Speaking into the Dark

Speaking Into the Dark

A Thank You

I want to thank those who’ve consistently supported and encouraged me over the years. I’m not going to put up a list of names—because I know you probably don’t need or want me to do that—but I’m very aware and you have my gratitude.

Nobody can write consistently (and, by that, I mean decade after decade) without some form of support. If you doubt this, try an experiment: every night for a week, sit in a dark closet and speak for 90 minutes, imagining there is someone listening on the other side of the door.

I only ask that you try this for a week because I doubt most people could get to the third session without going a little crazy. Now imagine trying to do this every night (and feeling like a total imposter and failure anytime you miss) for 20 years. That’s what it’s like to be a writer.

The illustrious Chuck Wendig puts it like this:

And the writing life? The publishing world? Definitely not a realm of pure kindness. The writing life isn’t cruel to be cruel, but there exists a lot of ambient cruelty built into any system based on envisioning art, producing it, and trying to earn an audience for it. Further, writing is an often isolated and isolating act—you’re planting yourself in front of a notebook or computer and writing one sentence after the next for weeks, months, maybe even years. And then once you’ve finished that part, you’re holding it out, asking the universe to love it. No one part of this is actively or personally cruel, but it can sure feel lonely. It can feel desperate, too. It’s easy to lose focus and lose hope—and it only gets worse when someone (agent, editor, audience) takes that story you’ve worked on forever and tells you, “Meh. Nah.”

This is the truth. But Chuck isn’t complaining and neither am I. I think we’re trying to get at the same thing: speaking into the dark is hard. And it’s always dark. It gets significantly darker when you “make it,” when you become a marketable brand and you’re surrounded by businesspeople who want to see you excrete more salable units, forever.

There’s a lot of irony embedded in writerly success, but I haven’t experienced that sort of thing—what passes for fame and status in the highly self-conscious and pathological publishing industry. But I’ve been close to a few writers who have and I’ve seen how brutal “success” can be.

If you want to publish me, grand! I’ll take it. Send me a check and put my face on a website. Still, I’m not so naïve that I believe there’s an end to this or that someday there’s going to be a parade in my honor where everyone will love me. I’m not in this for love or money. I’m in it because I’m addicted to it.

So the best thing for me is just to be able to continue. And expressions of support along the way, the sense that sometimes, perhaps unexpectedly, there actually is someone listening out there, are important.

Now I will stop writing before this seems even more like a metaphor for sitting in the confession box. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 35 years since my last confession . . . or about 10 hours, depending on how I want to think about my writing habit . . .

Don’t Weep for the Oompa Loompas

I loved Roger Ebert’s wit and lack of pretention. His movie reviews in The Chicago Sun-Times often struck a delicate balance between honesty and generosity. He had a great sense of film history and he’d contextualize Hollywood stinkers in ways that made them interesting as artifacts of a silly and unforgiving industry.

Over time, I found his approach to be applicable beyond the movies: first accept that there will be a lot of garbage in a given field or system. Then understand that garbage can teach you as much, if not more, than quality if you’re willing to pay attention. That is, if you can continue watching, if you can manage to withstand it and keep your lunch down.

Sometimes, I have a near visceral reaction to pretentious media, especially when it comes to literary fiction and nonfiction. I can trace it to when I was getting a master’s degree in writing and every other literary novel seemed to be about an attractive young woman on the east coast exploring bisexuality and working in an art gallery. Most of the stories submitted in my workshops were also about that or something very close to it. I spent my MFA depressed, alienated from a literary scene steeped in cloying trendiness.

Besides, I didn’t know how to write about that stuff, even if it was required reading in my classes. My characters, as one of my instructors put it, were rather from the “low end of the service economy.” And that dog wouldn’t hunt if I wanted a career as a writer. So she hoped I had plans after graduation. Maybe sell some insurance or, you know, the Navy. Half-drunk at a faculty party, I laughed and said something like, “Don’t do me any favors.” She didn’t.

The formula was ubiquitous in those years and seemed to whip my professors into a lather whenever one of the Big Six offered up another clone—probably because my professors were working writers trying desperately to stay in step with what their agents and editors demanded. Then Candace Bushnell anthologized her New York Observer columns, which applied the formula to a type of harder-edged, jaded, status-anxious Manhattanite and everybody wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw.

I tried to channel my inner Ebert when writing critiques of the new Bushnellian short stories coming across the table. I drank my Milk of Magnesia and tried to learn. And I did learn at least one thing: marketing is rarely about art even when art is being marketed. But the artists don’t always realize this. Everyone’s just trying to do their best. Everyone just wants to be loved in a world that won’t love them back. So what’s it gonna take? Go ask Candace.

