Hello and welcome, reader.
As ever, it’s my pleasure to have you join me.
The writer’s self-imposed rest continues, here. By now, I’m at loose ends and threatening to crack, despite sticking to a strict regime of diet, rest, study, and training. At times like this, being stuck in here is one fine how-do-you-do.
Nor can I say what’s worse; exhausted and crazy from writing, or insufferable and angry at not.
Did I mention the irony at arm’s length routine goes on, as well? Anyway, by now, you know its style, and neither habit nor vice. The truth is, I’m often hard pressed, figuring out which parts of it to believe myself. As usual, that makes it damned near impossible for me to imagine what it’s like for you, reader.
I’m not even sure when the narrator got to be so bloody unreliable. But rather than get stuck in the latest mystery, let’s move on to the usual craft related horse sense shared in this edition of The Practice.
How was that for personal insight?
I mean, who cares if I believe the world has gone bat shit crazy, anyway? Or that I’m sure the inmates in control of the local asylum are threatening to burn the place down around the rest of us? So what if I’m certain the zealots have united with the rich to use the mob’s ignorance against itself and destroy freedom?
It’s just entertainment, after all.
See what I mean? That’s why this writer leaves that bullshit out. Because such talk is worthless to anyone but a fan of wrapping themselves in a flag of false concern. Well, I wave none of them here. Nor am I a fan of those who do. Instead, I focus on stuff I can either affect or enjoy, like loved ones and art and baseball and books and freedom and films and music. As worrying over things beyond my control amounts to vanity, which serves no good purpose.
Go ahead, call me selfish. I won’t argue the point.
Besides, I always meant for this writer’s life to be seen as an object lesson, not an instruction manual. That’s the story I’m telling now, anyway.
So, let’s get on with it.
To open this month’s rant, I’m saying it’s a fabulous epoch for writers we’re living through today. Here’s why.
After all, with traditional, hybrid, and self-publishing, writers can now choose their delivery method. Not only that, but the growth of genre writing of all types has opened the door for those with more varied tastes.
So, and despite the challenge of a market remade by the internet, it’s a fine time to be alive for publishers, too. As, no matter the length of the grant-funding lineups, old school publishers still sell far more books than hybrids and indies combined.
With all the choices, readers are doing alright, as well.
In short, there’re few reasons to complain in any corner of the literary world.
So, why is the writer such a cranky ess-oh-bee, anyway?
As a race, meanwhile, we publish more books today than we ever have. The latest reports claim over three million titles printed in 2023. That includes more than two million self-published, on top of over a million turned out by traditional publishers. Since early in the 21st century, the yearly numbers have grown by a near exponential amount.
Sadly, printing more books doesn’t mean selling them. With industry revenue numbers flat since the turn of the century, the average title can now expect to sell a paltry 263 copies.
But, despite a knot to the ego left by that sorry fact, it doesn’t explain the writer’s angst. Nope. For behind the vague term, average, waits a hard but simple truth.
It’s more a measure of the possible than expected return.
Or maybe it’s a dream. Because a little more than three million divided by the over seven-hundred-ninety million books sold last year doesn’t quite show the facts.
For writers, the numbers are daunting.
Because once you allow for the millions on top of the bestseller lists, followed by the tens of thousands of mid-list titles, and genre hits read by thousands more, there’s not much left for the rest. And that’s without counting reprints, libraries, or schools.
Which makes reaching even the average quite a task for most of us.
But that’s not the source of this writer’s misery.
Because, you know, c’est la vie. That’s why it’s a calling, and not a career. If this comes as news to either of us, then we’re both in trouble. Though I will allow that, mine would then be far worse than yours, given the time.
Lucky for me, I’ve always known the truth about the calling. Of course, given my preference for risk, it’s ever been a great fit, too. But I’ve made a habit of advising others against the pursuit, when asked about the artist’s life, all the same.
And that’s not it, either.
For the record, though, it’s a dark ride best left to ‘those’ people. You know, the ones that think and look and act something like me. We’ve got to work too hard to pull off normal for long. And we are, as you’ve learned by now, far too easy to find. Though, given the terms of the deal, I don’t know why.
I’ve long believed it genetic, and thus, the luck of the draw.
Besides, other than the standard model, spacetime continuum, and quantum uncertainty, the choices are few, and offer, at best, a mixed bag of the same old nuts. I mean, unless stuff like matrixes or holograms or religion or conspiracy theories are your bag. For me, none of that crap offers any more comfort than accepting what science tells me is real.
I’m also not saying that’s it.
Nor is the latest month of open prose submissions at The Paris Review, held yearly in February, June, and October, and underway as I started writing this. The old mag has remained a hit with the literary set since its birth in 1953. Despite a growing online rep for these days printing little but the soulless drivel of homogenous MFA-toting wannabes. As, thanks to social media, there’s now no shortage of critics.
