they are not subject to the same standards of quality that conventional publishing houses maintain when they weed out less qualified contenders and put manuscripts through a rigorous vetting and editing process.
“A weeding-out process has to happen,” Harwood grants, “but you can let the fans do the weeding instead of the agents and publishers.”
You’ve released For the Win using a Creative Commons licence, giving it away for free. Why?
I give away all of my books. [The publisher] Tim O’Reilly once said that the problem for artists isn’t piracy – it’s obscurity. I think that’s true. A lot of people have commented: “You can’t eat page views, so how does being well-known help you earn a living as a writer?” It’s true; however, it’s very hard to monetise fame, but impossible to monetise obscurity. It doesn’t really matter how great your work is; if no one’s ever heard of it, you’ll never make any money from it. That’s not to say that if everyone’s heard of it, you’ll make a fortune, but it is a necessary precursor that your work be well-known to earn you a living. As far as I can tell, these themes apply very widely, across all media.
As a practical matter, we live in the 21st century and anything anybody wants to copy they will be able to copy. If you are building a business model that says that people can only copy things with your permission, your business is going to fail because whether or not you like it, people will be able to copy your product without your permission. The question is: what are you going to do about that? Are you going call them thieves or are you going to find a way to make money from them?
The only people who really think that it’s plausible to reduce copying in the future seem to be the analogue economy, the people who built their business on the idea that copying only happens occasionally and usually involves a giant machine and some lawyers. People who are actually doing digital things have the intuitive knowledge that there’s no way you’re going to stop people from copying and they’ve made peace with it.
I love literature, but I don’t love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition.
We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I’m on a plane, it’s all I see everyone reading, but they function for us as nostalgia: when we read traditional novels, we get to pretend that life is still coherent.
… I realized how perfectly the appropriated and remixed words embodied my argument: just as I was arguing for work that occupied a liminal space between genres, so, too, I wanted the reader to experience in my mash-up the dubiety of the first-person pronoun; I wanted the reader to not quite able to tell who was talking—was it me or Sonny Rollins or Emerson or Nietzsche or Frank Rich or, weirdly, none of us or all of us at the same time?
Whether or not you agree with him, the article is an interesting read.
Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage. This may sound unpromising: Dyer tries and fails to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence, but the book conveys Lawrence better than any conventional biography, and more importantly, it asks the question: how and why do we get up in the morning? In many ways, it’s a thinking person’s how-to book. How to live your life with passion when you know every passion is delusional, is drained of meaning. Dyer can’t commit to place, to relationship, to art, because he can always see the opposite position. Dyer’s conclusion: “The best we can do is try to make some progress with our studies of D.H. Lawrence.” By getting up in the morning, we get up in the morning. By not writing our biographies of D.H. Lawrence, we write our biographies of D.H. Lawrence. I reread this book at least once a year.
Fantasy author Jim Hines wondered whether a lot of the common wisdom of being published — “you have to sell short stories first”, “you have to have an in with the publisher”, “fame and fortune awaits the published author!” — were true.
So he wrote a survey, got 246 published authors to return the result(!), and published his findings.
If you’re thinking about writing a novel (particularly a genre novel), it’s deeply informative.
For instance…
Combining the agent and publisher questions, a total of 140 — more than half — made that first professional novel sale with no connections to either the publisher or the agent.
Here’s the percentage breakdown:
Met editor at a convention: 17% Knew editor personally: 3% Referred to editor: 11% Met agent at a convention: 11% Knew agent personally: 4% Referred to agent: 21% Did not use an agent: 25%
The artist gets to explore, quickly, many ideas. He practices starting. He can fail with some impunity. (“I had to do it fast, so it’s not as graceful as I’d like…”) He can succeed, and bring the work along, perhaps at a later date.
It tightens up the palette, makes the artist consider what’s truly important to him, both in terms of production and theme, and brings forth that constant in a creative person’s life: “what now?” And, just like always, but a little bigger in the heat of the sprint, the clock is ticking.
It’s even better with a group! — Sprint, support, share.
And then there’s this story about the value of quantity over quality, from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s Art and Fear:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Sprint! It’s fun.
I bring all of this up because the latest, most visible creative sprint — a magazine produced in 48 hours — is out now. The magazine (“48 Hour Magazine”) was photographed, illustrated, and edited in two days, from 1500 submissions from around the world. The first issue is appropriately themed “Hustle.” There’s a preview at that link.
Posted: May 12th, 2010 | Author:dave | Filed under:good read, writing | Comments Off
Steven Pressfield starts by wondering why we love amnesia stories, and works his way into the act of learning one’s own voice.
I have a theory that charisma arises from authenticity. When a writer has found his voice, when a singer has discovered her style, they have power. We feel it. It draws us to them. Why? Because we want it too. We want to be ourselves they way they are themselves. One of the reasons wild animals are so compelling is that they are entirely themselves. They can’t be otherwise.
Garrison Keillor recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on the 
Fresh on the heels of my post about mash-ups comes 
Fantasy author 
There’s a lot of value in the artistic sprint — “quick!