By the time Sex and the City hit HBO, 9/11 had already seared itself into the national consciousness. So naturally the usual illicit love triangles, existential crises, career failures and ineffectual husband stories that had been previously set in five-bedroom homes, fancy restaurants, galleries, and uptown lofts—with an odd chapter sometimes taking place at a resort in Vail or, saints preserve us, on a boat off the coast of Mallorca—now featured explosions.

I was advised to rewrite my current novel and make the protagonist a fireman. A well-known British novelist, who I’d previously considered above all this, published a divorce novel almost identical to his previous divorce novel, save that the new one was set not far from ground zero at the World Trade Center. My former classmates, now selling insurance, preparing to ship out on aircraft carriers, or working in the low end of the service economy, were suddenly writing stories that read less like quotidian Nobel Prize Alice Munro and more like overheated radio dramas from the 1940s.

Maybe Ebert got his compassionate take from “Sturgeon’s Law,” formulated in 1957 by science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who declared in a column for Venture Science Fiction that “ninety percent of everything is crap.” Subsequent writers reformulated this as: ninety percent of everything is garbage meant to hold up the ten percent that isn’t.” Sometimes, this is referred to as “landfill theory.” Still, if we’ve learned anything from modern horror movies—a genre that seems densely compacted with trash—one does not take the landfill for granted.

So I tried to embrace the new NPR-coffee-table terrorism fetish like every other young writer planning on attending the next AWP conference, but it was hard. Hard to keep down. Hard to contextualize as just another trend. Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close helped because I thought it was really good. Maybe I’d read it differently now, but I remember thinking Foer’s 2005 novel was the only good thing I’d read with 9/11 as a backdrop. I started to wonder whether the New York publishing industry had the potential to become less squeamish, less trendy, less risk-averse.

Nevertheless, when David Foster Wallace killed himself three years later and Little, Brown, and Company jumped at the chance to publish his unfinished Pale King, it seemed like a new low. The marketing around the book wasn’t about pushing units anymore or the possibility of an HBO special somewhere down the line. Maybe no one knew what it was about. Maybe the reptilian DNA of Little, Brown’s sales reps had finally asserted control and the lizards were running amok in a wild frenzy, fucking and consuming everything in sight. Then again, maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention.

I had a Skype meeting with an agent around this time who looked very much like the students I used to see coming out of the London School of Economics when I’d get off the Tube at Holborn: impeccably clean, flinty expression, driven, deeply unhappy. She asked me what the books on either side of my novel would be in the bookstore and didn’t smile when I said, “Well, that depends. What bookstore are we in?”

I should have said, “On one side we have The Pale King. On the other, of course, is Emperor’s Children—it culminates on 9/11, don’t you know.” She knew. I knew she knew. And she would have approved. Messud’s Emperor’s Children is the Sex and the City of 9/11 literary opportunism. For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t say anything like that. We simply looked at each other for a moment and she wished me good luck.

We’ve come a long way since then; though, it seems like we’re doing the same dance to different music. Much has been made of the wokification of publishing, whatever that means, and the censorship of Roald Dahl, whose work in its untreated form has now been adjudged dangerous for the youth. I suspect this has something to do with Millennials and Gen Zs being really, really, really, really sensitive and therefore risk averse. More than we ever were. In some ways, I suppose it’s good to be that sensitive. In others, perhaps not so good. And Roald Dahl’s estate better watch out. Because now they’re saying the Oompa Loompas are the “subject of some racial controversy” and I have no doubt they’ll be evaluating the corruptive influence of Switch Bitch and Esio Trot before long.

Still, the cynical insensitive Gen X voice in the back of my head says commerce will undermine equity, safe spaces, and sensitivity readers in the end. The scaly reptiles of the publishing industry are mostly nocturnal, preferring to stay hidden during the day. But when they catch the scent of profit, they invariably rise up and stop doing good so they might do well.

Then into the landfill will go yesterday’s social justice homilies along with the newly expurgated Bond books and whatever Dahl stories were rewritten by an administrative assistant at Penguin Random House using ChatGPT. And there will be a new renaissance of insensitive fiction and non-inclusive speech. Well, the grave’s a fine and private place. If Fleming and Dahl are turning in it as a result of all this bad noise, who really wants to know? Maybe the AI rewrites will improve between now and the next big thing.

I’m reminded of one of Ebert’s funniest reviews: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) which, in the first sentence, he called “a horrible experience of unbearable length.” Unwilling to pull punches, as this seemed like one of the few movies Ebert really hated and resented having to watch, he wrote that “the movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed The Rock in 1996. Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Faust made a better deal. . . . The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal.”

That always makes me laugh. Yet, this was not one of Ebert’s most compassionate reviews. It was one where the balance shifted conspicuously from generosity to blistering contempt. Maybe it was his age or the fact that he was definitely of a less sensitive generation, less concerned with being non-offensive, and it was starting to show. But there’s no denying that his serrated wit could sometimes reach neoclassical dimensions. And that may be why we read him—not for how much safety and inclusivity his ingenium could provide, but for how dangerous he could be.

