Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Minding the Pile: A Newbie's Old-fashioned Woes of Writing in a Digital Age
I got my first magazine gig in the summer of 2008, just before the economy imploded. While I was experiencing the first-blush thrill of seeing my articles in print, Rolling Stone shrank, newspapers all over the United States were declaring bankruptcy, the legendary "long lunch" of magazine publishers evaporated, the death knell for journalism began to sound, so on and so on. The magazine I'd just started working for stopped being able to pay its contributors for several months, and we produced the thinnest issue in the history of the publication that November. Now, here I am sitting on my unfledged novel manuscript, and the same scene unfolds (according to some sources) for traditional publishing. It's sometimes hard not to feel that I was born too late--or, at least, at the wrong time.
Garrison Keillor's death-of-publishing op-ed piece speaks directly to that anxiety. Lots of smart, well-spoken people have said and written quite a bit in response to this, so I won't belabor it, but the fact of the matter is that I'm impressionable. I will believe anything for approximately 5-7 minutes, at least. And so when I read Keillor's closing sentences ("It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it."), I kinda pulled a muscle in my chest. I'm old enough to have known what the publishing industry was like when I was developing my what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up narratives. For Garrison Keillor to steamroll my childhood fantasies and slam the door on future generations is a damn shame. His piece seems to me less the nostalgic musing of a curmudgeonly humorist than it is the sour grousing of a nasty, alienated old man.
In the Baltimore Sun, Keillor's editorial ran under the title "When Everyone's a Writer, No One Is," which purports to shift the emphasis a smidge, though the content is of course the same. About a month after Keillor's screed landed, author/editor Laura Miller wrote an article for Salon likewise examining the consequences of the digital self-publishing trend. Her perspective is much more judicious. Where Keillor says, "editors will vanish," Miller offers the finer-tuned argument that "if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job [as agent or editor] will soon be yours." (Or, to paraphrase, "when no one's an editor, everyone is.") How you, as a reader, might feel about this scenario has a lot to do with how much time you've spent with unpublishable writing.
When I think about slush piles, I think about Freud. In his 1908 essay, "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," Freud had this to say about the distinction between the daydreamer and the writer:
I've always enjoyed his matter-of-fact attitude about how the phantasies of the nonwriter "give us no pleasure....repel us or at least leave us cold." It makes me picture Dr. Freud sitting in his armchair, on the receiving end of something interminable and grotesque, wishing things were different. So it is with the slush pile. Talented writers and, well, let's call them "daydreamers" both contribute manuscripts to slush piles. You never know whether the next thing you pull out of there is going to (as Freud has it) seethe ars poetica and bring you the kind of pleasure that deepens when it resonates with your own experience or, alternatively, sap your faith in humanity and populate your nightmares for months. There's an overwhelmingly large proportion of the latter, and for it to "repel us or at least leave us cold" would be putting it mildly. I've spent a little bit of time with fiction slush, and between thinly veiled rape fantasies, passionately anti-Semitic recastings of the Holocaust, druggy and near-unintelligible ravings about who only knows, and the par-for-the-course awful grammar and general pointlessness, it was dark business indeed. Contrary to Freud's evocation of the shameful turd-burying habit of the daydreamer--and this is just my own Dunning-Kruger-effect-inspired generalization--it seems pretty typical of the slush pile (and sometimes, by extension, of self-published work intended for a general readership) that the skill of the writer is often in inverse proportion to their lust for publication, which is to say, to their perception of the value of their own work. (Here's a fine example. Here's another one.)
It's certainly true that self-publishing eliminates the so-called gatekeepers, the "old guard" of editors and agents whose job it is, more often than not, to protect the public from (forgive my bias) the unbridled textual excrescences of the unwashed masses. It's also true that the new era of digital self-publishing makes it that much easier for would-be authors to circumvent the middlemen and sidestep the steady diet of rejection accorded by the writing life while quality control goes out with the bathwater. Make no mistake: The slush pile is coming to an online distributor of print media near you. Nothing can stop it. I assume that this is what concerns Keillor when he opines that book publishing is "about to slide into the sea." The tide is flowing, for sure, but his conclusion is overly grim. As John Williams of The Second Pass puts it, "Publishers are not frightened by the latent powers of the slush pile, believe me." (And for what it's worth, he has a much more diplomatic view of slush piles than I do, and far more experience with them.)
So, say the pile goes public and the marketplace swells to bursting with the literary endeavors of the self-published. Say, even, that the act of publishing becomes entirely meaningless. What then? What we read (or don't read) becomes a study in the psychology of choice, and the result is effectively a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" scenario. In Miller's words,
This is the most informed, practical, and realistic prediction for the industry I've seen yet (sadly). It's difficult to disagree with Miller's argument, and anyone who would dance on the grave of traditional publishing and bang pots and pans for the DIY revolution would do well to consider it. (It is, after all, a chief complaint of authors who resort to self-publishing that no one else would pay them any attention.) In a literary age where so many options exist as to induce analysis paralysis, it seems to me that agents and editors, those "relatively few authoritative voices" are more important than ever. Far from being relics of a decaying institution, their skills and judgment should be in greater demand than ever before. If anything, there should be more of them. But I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.
Several months ago, I was considering applying for a renowned, fancypants fiction-writing fellowship. In a discussion with a friend of mine, I said it was longer than a long shot, that the judges would want the sort of author they could easily fill up a press release about. I'm not that person, I said. I haven't published anything. I'm a nobody. "How is being published still a thing?" he asked me. "I mean [and here he directed me to an Amazon page featuring an absurd, vanity-press-produced book], even that lady is published." I explained that what I meant by "being published" was "being published by a reputable press," and that (to me at least) it was even more of a thing now, owing to the glutting of the market. But to people who don't love books and know them well, a book is a book, no matter where it came from. Small independent presses have stronger identities than big conglomerates or their imprints--it's a part of what makes the titles they publish appealing to readers in the know. If a writer is shopping a manuscript, it's part of her job (or at least it used to be), to get acquainted with those presses (and ultimately to get rejected by many of them). DIY publishing shows a lazy disregard for this entire process, and the product is poison to the marketplace. If a writer's work is really fit to print, I'm inclined to think (perhaps naively) that a proper press somewhere would eventually pick up and follow through. If writers are really, truly struggling to find good publishers for good work and failing, then there must be too few independent presses publishing good books right now. (Sound crazy? I'm not the only one to suggest it.) However, if writers resort to the instant gratification of self-publishing instead, there will probably be even fewer small-press opportunities available in the future.
In short, the advent of Web 2.0, the burgeoning popularity and affordability of ereaders, the limitless online marketplace, and the DIY spirit make it an essentially forgone point that publishing is not, now, what I thought it would be like when I was younger. I say I was born too late, because I imagine it now essentially the way it used to be; and I say I was born at the wrong time, because I expect that the industry will come out of its current birth pangs well enough to thrive and sustain good writers and their work by the time I'm done trying to accomplish anything. But what I see in my immediate future is this: a monstrous slush pile, a dwindling and overworked contingent of agents/editors/professional book critics, a decreasing number of small presses, and an awfully inopportune time to be an awkward, self-loathing introvert. I'd rather be a fetus with a Facebook page already. Give me a do-over.
...
No, I'm not going to go out like that. It's too sad.
As a writer, maybe I don't need to concern myself overmuch with the ins and outs of the publishing industry. It's fine to do, if I feel I need to pull my hair out every now and then--especially since the pace of life today would have you believe that you need to keep as many plates spinning as possible--but even though much has changed (and will continue to change), most of what made the world of words wild and wonderful to me as a kid has stayed pretty much the same. Take, for example, the story of the last great book I read, Tinkers.
