Charles Rambles IV
Worries at any stage of the career.
I’m still trying to navigate Twitter. Being a published author of indie presses gets you 240 new followers, then it stabilises there for some reason, so I have between 530-540. I tend to lose followers if I tweet asking them to buy my book, and I should lose them if they don’t like me doing that, because it’s but one of the key reasons I have a Twitter account, duh. But in trying to network (just get in touch with authors you like, start liking and sharing their stuff: they notice you faster than you think) there’s a weird trend I’ve noticed in almost all writers but the king writer (Stephen King) and many literary agents: they do the young author sighing thing!
“Does anyone REALLY NEED another story about X?
“Can everyone please stop saying they were the first to Y?”
“’Something earnest and sincere you thought earlier today, which you thought was original and interesting, but this is a parody account, so I’m laughing at anyone who thinks this because it’s trite and overdone.’ – Parody account for Leo Robertson’s thoughts.”
You get my point: almost everything exists on Twitter. These parody accounts must make the writers of them especially cynical, because I’m sure they start with a good wealth of funny and astute observations, but given the internet’s hunger for content, in order to have the accounts maintained, their owners need to sneer at everything under the sun. Sad!
Black Mirror is a big fear-producer. I haven’t watched any of the latest season yet because I know it’ll be so good I’ll think every story about contemporary tension has been told. I know Twitter thinks that, because it’s either praised by those encouraging, self-accepting writers like Stephen King (and others I’ll maybe shout out later, but the encouraging crowd don’t need a shout out, because the encouragement is returned their way by the bucketload) or torn asunder by those horrified, neurotic ones, who have ventured too far into the Lovecraftian existential sea and stare at the Nietzschean abyss. By the way, it doesn’t matter how many things and concepts I namedrop: by the laws of the universe, I seriously can’t be that great. Here’s what I mean: to rebel against these Twitter sneerers I tweeted something like “In 50 years, I must have read 0.000001% of the literature ever written, so, uh, I think I know what I’m talking about.”
And anyway, if you’re just being yourself, any time anyone calls out something trite or overdone or cliché, you need not worry :)
Rebellion, by the way, is a good place for creative energy, because originality or story or whatever—I haven’t fully fleshed out this analogy yet—exists in the place between the status quo and what you want to see in the world. I think I flesh this out later when I talk about a Bunsen burner, so watch out for it then. When I wrote Rude Vile Pigs (available in all good blah blah, basket of dreams) I was trying to rebel against the notion that I should love all my characters: who could love these people? I did end up loving some of them. Please don’t think that a result of my surprise at my own skills, rather than a consequence of my arrogance. Also, here’s a rule about rebelling, by the way: somebody has to give a shit. Someone has to want you to do another thing, or something other than a straw man needs to demonstrate an opposing opinion for it to be interesting. If no one gives a shit, it’s not rebellion: you’re just being a dick to yourself, eg, if angry at the world, so you don’t want to provide them with beautiful, heartwarming, evocative, pretty stories about the power of human endeavour and connection, and instead want to write… some other bullshit, well, the world doesn’t really give a shit—because it doesn’t know what it’s missing, I agree, but, still. I’m not saying that’s what I or anyone I know did—it’s just an interesting principle!
Anyways, sneering is no fun: I have no use for it. Why are they sneering? Why isn’t Stephen King? Duotrope boasts that it has about 6000 markets for fiction. So, no matter what level of writer you are, you cannot find the time to read all those. You cannot rid yourself of the nagging suspicion that in the one magazine you didn’t read is a story so monumentally good it would nullify your life’s efforts. Not even that, right? It could be on TV, a film, or even something in the works that you don’t even know about. It could have already been written: you can’t have read everything either. By promoting your own book, you may be stealing time from readers whose energy is best expended otherwise. In so many possible ways! How do you know what a reader likes? You don’t even know this person! Her mother is ill, she’s cycling to the hospital with, I don’t know, a stuffed penguin and a basket of ice chips or whatever ill mothers need—I can’t remember—and then the wheels come off her finds your book? Ugh. What a waste of her time! Okay here’s an example I can be bothered providing: a friend (when you see me write “a friend”, be very suspicious, because I don’t have many: I’m probably just talking about myself or something I overheard that I’m trying to give more credibility to), she was knocked off her bike by a van and hurt her leg. She can claim compensation but is reluctant to because she doesn’t want to take money from someone else who might really need it. First of all: that’s not the reason, is it? It’s probably just a method of self-punishing. I think that’s why New Year’s resolutions fail: because it’s about making better choices, not removing beloved treats. Anyways: unfortunately you don’t know who the next person is or what book they wrote; you only know what you wrote, and you should do your best to know the market, but you can only know so much. Here’s a good rule for life, then: if you’ve done your best, you can chill. But sneerers get scared and self-flagellate and deprive themselves and lash out, and that’s why they sneer. Why shouldn’t you sneer? Because if you’re being authentic, your last bastion in the crashing seas of STORY and CONTENT and INTERNET, there will miraculously be a way you go about things that is undiscovered elsewhere.