I’ve been absent of late . . .

I think Warren Ellis puts it well in “How to Build a Blog Without Social Media“: “[My website] has always been subject to pauses and hiatuses, chiefly because my job is writing and in busy periods there hasn’t always been enough writing left in me on a given day to sustain this site.” This is what I’ve been meaning to post here for some time but, precisely for the above reason, haven’t had the mind or occasion to do so.

Lately, I’ve been working on long fiction projects, writing steadily but not visibly or publicly. I know a growing number of people read my blog and newsletter; though, I don’t often pay attention to the site statistics. And I’m grateful for any interest and attention paid to my writing—grateful enough, in fact, that I want to thank you for sticking with me during my less visible periods when I have to do the stereotypical fiction writer thing and disappear into the back room for some months.

I am still here, wherever “here” is in a non-local, asynchronous digital medium. And I’ve been thinking about what’s next. Here’s an overview of what’s going on and coming up:

The Covid lockdown novel had to change as my perception of that time changed. I’m rewriting the first 190 pages (which is to say, most of it so far). I thought it was a dead project. But I couldn’t get it out of my head—more the characters than the setting, but I don’t think it’s possible to separate the two. Hence, the rewrite. It’s unpleasant and fascinating in equal proportion, not unlike digging myself out of the basement after the house collapsed.
The short science-fiction novel about a night-blooming flower (no, the flower is not overtly a character) is going pretty well right now. It’s about halfway written. If I can keep writing the way I have been, I don’t think I’ll need too many subsequent drafts. We shall see.
My third book of literary stories, Living the Dream, (delayed two years by the pandemic and the publisher changing countries) is finally coming out. They tell me it should be available in late April. This is a good thing, since I already have most of a fourth story collection manuscript put together.
I intend to return to my tried and true magazine submission praxis very soon. So there should be articles and columns appearing here once again. I can’t predict exactly when or where my work will be appearing, but I guess that’s part of the fun.
I’m also still interested in doing an audio-only podcast via my newsletter, where I read poems and passages from books and talk about writers I like.
And, of course, there’s the magazine that my friend Kurt and I have been talking about for two decades. We finally have a talented, serious group, the possibility of legitimate funding, and the will to make it happen. It’s a big undertaking, but it’s picking up speed and we’re all experienced enough with magazine and small press publishing to know what we love and want to avoid.

So that’s the state of things at the moment. Watch this space and thanks for sticking with me. We’ll see where these pathways lead . . .

Michael

Being a Creative Writer in an Age of Anxiety

A colleague of mine, a self-employed commercial artist and science fiction writer I will call “Jim,” recently declared, “If you’re a man getting close to your 50s and you haven’t done something yet, don’t say you’re doing to do it someday because you probably won’t.” Jim was criticizing another guy in the same industry, who he doesn’t like and who seems to be loudly and visibly struggling in his career.

Strangely, Jim is also getting close to his 50s, hasn’t done all the things he wants to do, and is also existing paycheck to paycheck, trying to live off his self-published work (which is quite good, in my opinion). The difference between them is the other guy whines loudly and constantly plugs his GoFundMe, while Jim works harder and (mostly) swallows his frustration.

Jim’s comments on social media are usually criticisms of people who complain about their difficult lives instead of working hard like him. I can accept that attitude. If anyone has earned the right to be scornful of the weak, it’s someone who started off in a weak position and made themselves strong or, in Jim’s case, perhaps marginally stronger. Still, it doesn’t feel good when his angst rises and he starts punching down.

His pronouncement above sounds like flinty entrepreneurial wisdom—Yoda in a self-made, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps vein: do or do not (in your career, in your life); there is no try. But I know his criticism and anger are rooted in his own insecurities, not in some external source. We’re always the most critical of our own family, our own friends, our own professional colleagues, members of our own communities and cultures because, when they fail, it makes us feel like we’re next.

Jim was, to use a trendy term, “triggered,” and he had to release the vapors. We all have that friend who tries to speak like a philosopher or social critic as a way of purging anxiety and legitimating his concerns. Sometimes, I do that, too. So I’m not trying to be inordinately critical of Jim or except myself from a behavior that seems common among sensitive people, particularly artists and writers. If you’re not bothered by something, you usually have little motivation to write or speak about it publicly, especially on a blog or in a magazine op-ed or on social media. But in order to understand the criticism Jim’s making, we also have to know something about arts communities and social timing.

A creative community, whether physical (like a writer’s colony, a brick-and-mortar magazine, or a college art program) or on social media, is a perpetual knife fight in a submarine. It goes without saying that in every creative field, money is always tight, careers are always precarious, hyper-competitiveness is the rule, commercialism undercuts everything, and exploitation is a fact of life.

