Tuesday Writing Thoughts
This might become a feature. Or I might never do it again. You never know.
Yesterday was the best day I have had in ages. I was inspired by Glass Onion and wrote many many words about Benoit Blanc and the Mysterious Phillip when they were both at Oxford. Then I began a fantasy short story that has become extremely dark extremely quickly, and I don’t mind. It’s not the season for concern. It’s the season for words.
I got into bed at 6:15pm and spent many glorious hours writing, reading, and watching old Twitch streams of a Vault Hunters SMP server. Whatever my brain wanted, I gave it. And in return, I wrote more yesterday than I have in the last four months combined.
There is a lesson here. Taking care of myself is non-negotiable if I want to create. The grind mentality when it comes to writing… that doesn’t work for me any more, if it ever did. I think I coasted on it for a long time. Maybe a lot of us did. There was a lot of support for that on Twitter. Less so, as I recall, in the blogosphere of eras past. I seem to remember that long-form blogging and LiveJournaling was a little more nuanced and a little less hectic. But it’s easy to pour into a modeled attitude when there’s a lot of social support for it.
So many things about publishing as an industry and about how authors have been encouraged to think of ourselves are so sad, so broken. I wrote a tight five hundred and seventy-five words of blistering invective about the state of publishing from this writer’s point of view just now, but I’m going to save that for a day when I’m feeling braver.
What I do want to say, though, is that a couple of weeks ago as I scrolled through Twitter I saw a variation on a theme I’ve heard before from a very visible, high-profile author who has, at least on the outside, Made It Big. It went something like this: “No matter how successful you think another author is, they’re scared and struggling too!” And sure, I suppose on one level there is solidarity in We Are All Struggling And Publishing Is Uncertain, even if it’s a little bit of an eyebrow raise from someone who’s had multiple projects optioned for film, etc., but this is publishing, damn it. God only knows how they’re being exploited and gaslit behind the scenes to keep industry costs on them down, and have you seen the price of food lately? Publishing is not the way to fame and fortune, and much of that is by design.
And honestly… isn’t that the fucking grimmest thing you’ve ever heard in your life? That there isn’t a scalable height, no matter how high or steep the climb? That the ground is shifting under your feet at all times? That the actual best writing advice for long-term career viability seems to be “Be born in the 1950s, start publishing before 1990. Also, be a cis white man if at all possible?”
There are six fiction writers I can think of who seem to have stable, actively lucrative publishing careers. Wait. Seven writers. Maybe ten, if I stretch. And I’m sure that if I were to ask any of you to make a list of ten writers you think have viable long-term careers, our lists would have a huge amount of overlap.
It’s bleak, but also somehow freeing to think that I’m never going to be one of them. I want to be. I want my books to be ubiquitous, I want to have such an intense vibe associated with my work that people aspire to be like me. But I truly don’t see the way to get there right now. I’m not sure there is a way. So I’m going to write whatever I want and see what happens. That’s all any of us can ever do.
I wish you fair winds and a keyboard that is the exact right amount of clickiness. I’ll be doing my own thing, and hopefully, that thing will involve taking care of myself, reveling in myself, and that usually means creating.