Six years ago, Paul Harding submitted his novel manuscript to a number of agents and editors in New York City. All of them rejected it. He was told that no one wanted the kind of book he'd written, that it was too meditative, too slow, too quiet. Over the course of the next three years, "Tinkers" (the manuscript) sat in a drawer. And then, finally, Paul Harding found a publisher: the Bellevue Literary Press, a small, nonprofit "project" affiliated with NYU's School of Medicine. Bellevue's editorial director helped push the book (Harding's debut novel) to independent bookstores, whose staff read it, loved it, and raved about it everywhere they could. (I was turned on to the book by Michele Filgate, events coordinator at the RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire.) But while Tinkers was making rounds in the indie circles and on litblogs, major media outlets weren't reviewing it, and the book was more or less ignored by the public at large. By the end of the year, though, Tinkers had made "Best of" lists at NPR and The New Yorker. And then, in April, Paul Harding won a Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times called his success with Tinkers "perhaps the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory." It's proof that the old channels aren't broken. It's a credit to the agents, editors, reviewers, and readers who do their extremely valuable and underappreciated work the way it's supposed to be done. It's everything Keillor avowed was only happening "back in the day." It's a measure of hope.
Marilynne Robinson, Harding's friend and former teacher, told the Times that she sometimes has difficulty making her students believe that they "can write something that satisfies their definition of good, and they don't have to calculate the market." (She added, "Now that I have the Paul anecdote, they will believe me more.") Her advice is heartening to me. Maybe I don't need to fret about all-consuming slush piles, or the crest of the self-publishing wave, or what either means for the publishing industry. Maybe I don't need to worry about the number of people reading the stuff I like to read (or write), or about the market appeal of either of those things. Maybe all I need to do is develop and trust my definition of good, and strive to achieve it.
Garrison Keillor's death-of-publishing op-ed piece speaks directly to that anxiety. Lots of smart, well-spoken people have said and written quite a bit in response to this, so I won't belabor it, but the fact of the matter is that I'm impressionable. I will believe anything for approximately 5-7 minutes, at least. And so when I read Keillor's closing sentences ("It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it."), I kinda pulled a muscle in my chest. I'm old enough to have known what the publishing industry was like when I was developing my what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up narratives. For Garrison Keillor to steamroll my childhood fantasies and slam the door on future generations is a damn shame. His piece seems to me less the nostalgic musing of a curmudgeonly humorist than it is the sour grousing of a nasty, alienated old man.
In the Baltimore Sun, Keillor's editorial ran under the title "When Everyone's a Writer, No One Is," which purports to shift the emphasis a smidge, though the content is of course the same. About a month after Keillor's screed landed, author/editor Laura Miller wrote an article for Salon likewise examining the consequences of the digital self-publishing trend. Her perspective is much more judicious. Where Keillor says, "editors will vanish," Miller offers the finer-tuned argument that "if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job [as agent or editor] will soon be yours." (Or, to paraphrase, "when no one's an editor, everyone is.") How you, as a reader, might feel about this scenario has a lot to do with how much time you've spent with unpublishable writing.
When I think about slush piles, I think about Freud. In his 1908 essay, "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," Freud had this to say about the distinction between the daydreamer and the writer:
You will remember how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures. Such phantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others.
I've always enjoyed his matter-of-fact attitude about how the phantasies of the nonwriter "give us no pleasure....repel us or at least leave us cold." It makes me picture Dr. Freud sitting in his armchair, on the receiving end of something interminable and grotesque, wishing things were different. So it is with the slush pile. Talented writers and, well, let's call them "daydreamers" both contribute manuscripts to slush piles. You never know whether the next thing you pull out of there is going to (as Freud has it) seethe ars poetica and bring you the kind of pleasure that deepens when it resonates with your own experience or, alternatively, sap your faith in humanity and populate your nightmares for months. There's an overwhelmingly large proportion of the latter, and for it to "repel us or at least leave us cold" would be putting it mildly. I've spent a little bit of time with fiction slush, and between thinly veiled rape fantasies, passionately anti-Semitic recastings of the Holocaust, druggy and near-unintelligible ravings about who only knows, and the par-for-the-course awful grammar and general pointlessness, it was dark business indeed. Contrary to Freud's evocation of the shameful turd-burying habit of the daydreamer--and this is just my own Dunning-Kruger-effect-inspired generalization--it seems pretty typical of the slush pile (and sometimes, by extension, of self-published work intended for a general readership) that the skill of the writer is often in inverse proportion to their lust for publication, which is to say, to their perception of the value of their own work. (Here's a fine example. Here's another one.)
It's certainly true that self-publishing eliminates the so-called gatekeepers, the "old guard" of editors and agents whose job it is, more often than not, to protect the public from (forgive my bias) the unbridled textual excrescences of the unwashed masses. It's also true that the new era of digital self-publishing makes it that much easier for would-be authors to circumvent the middlemen and sidestep the steady diet of rejection accorded by the writing life while quality control goes out with the bathwater. Make no mistake: The slush pile is coming to an online distributor of print media near you. Nothing can stop it. I assume that this is what concerns Keillor when he opines that book publishing is "about to slide into the sea." The tide is flowing, for sure, but his conclusion is overly grim. As John Williams of The Second Pass puts it, "Publishers are not frightened by the latent powers of the slush pile, believe me." (And for what it's worth, he has a much more diplomatic view of slush piles than I do, and far more experience with them.)
So, say the pile goes public and the marketplace swells to bursting with the literary endeavors of the self-published. Say, even, that the act of publishing becomes entirely meaningless. What then? What we read (or don't read) becomes a study in the psychology of choice, and the result is effectively a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" scenario. In Miller's words,
[A]s observers like Chris Anderson (in "The Long Tail") and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book "The Art of Choosing") have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren't utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision [read: being your own gatekeeper] is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions. This has been going on in the book world for at least a couple of decades now, since long before the rise of e-books: Bestselling authors continue to sell better and better, while everyone else does worse and worse.
[Even if publishing becomes meaningless and people find new ways to discover things worth reading], we'll still wind up with a literary marketplace in which a handful of blockbuster names capture most of the sales and attention, personal connections are milked for professional success, and relatively few authoritative voices have the power to lift some artists into the spotlight while others languish in obscurity. Writers who are charming in person and happy to promote themselves and interact with fans will prosper, while antisocial geniuses may fail. (It's unsettling to wonder how the Salingers, Pynchons, Naipauls and David Foster Wallaces of tomorrow will fare in a world where social networking and glad-handing are de rigueur. Why should extroversion be required of a great novelist?) The result: not a whole lot better than the system we already have, but also (hopefully) not much worse.
This is the most informed, practical, and realistic prediction for the industry I've seen yet (sadly). It's difficult to disagree with Miller's argument, and anyone who would dance on the grave of traditional publishing and bang pots and pans for the DIY revolution would do well to consider it. (It is, after all, a chief complaint of authors who resort to self-publishing that no one else would pay them any attention.) In a literary age where so many options exist as to induce analysis paralysis, it seems to me that agents and editors, those "relatively few authoritative voices" are more important than ever. Far from being relics of a decaying institution, their skills and judgment should be in greater demand than ever before. If anything, there should be more of them. But I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.
Several months ago, I was considering applying for a renowned, fancypants fiction-writing fellowship. In a discussion with a friend of mine, I said it was longer than a long shot, that the judges would want the sort of author they could easily fill up a press release about. I'm not that person, I said. I haven't published anything. I'm a nobody. "How is being published still a thing?" he asked me. "I mean [and here he directed me to an Amazon page featuring an absurd, vanity-press-produced book], even that lady is published." I explained that what I meant by "being published" was "being published by a reputable press," and that (to me at least) it was even more of a thing now, owing to the glutting of the market. But to people who don't love books and know them well, a book is a book, no matter where it came from. Small independent presses have stronger identities than big conglomerates or their imprints--it's a part of what makes the titles they publish appealing to readers in the know. If a writer is shopping a manuscript, it's part of her job (or at least it used to be), to get acquainted with those presses (and ultimately to get rejected by many of them). DIY publishing shows a lazy disregard for this entire process, and the product is poison to the marketplace. If a writer's work is really fit to print, I'm inclined to think (perhaps naively) that a proper press somewhere would eventually pick up and follow through. If writers are really, truly struggling to find good publishers for good work and failing, then there must be too few independent presses publishing good books right now. (Sound crazy? I'm not the only one to suggest it.) However, if writers resort to the instant gratification of self-publishing instead, there will probably be even fewer small-press opportunities available in the future.