These hardships and uncertainties naturally produce immense anxiety, since survival is always at issue on some level, even when you ostensibly “make it” and get famous. As the actress, Jewel Staite, drolly notes on her Twitter profile, “I like routine, predictability, and living a non-stressful existence, which is why I’ve chosen the film industry.” That’s darkly funny. But it’s also true: life as an artist isn’t simple or calm. You don’t get job security, even when people know who you are. You’re always on the make.

Keeping this in mind makes it easier to see how tearing down other creatives can become a Malthusian side hustle. If they’re wounded, the instinct may be to kick them where it hurts. If they’re down, put your foot on their back. Do unto others before they can do unto you. More table scraps for you that way. You’ll feel less vulnerable, less likely to die in poverty and obscurity, less hopeless, lost, and ashamed that you ever considered yourself worthy to live a creative life.

If publicly criticizing others relieves your constant, grinding dread, even if only for a moment, it will be tempting. But there’s a problem with that way of being, apart from its meanness and craven pettiness: it makes you less able to do your own imaginative work. Competitiveness and the anxiety that stimulates it erodes creativity. It demands your emotional energy, the power you should be channeling into your creative process. And it makes you feel like you have to court public visibility at all costs to protect yourself from others like you. It brings to mind Putin parading around his nukes, saying don’t mess with me. I’m serious business. That’s exhausting. Artists should not have nukes.

This is why I have generally avoided arts communities; though, social media has put most writers like me in a perpetual online detention camp with my peers (and the current surge of AI art paranoia isn’t helping one bit). The pandemic only exacerbated the tensions and forced online interactions that would not have been advisable in any other era. Add the wave of self-conscious, humorless, social-activist writing still moving through pop-culture and the creative life seems nothing but an exercise in misery.

Western, middle-class, social timing says that by certain decades of life, one should have certain things and be certain things. But very few people will admit that they fall short of those ideals. One cannot log onto Twitter or Facebook without seeing some financial marketing come-on that goes, “How many millions will you need to retire?” In other words, how much money will you need to avert an ugly humiliating end after you retire? Millions? Most artists and writers have thousands (or hundreds) in the bank. Some, who are actually very gifted and good at what they do, live below the poverty line.

So I think I understand Jim when he says if you haven’t done a thing by 50, you aren’t going to. He’s not talking to you or me. He’s talking to himself. Because he’s thinking about social timing and emoting like a neurotic artist in a creative community, wondering if he’s destined to die in the gutter.

While I don’t accept the assumptions that go into the success / failure binary encouraged by middle-class social timing—I think it’s a little more complicated and there’s more room to live how you want to live, if you’re willing to make compromises—I also think it’s better to work hard than pump your GoFundMe for sympathy change. But I feel sad when I see a talented colleague desperately cutting down some other poor sap who’s just trying to make the rent any way he can.

We get one life. It isn’t over ’till it’s over. And ultimately we get to do what we want as long as we’re willing to accept the consequences. That means, if you really love being an artist, you’ll choose art. The hard part is making that choice in a relaxed, generous way.

List of resources available to writers who are refugees from Ukraine

https://www.facebook.com/ilya.kaminsky.543/

Dominance and Submissions

Let’s say you’ve labored long in the fields of creative writing and the People Who Know (or maybe just the people who’ve noticed) have appreciated your talent. Some have appreciated it loudly and publicly, some quietly to friends in ways that eventually come back to you, some through amazing feats of jealousy, and others through an unrelenting aggressive competitiveness that beggars belief. The lower the stakes, the higher the vitriol is an axiom of creative culture.

Let’s also say that for the first decade of writing and submitting short stories to magazines with names like Lost Nose Quarterly, Barbaric Yawp, and Bitch Review, the feedback of the 25-year-old readers working on these magazines mattered. Susie Lillywhite, the fiction editor at Uncommon Snuff, writes you a personalized rejection, praising your “humorous story of cis-het men behaving badly,” and your ever-present grinding self-doubt abates for ten full minutes; though, on minute 11, you wonder how Susie writes dialogue (“Hello, Mister Cisgendered Heteronormative Male. How are you today?” / “Hello, Thinly Veiled Proxy For Susie Designed To Signpost Authorial Identity And Abate Criticism. I am fine.”).

You get the inevitable raft of rejections and a few acceptances. In time, your acceptance average goes up. You know this because you obsessively gamify your submission process on a spreadsheet like fantasy baseball. Maybe your box scores show progress. Maybe all this effort means something—if not anything tangible in your day-to-day existence, then perhaps in a kind of working-fiction-writer sabermetrics that suggests your chosen life direction hasn’t been a horrible mistake. Maybe the 500 hypothetical readers of Dogwater International are upping your short story RBI. It’s possible. Don’t say it isn’t.