I’ll tell you this: if my stuff was a fit, I’d send it to them!
They’re also open to unsolicited poetry submissions in four months of the calendar year. And, for all, there’s no agent required. To see if your stuff fits, look them up online.
That also isn’t the cause of this writer’s discontent.
Which is okay, just the same, because I’m next claiming to know a story about the old rag that’s worth sharing. Though, like many of those found here, it may or may not be true.
Away we go.
One crisp fall morning when I was a semi-regular student at Winnipeg’s Argyle Alternative High School, an English teacher named Brian Mackinnon read to the class from an interview with Ernest Hemingway. George Plimpton wrote it before any of us kids were born and published it in the afore mentioned Paris Review. And, though Mr. Mackinnon didn’t read all of it to us, and I said nothing to anyone, then, in the language of the times; what he read to us blew my mind.
So, when school broke for lunch that day, I hurried back to the stack-wall cabin that served as our inner city classroom to ask if I could borrow the magazine to read the interview in full. After getting Mr. Mackinnon’s permission, I spent most of an hour sitting at a desk across the room from him and read it over more times than I can now recall.
The teacher kept an eye on me and the magazine while eating a bagged lunch and tending to business of his own. We didn’t talk, and I made plenty of notes. I wrote them in longhand, using a pencil and a notebook, in those times carried in the chest pocket of my denim jacket.
And to this day, what I read there serves as the most useful fiction writing instructions I’ve ever found, and the blueprint for my writing practice. Though I prefer to sit when at work. But if you’re looking for a roadmap, or just an interesting read, the interview is on the website of The Paris Review. You’ll need a subscription to the magazine to read all of it, but if you’re anything like me, you’ve made worse investments.
Enjoy, and best of luck.
Because there’re few how-to books worth reading when it comes to writing fiction. Oh, you can find plenty of texts devoted to tools and techniques, so don’t get the wrong idea. Many of them, such as ‘The Elements of Style’ by Strunk & White, might be worth their weight in gold, to a writer. But as far as the details of doing it go, Hemingway’s terse replies to Plimpton’s probing queries offer more insights into how to write fiction than anything published before or since, in this writer’s opinion. At least, that’s my story, and in a world without sure things, you can bet I’ll stick to it.
Not only that, but, and perhaps more germane to our inquiry, could this be the source of the writer’s angst?
Well, I’m still not sure about that, myself. But all the same, over the last weeks, I shared a few of the concepts by which I follow the way of the writer and literary artist on the dreaded social media. Maybe I did it to keep myself from going over the edge from all the time spent not writing. Perhaps it was holding up my end of a passe tradition.
I can’t say for certain.
I know what stuck with me after reading that 1958 interview was Hemingway’s artistic insights and fiction writing instructions. In short, the why and how-to of his writing practice. And, though I’ve since read other writer’s ideas about the same stuff, none worked for me. That’s despite having little beyond gender in common with the fellow, and, in truth, often resenting him and the privileged world from which he emerged.
And, like I said, there’s just not a lot of that stuff, from so credible a source, lying around waiting for a writer to read.
Or perhaps reading his best work forces me to see my own shortcomings in such stark relief that anger, and resentment, are the only refuge. I’m not sure about that, either. But I know I’ve always thanked him, and Plimpton, and Brian Mackinnon, too, for the teaching. Without it, I might’ve taken the same wrong turns so many others do and ended up spouting the sound-alike claptrap that composes so much of today’s so-called content.
Though I’m still not sure that explains this writer’s malaise.
Could be it just pisses me off knowing I owe the guy something for everything I’ve done as a writer, too, you know. Because I sure wouldn’t have made it this far without the instructions he shared with us in that interview. And where I came from, we used to say, we know who we owe, about stuff like that.
So, maybe that explains it. But if that doesn’t work, we can think of those few posts as a fix, instead of an obscurant’s duty.
It’s worth recalling, too, though, how I believe stuff like that is quite personal. And thus, by rule, kept private, in these parts.
Anyway, a claim I’ve heard is the internet lives forever. Well, if so, there you go. I mean, as far as all that, I’ve held up my end.
For though one’s pudding may well turn out another’s poison, my tradition, as I first came to understand it in that classroom long ago, thanks to Hemingway, Plimpton, Mackinnon, and The Paris Review, demands I share it. In the spirit of Teddy and Squire Bill, and doing what I can, with what I’ve got, where I am, and all that.
Thus, our story ends.
So, too, for this month, do the craft related insights wrap up, as well.
Once again, I hope to have left you with more questions than answers. Because, after all, it’s the writer’s way. Of doing and being. Inside and out, too. Here, in this quiet place, just past one of the countless curves on the road to find out.
Until we meet again, thanks for being here, and for sharing this with anyone who might like to read it.
TFP
November 9, 2024