In short, the advent of Web 2.0, the burgeoning popularity and affordability of ereaders, the limitless online marketplace, and the DIY spirit make it an essentially forgone point that publishing is not, now, what I thought it would be like when I was younger. I say I was born too late, because I imagine it now essentially the way it used to be; and I say I was born at the wrong time, because I expect that the industry will come out of its current birth pangs well enough to thrive and sustain good writers and their work by the time I'm done trying to accomplish anything. But what I see in my immediate future is this: a monstrous slush pile, a dwindling and overworked contingent of agents/editors/professional book critics, a decreasing number of small presses, and an awfully inopportune time to be an awkward, self-loathing introvert. I'd rather be a fetus with a Facebook page already. Give me a do-over.
...
No, I'm not going to go out like that. It's too sad.
As a writer, maybe I don't need to concern myself overmuch with the ins and outs of the publishing industry. It's fine to do, if I feel I need to pull my hair out every now and then--especially since the pace of life today would have you believe that you need to keep as many plates spinning as possible--but even though much has changed (and will continue to change), most of what made the world of words wild and wonderful to me as a kid has stayed pretty much the same. Take, for example, the story of the last great book I read, Tinkers.
Six years ago, Paul Harding submitted his novel manuscript to a number of agents and editors in New York City. All of them rejected it. He was told that no one wanted the kind of book he'd written, that it was too meditative, too slow, too quiet. Over the course of the next three years, "Tinkers" (the manuscript) sat in a drawer. And then, finally, Paul Harding found a publisher: the Bellevue Literary Press, a small, nonprofit "project" affiliated with NYU's School of Medicine. Bellevue's editorial director helped push the book (Harding's debut novel) to independent bookstores, whose staff read it, loved it, and raved about it everywhere they could. (I was turned on to the book by Michele Filgate, events coordinator at the RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire.) But while Tinkers was making rounds in the indie circles and on litblogs, major media outlets weren't reviewing it, and the book was more or less ignored by the public at large. By the end of the year, though, Tinkers had made "Best of" lists at NPR and The New Yorker. And then, in April, Paul Harding won a Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times called his success with Tinkers "perhaps the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory." It's proof that the old channels aren't broken. It's a credit to the agents, editors, reviewers, and readers who do their extremely valuable and underappreciated work the way it's supposed to be done. It's everything Keillor avowed was only happening "back in the day." It's a measure of hope.
Marilynne Robinson, Harding's friend and former teacher, told the Times that she sometimes has difficulty making her students believe that they "can write something that satisfies their definition of good, and they don't have to calculate the market." (She added, "Now that I have the Paul anecdote, they will believe me more.") Her advice is heartening to me. Maybe I don't need to fret about all-consuming slush piles, or the crest of the self-publishing wave, or what either means for the publishing industry. Maybe I don't need to worry about the number of people reading the stuff I like to read (or write), or about the market appeal of either of those things. Maybe all I need to do is develop and trust my definition of good, and strive to achieve it.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Put on a Happy Face
If you've been visiting the site, you might notice that things look a little different around here! I've redesigned. When I first launched this blog, I spent a lot of time selecting just the right shades of dark gray for page- and post-backgrounds and lighter gray for the titles and body text. When I invited an editor friend of mine to check out my brand new thing, he found it "wicked hard to read" here. "Think of your elders and our sensitive, failure-prone eyesight," he said. (It bears mentioning that "elders" in this context apparently means "late thirties," which means I was being encouraged to consider an even greater contingent than the word itself suggests.) I was resistant to the idea (eat more carrots! use a feed reader!), but good editors generally give sage advice, and the internet seemed to agree that black text on white background was best for big chunky blocks of words. So I put "change color scheme" on my longlist, but what I said to my friend was this: "Maybe it wants to be gray. Maybe the text does not want to be read."
This is a tic I have. The fact that I devote a considerable amount of time to creating things that I have no desire to share makes me question the wisdom of pursuing a writing career. The notion of presenting my work fills me with anxiety and self-doubt. Most of the time, I have to force myself to do it, and then I get to questioning the value of what I'm offering, and it all goes downhill from there. For example, I was happily active on Fictionaut for several months, but when the site came out of beta and all the stories went public, I hid everything I'd written and I stopped commenting on other people's work. It scared me.
Of course I don't want to be like this, and I've come to figure that the best way to fight the problem is perhaps to behave as though there simply isn't a conflict when I do the opposite of what I'd prefer. I find myself thinking of the one-line refrain in Wilco's "How to Fight Loneliness"--it's "just smile all the time." Smile when you don't want to. Everybody loves a smile. (Or at least it makes a predator hesitate, right?)
So, along with my renewed dedication to regular posting, behold my blog's happy new face: higher contrast, larger font, better kerning, and by all appearances greater willingness to be read. (Which is good, because those carrots weren't doing your eyesight any favors.)
Monday, June 28, 2010
Rejection and the Silver Lining
I'm currently working as an administrative and editorial assistant at a liberal arts college. Like many who work in a secretarial capacity at small private institutions, a variety of tasks fall under the aegis of "my job." My favorite of these responsibilities involves an artist-in-residence program that, for the purposes of the privacy of all concerned, I shall dub "the Bananafana Fiction Prize." It goes like this: Authors (typically between the ages of twenty-five and forty) submit a CV, a brief description of the WIP they're planning on working on during their time at the college, and a few copies of their published novel. Every autumn, the Bananafana Fiction Prize Committee agrees upon the best novel and most suitable candidate, and the winning author receives some money and an appointment as writer-in-residence for the spring semester. He or she gives one public reading upon arrival (and is feted afterward by the extended literary academic community at a spectacular dinner I've been honored to attend a couple of times), and the rest of their time here is spent being an informal mentor to the students and pursuing creative goals with the support and encouragement of everyone here. It's a sweet deal. And it's a great experience for me, too! Every year, I'm exposed to new authors whose work I might not otherwise have read. (And I confess I draw a certain amount of self-importance from the collection of great writers in my professional address book, even if the full extent of our correspondence is mostly me acknowledging the receipt of their materials and thanking them for their submission.)
So, t'is the season, and the 2011 Bananafana Fiction Prize applications have been rolling in. A few weeks ago, I came into the office to discover a trio of skinny 10x12 envelopes addressed to the Fiction Prize Committee, sitting on my desk awaiting attention. These envelopes each turned out to contain a brief cover letter, a short-story (manuscript), and a self-addressed stamped envelope. The letters all expressed appreciation for my consideration of the enclosed 2,000-some word story for this year's prize, included a sentence-long description of the story, and closed with a signature in the awkwardly idiosyncratic cursive common to young people. Perhaps it was the care with which the papers had been assembled, or the increasingly unusual, almost quaint sight of the SASE (complete with Forever Stamp), or the fact that this had never happened to me before, but I was completely charmed.
