Artists when we dream

Going through motions to get to the good parts.

Edification – Newsletter #96 – November 14, 2021

Dear Reader,

Happy Sunday!

In case you missed it, I had a story published in Twelve Winters Press this week, called “Closed Captioning”. It ran along with a short commentary on some of the ingredients that went into creating this more experimental piece. I’d be honored if you gave it a read.

I watch tv with closed captioning on not because I can’t hear what the weather girl is saying but because I can’t understand how a storm so powerful it severed our life in half like a wasp between scissorblades could itself be severed by invisible rivers of air and left to spin, wing-clipped and helpless, pattering a weak rain over our hotel.

Teddy lies sideways at the foot of the bed because at ten he knows he’s too big to sleep with his mom without knowing how much bigger he’s gonna get in the year to come and I hope we find a place to be with more than one bed soon so he can be alone with the invisible rivers coursing through his body. So I can be alone with mine.

If it’s not obvious from that beginning, this story began as a poem.

I sometimes begin a poem and a story springs out like a hideaway bed. Or vice versa. It’s often the case that the piece tells me what it wants to be, asserting its own form as I write. Who am I to argue?

On a related note, my current novel has evaded me since the beginning of November. She’s a contrary one – apparently she’s my own personal anti-NaNoWriMo.

My writing group friend and editing genius Jody Gerbig Todd wrote a newsletter essay last week about the National Novel Writing Month craze which reportedly involves some 80,000 active novelists! She included some other mind-boggling (and for this reader at least, bone-chilling) statistics about the number of novels produced each year:

“According to Forbes, somewhere between 600,000-1,000,000 books are published each year, half of which are self-published and probably not widely read. If traditional publishers are putting out about 300,000 books a year, and they only accept about 1% of submitted manuscripts, that means millions of manuscripts are written and submitted to traditional agents and publishers a year. I wonder how many of those are written in November. I wonder how many people—come December 1—never pick up those drafts again, trashing them for something else, and how many work on their drafts the other eleven months of the year (or years), beating the seemingly unsurmountable odds of traditional publishing.”

Yikes!

Jody isn’t saying not to write your novels, of course. She argues the opposite. Go write. Keep at it. But don’t expect to hack out a novel in the month of November. It takes an incredible amount of work to produce 80,000 polished words, whether you are self-publishing or attempting the steep climb of traditional publishing.

But think about that: Only one percent of books that are queried make the cut!? (If anything calls for an interrobang, it’s a publishing industry statistic.)

I’ve been getting nibbles on my query hooks over the past couple of months, and feeling these surges of optimism followed by near fatalism. Yesterday, after a kind word from an agent who has seen my manuscript, I was doing this zig-zag, thinking about those almost impossible odds of becoming a self-supporting creative writer.

I mean, there are authors out there making a living writing books – just like there are professional athletes and movie stars. … Except there are probably fewer of them and they probably make less money. Let’s just say that most writers, even New York Times bestselling authors, do not strike it rich on a book deal.

And yet, I hope to get some books out in the world. I dream of screenplay adaptations for my novels. Book signings, motorcycle tours.

I also dream of my husband being able to retire in a timely fashion and of putting my kids through college without boatloads of debt. You know, the American dream. Not having to drop dead when I get old. Surviving. Stuff like that. Is that too much to ask?

The zig. The zag.

Writing is a hard row to hoe. But you know what? If only one percent of the querying hopefuls out there make it, that’s probably still more possibility than having a career in the visual “fine” arts.

As you probably know, my first love was drawing. That’s the skill that put me through college on a scholarship. But there’s nothing out there for me in the art world, except perhaps in the teaching profession. I’m not good enough to go pro; I’m too traditional but not traditional enough. Same with being unconventional. I’m oatmeal with cranberries instead of raisins. What can ya do.

Something else I learned the hard way, being currently stuck halfway through an Masters of Arts in Teaching program I can no longer afford, is that education is also a hard row to hoe. I did some student teaching in the elementary school here and it was enjoyable but also overwhelming. I don’t know how teachers do this day in and day out. I wish they were paid a wage commensurate with the importance and difficulty of the profession.

And honestly, the same could be said for every job. Is there any row that isn’t hard to hoe? This country sometimes looks to me like an endless field, permafrost rows as far as the eye can see.

But maybe it’s me. Maybe I have a kind of failure-to-thrive in my career commitments, or I’m not applying myself hard enough to the practical art of living. Some people are smart enough to get by in America, including one guy I’m lucky enough to have married. My husband is a musician who sucked it up and went into road construction so he could have the money to make music. And now we’re finally getting making some music together, so maybe it is possible to have it both ways.

Our late night songwriting sessions have so far yielded eight songs, along with a dozen other ditties in various states of undress. Nobody in our families or personal friends – out here in the “real world,” whatever that means anymore – knows what we’ve been up to. It’s the most exhilarating secret.

How many other ordinary people are out there, right now, plugging away at some secret passion project? If there are millions of novelists submitting their books to agents every year, I guess a better question is who isn’t out there plugging away at a passion project?

Or: Is this economy all one big Kafkaesque charade in which we participate in body but not in spirit? Are we all artists when we dream?

Talk soon,

Edie

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