Not to say it’s easy to be authentic: you have to constantly find yourself. As you grow, you’ll be overjoyed and horrified by who you become at the same time, but in that tension of losing yourself and rediscovering yourself, you will produce a story to inform you and those like you of what you need to know at that time, written with the ability you have at that time too. One way story exists is in the gap between what you are and what you think you are. It fills the interstices of what you say and what you wanted to say, between cultures, between schools of thought—you’ll quickly find your own examples if you accept this way of thinking.
Frequently in fiction I’ve wanted to add further dimensions, third arguments, but I keep falling back upon binary warring forces. Likely this, isn’t useful when it comes to reading my fiction, it’s just something I’ve noticed. You can pick it up by reading Chekhov: everything he writes seems to be about the arbitrarily assigned traits and opinions and personality types we have, and that’s why his stories are timeless and essential reading for most people, because this tension will never die, but we can rid ourselves of the discomfort we feel around it by acknowledging it either in our own writing or reading or communication or something somehow. Don’t you ever think—in as non-arrogant a way it can be phrased, which may well be but probably isn’t the following way—about how painful the life of a non-reader must be? My God: every new challenge they face, they must feel like the first one facing it. Every embarrassment they feel must be their own. Every mistake they made must only have been made by them, and never made worse by anyone else before. I’ve seen the confusion on people’s faces when they don’t have the tools to express themselves. It happens to the best of us, of course—then after distance and reflection, the confusion may well reveal a story—but it’s one of the most painful situations in life and I’d do as much as possible to minimise it.
The non reader’s reward for not reading is ignorance, an unearned confidence in a poorly gauged sense of originality and self-importance, a way of going about the world that makes it seem like whatever they are doing is far more important than it is. What a lovely life that must be!
Here’s another thing I believe, then: loveliness doesn’t override loneliness. We readers need to face our minuscule, pixelated properties, our shallow influence, our eventual washing away by the seas of time. We map out our tiny, lonely islands of self from which we can cast off hundreds of letters in bottles and sometimes receive, like, two back, for which we have to learn to be thankful. Maybe reading and not reading is just another balance. Hopefully I tend towards the examined life, for which I can see now I’ve paid a high price. But the soulbucks I invested come with high dividends!
One thing I wanted to say related to the above ramble: writing is about the discharge of energy. You ramble highly and cut the story out of what remains. Of course, believe it or not but producing this text took a lot of time, and I have other stuff to do, so my book reviews (to date: podcast view quality needed!) and blog posts tend to be less edited, because editing takes a fucktonne (British) of energy I’d rather use elsewhere, while you, kind reader, basically get the point of my meaning, but must discharge the additional energy of editing and cherrypicking where I have not used mine. Oh well.
Anyways, on the discharge of energy: this is a lot like an experiment I did in chemistry class (You don’t often get through a Robertson ramble without a scientific analogy, although in the interest of avoiding pitfalls, I will never make one using Occam’s Razor, The Theory of Relativity, String Theory, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and especially not Schrodinger’s Cat. Leave those to dilettante hacks! I even heard in an interview with a comedian: ‘There’s a thing in science where if you measure it there’s an error.’ #LazyHeisenberg!) We put some chemical in the fire of a Bunsen burner and looked at it through a hand-held colour spectrometer, which is a weird steel telescope you can only see out of through a rectangular strip as wide as a fingernail. As it burned, lines of colour appeared in the strip of our vision. This, we were told, was the effect of energised electrons reaching higher energy levels, higher electron shells, and then discharging photons as they returned to their original electron shells. With more accurate measuring devices, this method could be used to identify the pure substance burning. This is how I think about writing: so much energy is discharged, and from it, a thin band of meaning is extracted, an authentic fingerprint of understanding. That’s all you’re entitled to—and yet only you are entitled to it.