I took the manuscripts home and read them. I wrestled with myself over whether I'd mark the copy. I worried that drawing attention only to the errors would cause the students to see failure instead of potential. On the other hand, circling the occasional solecism might encourage the kids to revise their stories and (per the advice I was already drafting in my head) consider submitting their work somewhere more appropriate. I resolved to find at least one valuable thing to say about each story. It occurred to me that my responses to these applications might constitute the first rejection letters these writers would ever receive. And the first time should be special, shouldn't it? I would be gentle. Patient. Kind. Genuine. I admit I fancied myself a bit of a Francis P. Church, holding the illusions and imaginations of so many young people in my hot, ink-stained little hands.
The following afternoon, the mail guy delivered six more applications identical to the first few, each with cover letter, SASE, and story. I thought, "Hm! Now I have kind of a lot of these," but I was nonetheless still smitten. I took the second set home, too, and read them all. Like the stories I'd received the day before, these were also fictional biographies and fictive recastings of historical events. I decided not to mark the papers, in part because deviations in the quality of the manuscripts were beginning to make themselves apparent, enough to make me question the depth of my investment in a project I'd decided to take on outside of work. Copyediting some 25,000 words and crafting personalized responses to each story presented a time commitment that could put a considerable dent in my weekend "me" time.
Maybe you can see where this is going.
On Monday, I arrived at my desk to find a three-inch-tall stack of 10x12 envelopes. I tore into them to verify that they were what I figured and feared they might be. They were. The honeymoon period was over.
Here's an illustrated summary of our time together:
When my boss suggested that maybe someone ought to change the website (which, incidentally, features not only a full description of the prize but pictures of past winners and blurbs about the novels they wrote), I banged my fists on the table, raged against people who don't follow directions, and defended the website as though I had given birth to it myself.
Now, here's the thing. I subscribe to the blogs of a number of literary magazines, authors, agents, editorial assistants, and self-described rejectors and rejectionists. I followed the #queryfail debacle on Twitter. I read SlushPile Hell every day. I know exactly how common it is for people to ignore submission guidelines and send their work to agents and contest judges who will not read it, and I am well familiar with the deluge of snark and scorn that these writers bring down upon themselves in this fashion. But what became inarguably apparent to me as I tore through the final stack of envelopes was the following awful truth: Someone told them to do this. Some adult to whom the educations of young people are entrusted gave their entire class instructions to do something that arouses nothing but rage and loathing in the editorial community. This person provided envelopes, stamps, and the college's address, so that a room full of writers could waste everyone's time. It is infuriating.
It's tragic, too, because there's a bunch of kids in Texas who won't be getting a real rejection letter from me, but rather what might more properly be called a "letter of disqualification." I made it myself. It looks like this:
Perhaps what upsets me the most about the ordeal is that it really didn't have to be this way. Instead of being told to put together these packets and send them somewhere they don't know or care about, somebody could have learned something. What happened here is the poor execution of an otherwise laudable idea. Personally, I feel like I waited too long to start collecting rejection letters--because I valued what I considered an "unblemished" submission history, and also because, quite frankly, I was suffering from the well-trod delusion that I would be knocking them out of the park from day one. Since then, I've certainly thought that if I were to teach a creative writing class at the high school level, I would have my students research potential venues for the publication of their work (by, for example, perusing literary magazines or reading contest-winning material), so that they're actually invested in the endeavor when they invariably get rejected. Hell, I'd buy a class subscription to The Paris Review, and then we could all send our short stories and get our rejection letters and put marshmallows in our hot cocoa and commiserate together! It would be grand. It's a good idea to introduce young writers to contest rejection early on, to normalize it quickly. But it should at least be an honest-to-goodness rejection, not a you-didn't-read-the-rules-and-never-stood-a-chance rejection. The lesson is important.
So, t'is the season, and the 2011 Bananafana Fiction Prize applications have been rolling in. A few weeks ago, I came into the office to discover a trio of skinny 10x12 envelopes addressed to the Fiction Prize Committee, sitting on my desk awaiting attention. These envelopes each turned out to contain a brief cover letter, a short-story (manuscript), and a self-addressed stamped envelope. The letters all expressed appreciation for my consideration of the enclosed 2,000-some word story for this year's prize, included a sentence-long description of the story, and closed with a signature in the awkwardly idiosyncratic cursive common to young people. Perhaps it was the care with which the papers had been assembled, or the increasingly unusual, almost quaint sight of the SASE (complete with Forever Stamp), or the fact that this had never happened to me before, but I was completely charmed.
I took the manuscripts home and read them. I wrestled with myself over whether I'd mark the copy. I worried that drawing attention only to the errors would cause the students to see failure instead of potential. On the other hand, circling the occasional solecism might encourage the kids to revise their stories and (per the advice I was already drafting in my head) consider submitting their work somewhere more appropriate. I resolved to find at least one valuable thing to say about each story. It occurred to me that my responses to these applications might constitute the first rejection letters these writers would ever receive. And the first time should be special, shouldn't it? I would be gentle. Patient. Kind. Genuine. I admit I fancied myself a bit of a Francis P. Church, holding the illusions and imaginations of so many young people in my hot, ink-stained little hands.
The following afternoon, the mail guy delivered six more applications identical to the first few, each with cover letter, SASE, and story. I thought, "Hm! Now I have kind of a lot of these," but I was nonetheless still smitten. I took the second set home, too, and read them all. Like the stories I'd received the day before, these were also fictional biographies and fictive recastings of historical events. I decided not to mark the papers, in part because deviations in the quality of the manuscripts were beginning to make themselves apparent, enough to make me question the depth of my investment in a project I'd decided to take on outside of work. Copyediting some 25,000 words and crafting personalized responses to each story presented a time commitment that could put a considerable dent in my weekend "me" time.
Maybe you can see where this is going.
On Monday, I arrived at my desk to find a three-inch-tall stack of 10x12 envelopes. I tore into them to verify that they were what I figured and feared they might be. They were. The honeymoon period was over.
Here's an illustrated summary of our time together:
MS Paint artwork inspired by [read: directly ripped off from] the wry, witty, and wise Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half, who knows that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery on the internet.
When my boss suggested that maybe someone ought to change the website (which, incidentally, features not only a full description of the prize but pictures of past winners and blurbs about the novels they wrote), I banged my fists on the table, raged against people who don't follow directions, and defended the website as though I had given birth to it myself.
Now, here's the thing. I subscribe to the blogs of a number of literary magazines, authors, agents, editorial assistants, and self-described rejectors and rejectionists. I followed the #queryfail debacle on Twitter. I read SlushPile Hell every day. I know exactly how common it is for people to ignore submission guidelines and send their work to agents and contest judges who will not read it, and I am well familiar with the deluge of snark and scorn that these writers bring down upon themselves in this fashion. But what became inarguably apparent to me as I tore through the final stack of envelopes was the following awful truth: Someone told them to do this. Some adult to whom the educations of young people are entrusted gave their entire class instructions to do something that arouses nothing but rage and loathing in the editorial community. This person provided envelopes, stamps, and the college's address, so that a room full of writers could waste everyone's time. It is infuriating.
It's tragic, too, because there's a bunch of kids in Texas who won't be getting a real rejection letter from me, but rather what might more properly be called a "letter of disqualification." I made it myself. It looks like this:
Dear [Name],
I am writing to you on behalf of the Bananafana Fiction Prize Committee to thank you for your application. We appreciate your interest in the prize, and I enjoyed reading your short story, "[title]." Unfortunately, your submission does not meet our needs. The Bananafana Fiction Prize does not accept unpublished manuscripts for consideration, and high school students are not eligible to apply.
Because you and your classmates have the distinction of being the youngest applicants in the history of the Bananafana Fiction Prize, I hope you'll permit me, as a longtime aspiring writer myself, to offer you some advice.
Rejection is a staple of the writing life. Failure presents a valuable learning experience, and it’s important to cultivate the ability to do it as well as possible. For starters, dismiss any negativity you might be feeling and welcome the circumstances. The more you fail, the more opportunities you give yourself to succeed.