You’ve got a novel in progress. This goes without saying. Everyone has a novel in progress. Your screenwriter friend, Gaurangi, tells you she has two novels in progress, a poetry chapbook in progress, and a book of essays in progress. Yet, she’s miserable and hates her life. “Is that because you’re still assistant manager at KFC and can’t break through the glass ceiling?” “No,” she says, “it’s because you’re a fucking asshole.” You’ve been friends for 15 years. Her name means “giver of happiness.”

There is no joy like mine, you think. I am a cherry blossom adrift in the infinite cosmos. The form email from GOAT Bomb sits in your inbox. You can see that it begins, “Dear Valued Author, thank you for submitting to GOAT Bomb . . .” but you’ve been meditating. And if zazen has taught you anything, it’s that impersonal form rejections are naught but the transcendent meanderings of The Great Vehicle. The rejections aren’t depressing you. It must be something else.

So let’s say you’ve also learned how to save money as an effective freelance survival tactic. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’ve managed to eke out an existence as a ghost writer and a copyeditor. Let’s say, also for the sake of argument, that your cousin, who thought college was stupid, now makes low six figures as a construction manager and thinks you’re hilarious. You see him at Christmas dinner, a rosy-cheeked beer-drinking construction Santa with a twinkle in his eye. And he asks you the same thing he asked you last year: “Are you a mental midget?” He finds the question hilarious. “No,” you say. “I mentally fidget.” He can’t stop laughing. “With your digits!” In this family, we come together through spontaneous and combustive rhyming. You don’t take it personally.

But you don’t follow baseball. Thus, your spreadsheet submission game perpetually teeters on the edge of something else, deep and dark, eldritch and unspeakable, an existential abyss. Why do you do it? How does publishing another story in The East Punjabi Fiction Annual (that took you six months of sustained before-dawn writing sessions and seven painful drafts) matter in the construction management food-on-the-table sense? You joke, but there are no rhymes for it, at least none that would entertain your cousin.

The fact is, you are a mental midget. You must be if you still have to worry about putting ten more dollars on the credit card for a sandwich at Safeway—which isn’t Joe Biden’s fault. So don’t start. The supply chain is effed-up, yes. Covid is ineffable, yes. The pandemic shooed you out of Bangkok one step ahead of the Thai quarantine police, yes, and now you’re living in a Hawaiian jungle, but that has nothing to do with anything. Here you are. The feral rooster outside goes, “KEEEEE-YAAAAW-KOOOOO!” And the great world turns with its comings and goings.

Smoke three cigarettes with Gaurangi in her Kia in the parking lot of KFC. It’s midnight and she is off work. You drove into Hilo just for this because it’s a miracle that you both now live in the same place and she texted you: come smoke a cigarette with me so I can cope with the fact that I manage idiots. She won’t smoke at home because she has a two-year-old daughter and cigarettes are poison. “I should move back to L.A.” she says. “The fucking Big Island’s getting me nowhere.” “You married a Hawaiian.” She looks at you, drags deeply, and smiles. “Yes. That probably has something to do with why I’m here.”

One manages a KFC in Los Angeles if one wants to be a screenwriter, a whole different fantasy ballgame. One brings one’s Hawaiian husband to a bungalow in Glendale. Maybe one sells the script for She’s Gotta Have It 2, earning $135,000 for the original screenplay, including treatment, and suddenly it’s all cheddar. One writes one’s friend in the jungle: I don’t hate L.A. now. It is what it is. Now one can calm down and finish that poetry chapbook in peace.

You’re drinking too much coffee and you read a lot of news. Some nut writing for The Conversation says Covid and climate change are going to turn coffee into a rare luxury item like Kobe beef or Cristal. But the enormous tin of Safeway Select on top of your refrigerator suggests otherwise. You wonder how much the writer got paid to cook up a pandemic scare piece on coffee. What if you pitched something similar about a thing everybody wants being unceremoniously taken away by forces beyond one’s control? What about cheese: “Is Cheese Systemically Racist? Biden Might be Coming for Your Gruyere.” Or sex: “The Death of Intimacy: Gen Z Prefers Online Porn to Sex and Who Can Blame Them?” Or healthcare: “The GOP Thinks Letting Grandpa Die is Good for the Economy.” You write these ideas down and fire up the laptop. There’s rent to be made.

At this point, there are many possibilities. You’ve moneyballed your way into 30, 40 magazine publications. You have three published story collections and a multitude of columns, articles, and essays floating through the aetheric digitalia. But you still live in the jungle. You’ve got a neighbor up the dirt road who deals with his emotions by smoking crack and shooting cats with his Marlin 60. You’re still getting rejections from 25-year-olds and machines that go, “While we appreciate your interest in Dark Pissoir . . . “

Occasionally, some acquaintance on social media will pay attention to you for more than 30 seconds and wonder how you exist. How do you make a living (or How can you possibly make a living?)? You say as best you can. There are 25-year-olds publishing novels with Random House. There are 25-year-olds managing construction sites and getting welding certificates and buying their kids $900 gaming consoles. And there’s a fine line of termite dust along the base of your hovel’s north wall. Are you discouraged? What does that mean, exactly?