It’s hard to hold onto this revelation, and there are many coping strategies so that you don’t have to think about it: one is to be so arrogant and self-assured a writer that you think you’re “doing it better” than everyone else, rather than just doing it differently from everyone else. Now that I think about it, writing being highly and not wholly subjective, perhaps doing it better and doing it differently are valid and sometimes but not always exclusive merits to a piece of writing. Kurt Vonnegut said of Joseph Heller that he was “a first-rate humorist who… insists on dealing with only the most hackneyed themes. After a thousand World War II airplane novels had been published and pulped, he gave us yet another one, which was gradually acknowledged as a sanely crazy masterpiece.” If you’re lucky enough to have the innate (or perhaps nurtured) talent, and the inherent (or perhaps acquired) self-belief that makes your egocentricity authentic, have at it.
If you’re better at acceptance than self-delusion (arbitrary warring forces), you’ll have to thrust yourself towards uncomfortable truths again and again—I think this is me. There’s this wonderful passage in, of all things, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red Mars” in which he aligns personality types with the four temperaments theory of personality, and I don’t have the book to hand, but I can screenshot it later, but there will be advantages and disadvantages to whatever personality type you have, which will help you cope with the world and its ways. Self-delusion versus acceptance is one way, introspection versus curiosity about others is another way, losing yourself in higher order problems (considering your drop-in-the-ocean nature, dreaming of what Shanghai will look like in 100 years) versus staying highly present (meditation, mindfulness) is another way. There are so many different solutions and your intuition is telling you yours. This is, I suppose, why there’s always a new book about happiness: there’s always news about happiness, through personal insights, latest developments in science, somewhat useful statistics about how to live your life (although you might always be in the minority and not know it) and yet what you know better than anyone else in the world is what you need to do!
Not to say you don’t listen to everyone but that, where possible, you use data and insight and voices to erect mountains and carve out pitfalls to guide your path of personality on its way. What way is that? Is it a terrifying one, but with fulfilling work? Or a dead-end job but amazing pals? Or both or neither or what? WHAT ARE WE?! It’s okay: I know what I am, most of the time, and that’ll do, I guess. It’ll have to because it’s all I’ve got (acceptance.) New Sherlock is good though (escape!)
Okay, honestly, how can you enjoy life knowing all this is true?
1. There’s what I’ll call The Cure for Glasgow: ‘Saying someone shouldn’t be sad when other people have it worse is like saying they can’t be happy because other people have it better.’
2. There’s acknowledging that if you are truly unique, the success of others has nothing to do with you.
3. Go at your own pace but be diligent in anything you do.
4. Accept that other people all know something you don’t, but it’s also fair to say that a lot of the time, you’d have to put in so much work to find out what it is that it isn’t worth it. But you can still be assured they know something even if you never find out what it is—or want to talk to the person again. And when you recognise that other people are quite poor at knowing what it is about them others might find interesting, you can forgive yourself when you don’t really know what you’re supposed to write about. And the more you forgive yourself for anything, the faster you can get back to doing what you’re supposed to do, which is to everyone’s benefit.
5. Rejoice that it doesn’t take long to overtake 50, 60, 70% of the “competition”, whatever that means, because most people drop out more easily than you’d think. Also, patience means the reward comes later than you expected, so find the reward in the work itself; but also remember that rewards will come eventually, so don’t toil away for nothing.
6. It is a possibility you’ll toil away at any craft and never succeed ever, because of the influence of chance, subjectivity or bias. No one can take that reality away from you. However: it is so unlikely that skill and experience will forever go unnoticed, so unlikely that you should picture something good coming from your hard work, but it isn’t good to be too specific about what that is. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, but I don’t want to, I avoid buses, and statistically I will live for a long time, and so that’s the option it makes sense to plan for even if it doesn’t come to fruition. Know what I mean? Statistics offer a lot when it comes to dampening the horrible truths of absurdism.
LAST PART TOMORROW!