Secondly, be aware of precisely what it is you’ve failed to achieve. One way to make the most of potential failures is to make sure in advance that what you're applying for is something you really want. Effort should always be conscious. Your greatest successes and your worst failures all have one thing in common: their significance to you. To determine whether an award, publication, or other opportunity is right for you, take time to learn about the people who have already achieved the goals you’ve set for yourself. For example, the current Bananafana Fiction Prize writer-in-residence is [name redacted]. Her novel [title redacted] is a work of historical fiction based on the life of [here's a hint: mad scientist with a penchant for pigeons]. Reading her novel would be especially useful to writers interested in transforming biographical material into fiction, in the same way that you did in the short story you submitted. But reading her novel (or those of past winners of the Bananafana Fiction Prize) would also provide you with a solid idea of the kind and quality of writing that the committee hopes to see among the submissions every year. If you know what you want, be sure to do your research and follow directions—you don’t want to fail for the wrong reasons; and if you do fail, it should be for reasons that are constructive and useful.
Lastly, think about what, if anything, the experience has cost you and how you can benefit from it. (This may also prevent you from making the same mistakes in the future.) Put your analysis of what went wrong to use as soon as you can. Make revisions to your work if you need to, and then submit it to a short-story contest or literary magazine, and then another, and then another--rinse, repeat. Don’t give up. Failing well just might be what really trying is all about; and once you master failure, you’ll be that much readier to succeed. Good luck.
Sincerely,
[my real name goes here]
Administrative Assistant to the Bananafana Fiction Prize
Perhaps what upsets me the most about the ordeal is that it really didn't have to be this way. Instead of being told to put together these packets and send them somewhere they don't know or care about, somebody could have learned something. What happened here is the poor execution of an otherwise laudable idea. Personally, I feel like I waited too long to start collecting rejection letters--because I valued what I considered an "unblemished" submission history, and also because, quite frankly, I was suffering from the well-trod delusion that I would be knocking them out of the park from day one. Since then, I've certainly thought that if I were to teach a creative writing class at the high school level, I would have my students research potential venues for the publication of their work (by, for example, perusing literary magazines or reading contest-winning material), so that they're actually invested in the endeavor when they invariably get rejected. Hell, I'd buy a class subscription to The Paris Review, and then we could all send our short stories and get our rejection letters and put marshmallows in our hot cocoa and commiserate together! It would be grand. It's a good idea to introduce young writers to contest rejection early on, to normalize it quickly. But it should at least be an honest-to-goodness rejection, not a you-didn't-read-the-rules-and-never-stood-a-chance rejection. The lesson is important.
Monday, June 21, 2010
This Dead Blog Makes Me Sad, or This Is Why You Can't Have Nice Things
When I was eleven, I had a teacher, one Mrs. Wilkinson, who had everyone in our seventh-grade English class keep a journal, which she would collect periodically, just to ensure that everyone was really putting effort into the assignment. She set aside class time for writing, although we were encouraged to write avidly outside of class, as well. I'd kept diaries on and off for a few years prior to that, but nothing as well-maintained as the project I was about to begin. I took it seriously.
I bought my first journal at a stationery store in Vienna, a few steps away from one of the tram stops between Grinzing and Schottentor on the #38 tram. The first book had a chartreuse paisley cover and, like all of its successors, was hardbound. Because I wasn't yet aware how much and how frequently I'd be writing, or that I'd be pressing everything from photographs to flowers between the pages, the first journal had a small, stiff spine. I took it everywhere with me. Writing became a solid part of my routine. I wrote when I woke up in the morning; I wrote during lunch at school; I wrote, elbow to elbow on dining-room tables, with my best friends; I wrote in bed, by flashlight; I wrote on field trips--in Graz, Salzburg, Hallstadt, and in Prague, Budapest, and Paris. I doodled, sketched, and painted in it, taped ticket stubs, postcards, cut-out snowflakes, bits of sheet music, candy wrappers, stickers, and friendship bracelets inside. When I ran out of pages, I'd go to the stationery store and buy another journal. Our class visited the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp; I wrote about that. My mother got sick and returned to the United States to get on the national transplant registry; I wrote about that, too. I documented the piercing of my ears, the euthanizing of our oldest family pet, my first experience skiing, the effects of war in Sarajevo, my debut as a clarinet soloist in a youth music festival, the harvesting of wine grapes with Cobenzl vineyard workers. I wrote (and meticulously taped construction-paper flaps over) awful poetry, first-kiss fantasies, lamentations on the subject of puberty, weird dreams, made-up stories, and racy passages copied from romance novels. I described the night my father and I drove on roads lining the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods, on a night so bright he turned the headlights off and navigated by moonlight alone. I described the night it was first suggested to me that he wasn't coming home. I described a few things that happen to you once in life and then never again.
I had about ten years' worth of writing, some eleven volumes, when I destroyed the entire collection.
I had a roundabout way of doing it. I fell in love, packed the journals in a big box, drove 900 miles across the country, and left them in my beloved's bedroom closet. I was nineteen. I thought I was coming back. I thought giving him my single most precious and irreplaceable possession would guarantee my return at a time when few things were certain. Here's why it's my fault: I never told him what the box contained and--either out of respect of my privacy or a complete lack of curiosity--he never looked inside it. We fell out of touch while the box was shuffled around among his things, deposited in a flood-prone basement, and then finally discarded by a disgruntled landlord, along with a smattering of other abandoned belongings.
Among friends, I've referred to the self-sabotaging tendency by which I lose or destroy the things I love best as my dispersionism. I am a dispersionist. My journals were the greatest thing I have ever made and lost. And while I'm wise to the fact that their loss lends them a vaster greatness, it is nevertheless true that words are stronger than memories, and that I greedily regret not having more of both.
It's been about five years to the day I had the brief conversation--long distance, over the phone--about the fate of my journals. I tried to convince myself that maybe it was better this way; that the writing was probably all leg hair and slow dances anyway; that Past Me and Past Life were not as compelling as I'd like to believe; that it's silly and self-indulgent to be so backward-looking all the time; that it is far better to have nothing so dear to lose, no more paper to hoard and haul around, et cetera. And yet, within the last couple of years, I could still catch myself entertaining the deluded fantasy that my friend had actually held on to the box and was hoping to surprise me at some point with an unexpected reunion, or that there exists somewhere some landlord or dump-worker who thought, "Who could possibly throw this away? It must be important to someone. I'll hold on to it for a little while." (Even to describe the "chartreuse paisley cover" is a nod to the latter.) These are, of course, effects of denial--an inability to accept, or even grasp, the scope and permanence of the lack (together with, I admit, a splash of self-importance). Every now and then, I'll tell some half-remembered story, and someone might say, "You oughta write a book!" and I'll flinch to think of the resources I no longer have. It was the first loss of my adult life, the first for which I was solely accountable, and one which seemed to reiterate and worsen all preceding losses (the act of documentation itself being more often than not a futile attempt to salvage and recreate, in my case). I'm still sore about it today.
In time, though, the constellation of responses to something like this--the disbelief, denial, delusions, even disappointment--are superseded by acceptance. There is the sad old adage that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And so it is that I labor to convince myself that it is not the writing itself that mattered, but the fact of having written. The simple fact that "it was" is greater than whether it was actually good or bad, useful or not.
I've written, albeit ambivalently, about the writing cure--here, too, the process is of greater significance than the product. It is somewhat comforting to know that I can't obliterate the effect of all that work as easily as I did the work itself. Writing is--among other things--a craft. Aspiring writers are often advised to write every day, because improvement is a matter of practice. Maybe I'm a better writer now than I would have been if I hadn't poured so much energy into those journals. Maybe I'm a healthier, better-adjusted person than I would've otherwise been. I certainly have pretty penmanship. Consolation prizes, all!