On Forgetting One’s Humanity

Professional writers and artists sometimes forget that they are human beings. In the immense pressure to monetize their work, develop personal commercial brands, and get recognized as professionals (because without such things, capitalist culture regards an artist as a hobbyist at best), they can forget that their art is only one part of who they are. It might be a very large, dominant part, but they exist as multifaceted, complex beings who cannot be wholly defined by what they produce for others to consume.

Forgetting their humanity leads creative people into a lot of pain and self-torment, especially during those inevitable times when they’re not producing a lot of work and they feel like they don’t matter and might not even really exist.

That’s when it’s important to remember that it’s not how often or how much you produce that makes you real. It’s how committed you are inside—knowing that you will return to the work in time and putting your faith in the creative impulse to guide you. Inspiration will return. And so will you.

In the meantime, make the other parts of your life as deep and as excellent as you can, which is a neverending practice you owe to yourself and to those who have nurtured you along the way, crucial to your wellbeing. You are not a content machine. You are a channel for something greater than your anxious everyday personality. Remembering that, honor who you are.

Freelancing Ain’t All Wine and Roses

My recent hiatus from freelance writing culminated in an existential crisis that I now think was actually about money. It’s interesting how money—getting it, keeping it, losing it, worrying about it, hating it, enduring its fraught passage through our lives—often seems to be the underlying rule and mean in situations we first thought were about love or fate or right choices. Life might not always be about money. But lately I’ve had a hard time seeing when it isn’t.

The realization hit me while I was cutting banana trees for my neighbor. Every freelancer encounters dry spells and every dry spell brings angst, a spate of dreadful job applications, and self-imposed austerity measures which help far less than you think they should. In the middle of that, volunteering to prune banana trees should be therapeutic. It some ways, it is.

In others, it only drives the nail of precarity deeper into your skull: what am I doing when I should be looking for a new paying project? What am I doing volunteering for anything? What is my age? What choices have I made that put me here? How much am I to blame? How do I set this worry and anger aside so I can get back on the hustle? Will this petty opportunity cost return as top ramen and hot dogs, holy T-shirts and rent anxiety? Where will I be this time next year? And will I have all the teeth I have now?

These are questions freelancers never want to ask but inevitably do. This is the fear that only those with money have the luxury of being generous. This is how your world gets smaller, how you end up optimizing every moment for work instead of living a life. So I pruned my neighbor’s banana trees with a Ryobi P519 Reciprocating Sawzall in high tropical humidity and tried not to wallow.

Heavy yard work can be good for the soul, especially work that involves razor-sharp power tools. Still, through the whole day, my inner existential calculator-self-critic-time-clock was hard at work dredging up a range of facts, assumptions, and figures that all led to the same thought: kindness is stupid when you’re broke.

Unfortunately, by that reasoning, so is art, writing, music, libraries, museums, public broadcasting, kite flying, junior college, cooking, learning languages, community theater, and any other thing that brings joy and meaning to someone whose emotional life isn’t completely constrained by making a buck. It’s what the ladies’ self-help success guru, Penelope Trunk, used to say when she’d argue that graduate school in the humanities should require a trust fund. In her reductive materialism, culture and self-expression are supposed to come with a price tag like everything else. And if you can’t afford it, well, get back in your cage.

The commodification of kindness and creativity is something I hate as much as anything I’ve ever hated, a set of beliefs about the world that I vehemently reject. Of course, I do. I’m a former English teacher. I have a hard-earned PhD in the subject. I write books. And those skills also feed me as a freelancer, even if the life I lead is a bit like that of a low-stakes professional gambler. Nevertheless, poverty sucks.

I dislike large parts of capitalism, at least, the post-industrial variety carried into my generation by the Boomers. But I do think my fellow Gen-Xers doth protest a bit much. My parents’ post-WWII generation did the best they could and, in many cases, that was pretty great. The people around me, born in the early 1970s, who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, also did their level best. Put into the widest global perspective for our time, we had it pretty good. And I believe in hard work.

Everyone I knew growing up in lower-middle-class southern California shared that belief and mostly survived. Many of us, especially the arts and humanities types, went into debt and paid an enormous psychological price to do the things we felt called to do. And we seemed to enjoy a much smaller return on those efforts than that of previous generations. But we still shut our mouths and tried to make a living. I guess we’re still trying.