The moral of this story brings me, finally, to the point of this post. When I started this blog, I looked at it as both an impetus and an opportunity to broaden my research and writing habits. I have interests that are not directly related to my job or creative endeavors, and I figured that keeping a blog would provide both an outlet for those interests and motivation for me to put time into, say, reading a pile of studies about the effectiveness of SSRIs versus behavioral therapy with regard to treatment for mild to moderate depression. I wanted to blog about research, about ideas. I wanted to avoid personal pronouns and navel-gazing. The unfortunate truth is that it takes me much, much longer to research, draft, edit, and publish posts about studies and ideas outside my realm of expertise than it would to just write about what I think. The other unfortunate truth is that it's much, much harder for me to consider an avalanche of personal thoughts and experiences as interesting or valuable as reportage and analysis.I try to remind myself that merely having done is more significant than having done well, or even poorly. I'd rather keep a regular blog than not, even a bad one. Really! I loathe being responsible for yet another piece of internet detritus.
My life now is different from what I imagined it would be about eight months ago. If I don't have time for the kinds of posts I was originally planning on writing, I certainly won't have time for them later. Still, I'd prefer to fill this space somehow. There is also the fact that, all things considered, the next year or so offers a bounty of newness that I want to document and share. I've been where I am now for longer than I've ever been anywhere. And I'm leaving. Cat and I are heading across the country. I'll be trying my hand at a super-selective, fancy-pants MFA program. I'll be teaching for the first time. I'll be in the company of writers I've admired for years. It could be wonderful; it could be a complete disaster; it could be variable amounts of both. But it'll be worth writing, I think, and the people who stop by here most often (hello, my friends!) might consider it worth reading.
I'm going to try to post here once a week. Topics may range from perspectives on solitude to the effects of consuming an entire pot of Earl Grey tea (biochemically no different from a tablespoon of ipecac, in case you're wondering). They may be 1,200 words long, or 12 words long, or may just be YouTube videos of toads bouncing down mountains. It doesn't matter. I'm doing it. Weekly. Promise. (In part because it's not easy to pack the internet into a cardboard box and accidentally the whole thing.) It could be bad, it could be good, but most importantly, it will be.
So, cheers to all that. And thank you, Mrs. Wilkinson.
I bought my first journal at a stationery store in Vienna, a few steps away from one of the tram stops between Grinzing and Schottentor on the #38 tram. The first book had a chartreuse paisley cover and, like all of its successors, was hardbound. Because I wasn't yet aware how much and how frequently I'd be writing, or that I'd be pressing everything from photographs to flowers between the pages, the first journal had a small, stiff spine. I took it everywhere with me. Writing became a solid part of my routine. I wrote when I woke up in the morning; I wrote during lunch at school; I wrote, elbow to elbow on dining-room tables, with my best friends; I wrote in bed, by flashlight; I wrote on field trips--in Graz, Salzburg, Hallstadt, and in Prague, Budapest, and Paris. I doodled, sketched, and painted in it, taped ticket stubs, postcards, cut-out snowflakes, bits of sheet music, candy wrappers, stickers, and friendship bracelets inside. When I ran out of pages, I'd go to the stationery store and buy another journal. Our class visited the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp; I wrote about that. My mother got sick and returned to the United States to get on the national transplant registry; I wrote about that, too. I documented the piercing of my ears, the euthanizing of our oldest family pet, my first experience skiing, the effects of war in Sarajevo, my debut as a clarinet soloist in a youth music festival, the harvesting of wine grapes with Cobenzl vineyard workers. I wrote (and meticulously taped construction-paper flaps over) awful poetry, first-kiss fantasies, lamentations on the subject of puberty, weird dreams, made-up stories, and racy passages copied from romance novels. I described the night my father and I drove on roads lining the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods, on a night so bright he turned the headlights off and navigated by moonlight alone. I described the night it was first suggested to me that he wasn't coming home. I described a few things that happen to you once in life and then never again.
I had about ten years' worth of writing, some eleven volumes, when I destroyed the entire collection.
I had a roundabout way of doing it. I fell in love, packed the journals in a big box, drove 900 miles across the country, and left them in my beloved's bedroom closet. I was nineteen. I thought I was coming back. I thought giving him my single most precious and irreplaceable possession would guarantee my return at a time when few things were certain. Here's why it's my fault: I never told him what the box contained and--either out of respect of my privacy or a complete lack of curiosity--he never looked inside it. We fell out of touch while the box was shuffled around among his things, deposited in a flood-prone basement, and then finally discarded by a disgruntled landlord, along with a smattering of other abandoned belongings.
Among friends, I've referred to the self-sabotaging tendency by which I lose or destroy the things I love best as my dispersionism. I am a dispersionist. My journals were the greatest thing I have ever made and lost. And while I'm wise to the fact that their loss lends them a vaster greatness, it is nevertheless true that words are stronger than memories, and that I greedily regret not having more of both.
It's been about five years to the day I had the brief conversation--long distance, over the phone--about the fate of my journals. I tried to convince myself that maybe it was better this way; that the writing was probably all leg hair and slow dances anyway; that Past Me and Past Life were not as compelling as I'd like to believe; that it's silly and self-indulgent to be so backward-looking all the time; that it is far better to have nothing so dear to lose, no more paper to hoard and haul around, et cetera. And yet, within the last couple of years, I could still catch myself entertaining the deluded fantasy that my friend had actually held on to the box and was hoping to surprise me at some point with an unexpected reunion, or that there exists somewhere some landlord or dump-worker who thought, "Who could possibly throw this away? It must be important to someone. I'll hold on to it for a little while." (Even to describe the "chartreuse paisley cover" is a nod to the latter.) These are, of course, effects of denial--an inability to accept, or even grasp, the scope and permanence of the lack (together with, I admit, a splash of self-importance). Every now and then, I'll tell some half-remembered story, and someone might say, "You oughta write a book!" and I'll flinch to think of the resources I no longer have. It was the first loss of my adult life, the first for which I was solely accountable, and one which seemed to reiterate and worsen all preceding losses (the act of documentation itself being more often than not a futile attempt to salvage and recreate, in my case). I'm still sore about it today.
In time, though, the constellation of responses to something like this--the disbelief, denial, delusions, even disappointment--are superseded by acceptance. There is the sad old adage that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And so it is that I labor to convince myself that it is not the writing itself that mattered, but the fact of having written. The simple fact that "it was" is greater than whether it was actually good or bad, useful or not.
I've written, albeit ambivalently, about the writing cure--here, too, the process is of greater significance than the product. It is somewhat comforting to know that I can't obliterate the effect of all that work as easily as I did the work itself. Writing is--among other things--a craft. Aspiring writers are often advised to write every day, because improvement is a matter of practice. Maybe I'm a better writer now than I would have been if I hadn't poured so much energy into those journals. Maybe I'm a healthier, better-adjusted person than I would've otherwise been. I certainly have pretty penmanship. Consolation prizes, all!
The moral of this story brings me, finally, to the point of this post. When I started this blog, I looked at it as both an impetus and an opportunity to broaden my research and writing habits. I have interests that are not directly related to my job or creative endeavors, and I figured that keeping a blog would provide both an outlet for those interests and motivation for me to put time into, say, reading a pile of studies about the effectiveness of SSRIs versus behavioral therapy with regard to treatment for mild to moderate depression. I wanted to blog about research, about ideas. I wanted to avoid personal pronouns and navel-gazing. The unfortunate truth is that it takes me much, much longer to research, draft, edit, and publish posts about studies and ideas outside my realm of expertise than it would to just write about what I think. The other unfortunate truth is that it's much, much harder for me to consider an avalanche of personal thoughts and experiences as interesting or valuable as reportage and analysis.I try to remind myself that merely having done is more significant than having done well, or even poorly. I'd rather keep a regular blog than not, even a bad one. Really! I loathe being responsible for yet another piece of internet detritus.