But millennials? Gen-Z? I’m not sure I know what form of life they are. Terms like “self-entitlement,” “performative victimhood,” and “Twitter mob” do come to mind. When I interact with them socially or read about them as a group, I come away feeling like I’ve encountered an undulant mass of mewling, protoplasmic, always-online identity cosplayers.

I know that this is not true and that sweeping generalizations are inherently invalid. And I suspect generations largely aggregate into the same qualities and quantities that have always existed; though, I’d be hard pressed to come up with an earlier analogue for Instagram catgirls, and gig sensitivity readers. These generations are tomorrow’s freelance writers and Uber drivers. And there will be so many more of them.

At the same time, I wonder if people hitting the workforce now, in their 20s and 30s, with crippling debt, a lingering pandemic, and the hottest temperatures in recorded history, have the same inner fallout when they can’t find work. I wonder whether they even want to work the way I have, the way I still work? Do they doubt themselves, even after decades of professional experience? Do the former English majors sometimes reach a point where they swear they’re giving up the thankless writing life (because, let’s face it, the last thing the world needs is another writer) but find themselves coming back to it again and again like an addiction?

I have no doubt that some of them will come around to my way of thinking while cutting banana trees and flirting with heat stroke: maybe what the world needs is not what I need. Maybe a writer’s job is not to be respectable and flush, but to write and avoid getting flushed. Maybe no matter how many trees I prune, I know I’ll be heading back to the writing desk sooner or later, dental plan or not. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then next week. If not next week, then never. Because in this game, there is no victory scenario, no rest, no stopping until they put me in the ground.

Get ready for few changes around here.

I’ve been running The Writing Expedition for almost two decades in one form or another. It began as a Blogger travel blog when I was living in Bujumbura, Burundi, and grew into kind of nexus for all my publications and writing projects. This, my Pressfolios site, and my Substack newsletter have been really professionally useful, way more than the various Facebook pages I’ve started over the years. If you follow me here, especially if you’re a long-term reader of my posts, I’m grateful. It’s been a long road out of Africa to the UK, Austria, Ireland, Estonia, Denmark, Sweden, the Czech Republic, France, Thailand, Japan, and back to the States. Thanks for traveling with me.

Sometime in the next two weeks, you’ll notice some changes to this site that have been pending for a long time. Bluehost will be its new home (though the domain will stay the same—there’s nothing you have to do). The obnoxious advertisements will (thankfully) be going away. There will be discussion forums for asynchronous writing workshops. I’ll also be offering some Zoom courses and private tutorials, covering beginning through advanced fiction writing, the magazine publishing process, how to win writing contests (I’ve won a few), increased editing opportunities (books, and short pieces, fiction and nonfiction), and story doctoring (which means you’ve written something but you’re stuck—we work on unsticking you). My newsletter will be picking up again and my podcast will finally be getting underway.

I’ve been a bit dormant (for me) over the past two months, publishing one magazine short story, two columns in Splice Today, and a small collection of blog posts. Mostly, this is because I moved to a rural area on the big island of Hawaii and just needed to rest, meditate, and take a semi-working vacation for the first time in 10 years. It’s been glorious, but now it’s time to get busy.

Things I’m not going to do: spam you with advertisements or engage in aggravating e-marketing foolishness. Most of what I’m offering will be through this site. But I want to make this announcement, say thanks, and remind you that I’m still here, still inflicting my ideas and opinions on an unsuspecting world . . .

If the Roof is on Fire, Just Keep Writing

Write seriously for any length of time and you learn that it’s a lonely business. Whether you’re writing essays, stories, poems, scripts, or novels, it’s just you and the page every day with no guarantee that your enormous investment of time, emotion, and energy is ever going to reach a satisfying conclusion. As Charles Bukowski wrote, you’re “betting on the muse.” And the muse is a cruel mistress.

Even if she’s the love of your life, sometimes you find yourself wishing the two of you had never met. Maybe, you think, if I hadn’t gotten addicted to writing, I might have made real progress in a day job. I might even have reached a point where I could have moved out of my tiny apartment, started paying off my student loans, and bought a car less than 30 years old, a respectable adult at last.

Instead, I chose to take all that energy and put it into words. When I’m lucky, when the muse deals me a good hand and I play it for all it’s worth, the words seem like they’ll never stop. There’s no better feeling than that. But no one can be lucky all the time. And sometimes you just go bust.

It doesn’t matter whether writing is a hobby or the way you keep the lights on. All writers have to face the same ups and downs, the same uncertainties, the same droughts, the same bad runs, the same unforgiving emptiness of a blank page with the muse nowhere to be found. Even the most talented among us can feel like imposters when we bet it all on one hand, fold, and leave the table with nothing but pocket lint and remorse.

But now we’re in a new abnormal. There’s a virus and civil unrest in the streets. Everything’s shuttered or broken. And our homes have become sci-fi biodomes where we drift through the day in a weird online approximation of the lives we used to lead. Lockdowns do that. Pandemics can change everything, even our writing habits.