My life now is different from what I imagined it would be about eight months ago. If I don't have time for the kinds of posts I was originally planning on writing, I certainly won't have time for them later. Still, I'd prefer to fill this space somehow. There is also the fact that, all things considered, the next year or so offers a bounty of newness that I want to document and share. I've been where I am now for longer than I've ever been anywhere. And I'm leaving. Cat and I are heading across the country. I'll be trying my hand at a super-selective, fancy-pants MFA program. I'll be teaching for the first time. I'll be in the company of writers I've admired for years. It could be wonderful; it could be a complete disaster; it could be variable amounts of both. But it'll be worth writing, I think, and the people who stop by here most often (hello, my friends!) might consider it worth reading.
I'm going to try to post here once a week. Topics may range from perspectives on solitude to the effects of consuming an entire pot of Earl Grey tea (biochemically no different from a tablespoon of ipecac, in case you're wondering). They may be 1,200 words long, or 12 words long, or may just be YouTube videos of toads bouncing down mountains. It doesn't matter. I'm doing it. Weekly. Promise. (In part because it's not easy to pack the internet into a cardboard box and accidentally the whole thing.) It could be bad, it could be good, but most importantly, it will be.
So, cheers to all that. And thank you, Mrs. Wilkinson.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Potential Mascot
Why face confrontation when you can curl up like a ball and bounce down a rocky mountainside instead?
Adaptation is a beautiful thing.
Read more about the Venezuelan pebble toad here.
Tip o' the hat to Doctor Professor.
Adaptation is a beautiful thing.
Read more about the Venezuelan pebble toad here.
Tip o' the hat to Doctor Professor.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
A "Cure" for Writing
In my last post, “Where the Problem Fixes You,” I wrote about an article that examined the potential benefits of depression. One of the claims in the article (and the study on which it’s based) is that writing promotes quicker resolution of depressive symptoms by allowing the writer to gain objectivity, insight, and control through the abreactive process of writing about one's troubles. This idea (commonly known as the “writing cure”) is not quite as new the adaptationist theories in which it plays a role.
The writing cure is a variant of the “talking cure,” a concept generally regarded as the basis of psychoanalysis. The term was coined, not by Freud, but by Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O.” in the case histories), who was a young patient of Freud’s colleague, Josef Breuer. In 1880, Bertha and Breuer discovered together that regular discussions about her condition had the effect of reducing the severity of her symptoms. Through words, the limbic intelligence of the “underbrain” acquired the possibility of negotiation outside the self. In the analyst’s office, speech became the vehicle through which unconscious pressures could be shifted into consciousness, where they could then be examined, dealt with, and eventually mastered. Bertha Pappenheim dubbed this “the talking cure” or, in jest, “chimney sweeping.”
D. H. Lawrence might’ve come close to articulating the writing cure in 1913 when he famously wrote to a friend that “one sheds ones sicknesses in books — repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be a master of them.” To shed sickness in a book confers a purpose on sickness that it might otherwise lack, and that’s certainly remarkable. But I’d prefer to argue that the first person to write about the writing cure might well have been Virginia Woolf. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press had been publishing Freud’s papers since 1924, but Woolf herself reserved several years to pour scorn on the man before reading him in earnest (and meeting him!) in 1939, the same year she wrote the autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past.” In a much-discussed passage of the essay, Woolf describes how the experience of writing To the Lighthouse allayed her obsessive fixation on her mother’s death; she writes,
However deceptively cut-and-dried Woolf’s account might be here, this is the basic machinery of the writing cure. It makes some sense that people who write a lot are more likely to stumble upon a particular kind of writing that helps them — at least temporarily — alleviate pain. And yet, why is it that some of the strongest testimonies to the palliative effects of writing tend to come from writers who ultimately commit suicide? If writing is such a cure, why does it fail consistently enough to have earned its own term? It’s possible (in fact, likely) that participants in writing-cure studies and those who choose to write for a living are birds of a very different feather; but I’m going to go ahead and sit on that point for a minute.
James Kaufman, who coined the term “Sylvia Plath Effect,” coauthored a 2006 article in the Review of General Psychology titled “Why Doesn’t the Writing Cure Help Poets?” (note: link goes straight to a PDF file), which cites twenty-some studies on the way to the assertion that “writers are, generally, more likely to be mentally ill and die young than others in the arts,” with poets essentially blowing the curve with “higher rates of mental illness, suicide, and mortality than other writers.” (The New York Times covered the same topic in 2004, in an article titled “Going Early into That Good Night.”) Belief in the therapeutic power of writing, in light of such strong evidence against it, seems to come packaged with the notion that the majority of poets (and many writers) do it wrong.
Kaufman and Sexton, the authors of the 2006 article, argue that the key elements of writing-cure writing, done right, are expressivity and narrative; that is, in order to feel better, the writer needs to make an emotional investment and tell a coherent story. Language-level details might also help to clarify what’s ticking behind allegedly palliative writing. Linguistic-analysis software allows researchers to examine connections between the frequency with which a writer uses certain categories of words and the health benefits that the writer may or may not report (or demonstrate) after having written. (Categories of words, for example, might include “cognitive” words (“because,” “reason,” “result”), big words, self-references, interrogatives, positive and negative emotions, etc.) Linguistic analysis allows psychologists to make some pretty remarkable observations. For example:
A version of the widely used text-analysis software designed by Pennebaker, Booth, and Francis is available to play with online, for free (if you don’t mind contributing to their corpus with your sample) at http://www.liwc.net. (The current version counts words that refer to sex, eating, or religion, too.) For what it’s worth, I’d offer that the delightful blog Dear Thyroid is a perfect example of what therapeutic-writing exercises can offer, and if I weren’t averse to pasting in stuff that doesn’t belong to me, I’d run some of that stuff through LIWC just to see what it says.
Certainly, there is no lack of evidence or research supporting the argument that certain types of writing are beneficial to mental health, even if the longevity and universal applicability of those benefits might be debatable. The Scientific American article I wrote about last time suggested that depression, in itself, is an evolutionary advantage that should perhaps not be thought of (or treated) as a mental disorder. A week ago, the New York Times ran an article about the anxious mind that seemed to resonate with the ideas described in the Scientific American piece; as Robin Marantz Henig relates,
In view of all of these things, here’s what I think about all of this, finally: Depression probably offers a greater benefit to writing than writing does to depression. Contrary to the arguments expressed in the articles I wrote about in my previous post, analytical rumination may be better for your writing than it is for you. For Virginia Woolf, it was “the shock-receiving capacity” that made her a writer; it didn’t make her a happy person, it didn’t make her well-adjusted, but it did (by her account) make her see things more clearly, and she was able to bring that clarity of vision to her work. A high threshold for “shock” is perhaps the only way to explain how she could weather the eleven turbulent years (beginning, for her, at age thirteen) that brought the deaths of her mother, half-sister, father, and brother. I think it’s safe to suggest, with regard to extreme emotional disturbance, that the endgame of analytical rumination may be to say, essentially, “This insoluble problem is an integral part of who I am; and to the extent that I am happy with that, the trauma has a reason for being, and I accept it.” Such is adaptation.
Two weeks ago, over the text “near-unspeakable questions,” I linked to a four-word question in “A Sketch of the Past” that I think about a lot, and which appears in the below excerpt:
The “near-unspeakable” question is a matter of examining consequences and asking whether one would (albeit impossibly) substitute that Thing so terrible that one wishes it never happened, that Thing that forges a person, for something easier, for a life taken less seriously. Perhaps to catch oneself unwilling to substitute that trauma for the blithe “rush and tumble” is to catch oneself confessing preference for the trauma (and the hard-won wisdom that comes with it). It might mean thinking such admittedly complicated and disturbing things as, for example, “It is good that I was abused,” “It is good that I have lost my loved ones,” or, paraphrasing Mizuta Masahide, “It is good that my house has burned down. Now I can see the moon.”
The writing cure is a variant of the “talking cure,” a concept generally regarded as the basis of psychoanalysis. The term was coined, not by Freud, but by Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O.” in the case histories), who was a young patient of Freud’s colleague, Josef Breuer. In 1880, Bertha and Breuer discovered together that regular discussions about her condition had the effect of reducing the severity of her symptoms. Through words, the limbic intelligence of the “underbrain” acquired the possibility of negotiation outside the self. In the analyst’s office, speech became the vehicle through which unconscious pressures could be shifted into consciousness, where they could then be examined, dealt with, and eventually mastered. Bertha Pappenheim dubbed this “the talking cure” or, in jest, “chimney sweeping.”
D. H. Lawrence might’ve come close to articulating the writing cure in 1913 when he famously wrote to a friend that “one sheds ones sicknesses in books — repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be a master of them.” To shed sickness in a book confers a purpose on sickness that it might otherwise lack, and that’s certainly remarkable. But I’d prefer to argue that the first person to write about the writing cure might well have been Virginia Woolf. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press had been publishing Freud’s papers since 1924, but Woolf herself reserved several years to pour scorn on the man before reading him in earnest (and meeting him!) in 1939, the same year she wrote the autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past.” In a much-discussed passage of the essay, Woolf describes how the experience of writing To the Lighthouse allayed her obsessive fixation on her mother’s death; she writes,
I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.
However deceptively cut-and-dried Woolf’s account might be here, this is the basic machinery of the writing cure. It makes some sense that people who write a lot are more likely to stumble upon a particular kind of writing that helps them — at least temporarily — alleviate pain. And yet, why is it that some of the strongest testimonies to the palliative effects of writing tend to come from writers who ultimately commit suicide? If writing is such a cure, why does it fail consistently enough to have earned its own term? It’s possible (in fact, likely) that participants in writing-cure studies and those who choose to write for a living are birds of a very different feather; but I’m going to go ahead and sit on that point for a minute.
James Kaufman, who coined the term “Sylvia Plath Effect,” coauthored a 2006 article in the Review of General Psychology titled “Why Doesn’t the Writing Cure Help Poets?” (note: link goes straight to a PDF file), which cites twenty-some studies on the way to the assertion that “writers are, generally, more likely to be mentally ill and die young than others in the arts,” with poets essentially blowing the curve with “higher rates of mental illness, suicide, and mortality than other writers.” (The New York Times covered the same topic in 2004, in an article titled “Going Early into That Good Night.”) Belief in the therapeutic power of writing, in light of such strong evidence against it, seems to come packaged with the notion that the majority of poets (and many writers) do it wrong.
Kaufman and Sexton, the authors of the 2006 article, argue that the key elements of writing-cure writing, done right, are expressivity and narrative; that is, in order to feel better, the writer needs to make an emotional investment and tell a coherent story. Language-level details might also help to clarify what’s ticking behind allegedly palliative writing. Linguistic-analysis software allows researchers to examine connections between the frequency with which a writer uses certain categories of words and the health benefits that the writer may or may not report (or demonstrate) after having written. (Categories of words, for example, might include “cognitive” words (“because,” “reason,” “result”), big words, self-references, interrogatives, positive and negative emotions, etc.) Linguistic analysis allows psychologists to make some pretty remarkable observations. For example:
Another finding is that writers who shift in their use of the first person singular (e.g., I, me, my) to third person (e.g., we, us, them) are better off than those who continue to use the first person singular (Stirman & Pennebaker, 2001). This suggests that a shift in perspective is an important element and is consistent with the idea of storytelling. The picture that emerges is that the healthy writer is telling an evolving story and using emotion while doing it. . . . Conversely, a shift toward usage of the first-person singular may indicate a change in mental health. An analysis of the works of Kurt Cobain, John Cheever, and Cole Porter revealed that as their fame increased, all three writers used more first-person singular in both their creative work (song lyrics and stories) and in their private diaries and journals (Schaller, 1997). As this increase took place, so did an increase in self-destructive behaviors (e.g., excessive drinking) and depression (and for Cobain, an eventual suicide).
A version of the widely used text-analysis software designed by Pennebaker, Booth, and Francis is available to play with online, for free (if you don’t mind contributing to their corpus with your sample) at http://www.liwc.net. (The current version counts words that refer to sex, eating, or religion, too.) For what it’s worth, I’d offer that the delightful blog Dear Thyroid is a perfect example of what therapeutic-writing exercises can offer, and if I weren’t averse to pasting in stuff that doesn’t belong to me, I’d run some of that stuff through LIWC just to see what it says.
Certainly, there is no lack of evidence or research supporting the argument that certain types of writing are beneficial to mental health, even if the longevity and universal applicability of those benefits might be debatable. The Scientific American article I wrote about last time suggested that depression, in itself, is an evolutionary advantage that should perhaps not be thought of (or treated) as a mental disorder. A week ago, the New York Times ran an article about the anxious mind that seemed to resonate with the ideas described in the Scientific American piece; as Robin Marantz Henig relates,
“Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety . . . “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.
In view of all of these things, here’s what I think about all of this, finally: Depression probably offers a greater benefit to writing than writing does to depression. Contrary to the arguments expressed in the articles I wrote about in my previous post, analytical rumination may be better for your writing than it is for you. For Virginia Woolf, it was “the shock-receiving capacity” that made her a writer; it didn’t make her a happy person, it didn’t make her well-adjusted, but it did (by her account) make her see things more clearly, and she was able to bring that clarity of vision to her work. A high threshold for “shock” is perhaps the only way to explain how she could weather the eleven turbulent years (beginning, for her, at age thirteen) that brought the deaths of her mother, half-sister, father, and brother. I think it’s safe to suggest, with regard to extreme emotional disturbance, that the endgame of analytical rumination may be to say, essentially, “This insoluble problem is an integral part of who I am; and to the extent that I am happy with that, the trauma has a reason for being, and I accept it.” Such is adaptation.
Two weeks ago, over the text “near-unspeakable questions,” I linked to a four-word question in “A Sketch of the Past” that I think about a lot, and which appears in the below excerpt:
If to be aware of the insecurity of life, to remember something gone, to feel now and then, overwhelmingly, . . . a passionate fumbling fellowship—if it is a good thing to be aware of all this at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, by fits and starts —if, if, if—. But was it good? Would it not have been better (if there is any sense in saying good and better when there is no possible judge, no standard) to go on feeling, as at St. Ives, the rush and tumble of family life?. . . . would this not have been better than to have had that protection removed; to have been tumbled out of the family shelter; to have had it cracked and gashed; to have become critical and skeptical of the family—? Perhaps to have remained in the family, believing in it, accepting it, as we should, without those two deaths, would have given us greater scope, greater variety, and certainly greater confidence. On the other hand, I can put another question: Did those deaths give us an experience that even if it was numbing, mutilating, yet meant that the Gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking us seriously, and giving us a job which they would not have thought it worthwhile to give—say, the Booths or the Milmans. . . . So I came to think of life as something of extreme reality.
The “near-unspeakable” question is a matter of examining consequences and asking whether one would (albeit impossibly) substitute that Thing so terrible that one wishes it never happened, that Thing that forges a person, for something easier, for a life taken less seriously. Perhaps to catch oneself unwilling to substitute that trauma for the blithe “rush and tumble” is to catch oneself confessing preference for the trauma (and the hard-won wisdom that comes with it). It might mean thinking such admittedly complicated and disturbing things as, for example, “It is good that I was abused,” “It is good that I have lost my loved ones,” or, paraphrasing Mizuta Masahide, “It is good that my house has burned down. Now I can see the moon.”
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