Attending a poetry reading or just walking through a bookstore can feel like playing chess with the reaper. Surgical gear is the new black. And we can’t waste time in a coffee shop anymore, glowering at a blank screen over a latte with enough sugar to induce an intracranial coma in an elephant. That was the old world, old rules, old normal. Now everyone’s socially distanced and weird. Now everyone’s living like a writer.

We wait for life to reacquire some semblance of normalcy. We grieve for those who’ve died and want to safeguard the lives of those who haven’t. We keep in mind that all life is precious and that we’re in this together. And we hope that those who are now unemployed or alone or going into debt because of COVID-19 can find a way forward. We hope this for ourselves, too.

Yet, as with any pandemic, riot, or plague, there are darkly amusing dimensions. As a friend of mine put it recently, “This can’t go on for much longer. It’s just too stupid.” I had to agree. It is. Then again, he’s not used to betting on the muse, to leading a solitary hidden life with no assurance that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t just an oncoming train. Writers are especially poised to continue work through a pandemic.

State Dependency Writing Works in a Lockdown

Ever wonder why you can’t seem to get into a good flow state without your bagel and cup of coffee? Why the little rituals and routines of settling down to write seem so essential? When you look at them rationally, they’re really nothing—small mundane comforts, little observances in your personal space, that pink bathrobe with the embroidered toucan on the back you only wear when you write.

Was it grandma’s? Did you get it at a yard sale in 1993? Or was it always waiting for you up there in the attic, waiting to become the key element that helped you finish your first novel manuscript? You don’t want to think about it. It’s your magic writing bathrobe. If you look at it too closely, the magic might go away.

I understand. I’m not here to gainsay your magic. But I will suggest that memory and brain chemistry are part of it. And this is why it still works when the rest of the world is stuck at home, day drinking and fantasizing about haircuts. Therapist and licensed counselor, David Joel Miller, calls it “environmental context-dependent memory” or “situational memory.” And it’s probably why I’ll be acknowledging Krispy Kreme when my third story collection gets taken.

Miller explains it as “an ability to remember information in one situation that you are unable to remember in another.” It’s closely related to state-dependent memory, which has more to do with internal chemistry than with location. Generally, we can say that both types of “state dependency” are invoked by our little magical writing habits.

Are We Talking About Trance States?

Yes and no. If “trance” is defined broadly as an altered mental state, then yes. We go into trances all the time—driving our kids to school, washing the dishes, binging five seasons of a show we can barely remember a few days later. When we do anything familiar enough that it becomes rote, we’re probably doing it in a light trance state.

This is not inducing a David Lynchian out-of-body dissociative episode where we have a conversation with a dead prophet on top of an Aztec pyramid and realize the existential meaning of our lives. We’re awake. We’re functional. We’re just in the flow state that Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, the founder of Positive Psychology, describes as a period of total absorption.

He calls flow “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” That sounds like my compulsive writing habit, my ongoing love affair with the muse. I also know that, when she deals me a bum hand, flow is impossible.

So just as a gambler will blow on the dice, keep a lucky talisman in a vest pocket, or say a quick prayer to Our Lady of the Full House, we fire up a triple espresso and get a chocolate iced glazed donut. We creep up to the attic and put on our toucan bathrobe. Because these invoke our situational memory of having written, of being in that enjoyable flow state.

Speaking of the Devil

Legendary writer and Iowa Writers Workshop professor, Madison Smartt Bell, recommends everything from post-hypnotic suggestion to binaural beats. In a 2011 New Yorker interview about his novel, The Color of Night, he notes that “Normally most writers don’t say, ‘I’m going into a mild hypnotic trance.’ Typically they don’t know how they do it. . . . Most people, when they have a good experience writing, they’re well placed in that state, which is also sometimes called a ‘flow state.’ If you don’t have trouble, you don’t have to think about it. But if for some reason you can’t get into that state, then you start to have writer’s block.”

Most of my pragmatic fiction writing teachers didn’t like to talk about writer’s block. Often, they denied its existence completely. I think it was because they were superstitious. Speak of the devil and he might appear. The most instruction I ever got along these lines was in the last year of my MFA, when the leader of our advanced fiction workshop said: “Your job as a writer is to go into a trance such that, when you come out of it, there are words on the page.”

So here we are in this afraid new locked down world with non-writers drinking wine in our attic and sad news on television. In times like this, writing is as essential as any form of art. And we’re the ones to do it.

We simply have to remember that even though the muse is fickle, even though sometimes we’ll hit a bad run, we can improve our odds by sticking to our rituals. When we can forget what’s going on in the outside world and enter flow, we won’t be writing in spite of the lockdown. We’ll just be writing. And that’s a wonderful place to be.