Writing Wednesday: How (NOT) to Streamline Your Career

I have been asked on several occasions when on panels how the questioner can "streamline his career" (usually male questioner) and avoid all the mistakes that I made. While, I am one of the least easily embarrassed people I know and gladly share stories of mistakes that I have made and give recommendations on how to avoid those mistakes, I am not at all convinced that this is the same as "streamlining a career." I am pretty sure that I don't have the kind of career that can be streamlined and that the questioners are asking the entirely wrong person about this.

Yes, there are authors who have good advice about how to make more business-savvy decisions in the publishing world. I am not one of them.

Yes, there are ways to make sure that money comes to you by avoiding scam agents and scam publishers whose only interests in your career is making themselves money. I never had a problem with this, by simply following the rule of thumb that if someone really is legitimate, there is really little doubt about it. People who are too effusive or who guarantee things are not to be trusted. Real publishers will offer you real money and will disclose the amount. They will then send a real contract and a real check following.

Yes, for some authors, publishing is a business and they have to look carefully at what activities earn income and what activities do not, and then tailor their activities to those that produce money. I am not one of these, either.

The more I think about writing as a career, the less interested I am in it. I do not mean to sneer at others. I am lucky in that I have other streams of income unrelated to writing. I also planned my life this way, but luck was involved in achieving these goals. What that means is that I can write projects that I want to write. I don't have to sell them. I don't have to worry about every word, every minute of my writing time, being for a paid project.

I suppose there could be a reasonable argument about how much commercial pressure is actually useful for an artist. I'm not particularly interested in that discussion. I think I put plenty of pressure on myself without the need to have external deadlines, etc, added.

But let me go back to the idea of "streamlining." Streamlining is all about efficiency. It's about making things aerodynamic. It's about cutting out the extraneous. It's about fat and waste and stuff that can't be counted or measured.

Well, hmmm. That's pretty much art, isn't it? We are so used to thinking about successful art in terms of numbers, data, book sales, advertising, and so on. But that isn't art. Art can be sold and commercialized. But art is by its very nature the extraneous, the inefficient, the uncountable.

I am someone who loves to count things. I really do. I derive immense satisfaction from watching numbers rise and having control over them. But I am also able to see that there are times when counting is not helpful, and there are things that simply cannot be quantified. I think about how No Child Left Behind has become the metaphor for this reality. We in America seem to believe that if anything is real, it can be tested and quantified. This may be true in some theoretical model, but I think it isn't. I think that there are things, art among them, that have a value that can't be measured. And of course, I say this well aware that art is quantified every moment. Our culture devours art as soon as it is produced and puts a price tag on it. But that isn't the art. Not really.

I read a really important essay in grad school by Walter Benjamin about art in an era of mechanical reproducibility. Benjamin was a Marxist (who died in WWII at the hands of the Nazis) and he hoped that television and film and being able to let everyone in the world see beautiful art was going to revolutionize us. Everyone would have access to art. All the best things that used to be in museums or only available to the wealthy who could afford to own the real thing would be available to everyone. And in some ways, our youtube/internet/piracy world is a world that Benjamin would have cheered. In other ways, not so much.

We have access to great paintings at the touch of a button, though we still can't see all the details that the actual piece of art would give you. Even so, there is something wonderful about being able to experience art so easily. Perhaps this ease is one of the reasons that we don't think about the value of art anymore. Either art is commercialized and quantified with a price tag (movie ticket or book price), or it is "not-art" (what my husband calls the youtube videos he doesn't like--a stick falling in the forest).

Art is your own self-expression. The value others place on your art does not, in fact, make it more or less your self-expression. You may decide that you wish you could increase your ability to communicate your expression and then you improve your skills. Your art may then have a higher price tag or it may not. Yet again, this does not mean that your art is less art. Only 3 people in the world may ever find your art. Still, art.

The more we think about our art as a product, I think the less we are artists and the more we are producers. Look, I don't mean to say there is anything wrong with having a job, or even making money making art. But the money making part is actually almost entirely separate from the art creation. Or maybe it is more separate for some people than it is for others. I am not sure. But when I sit down and write my words on my computer, they are always my words.

No matter how much my editor or agent or publisher tells me they want the story to be thus-and-such, the words are still mine. The expression is still mine. This can lead to enormous frustration on all our parts, as the people who are not the artist try to quantify the art or figure out how to change it to fit some category that will make money as a product. Again, this is a process separate from the art.

Or at least I want the two to be separate. More and more, as I age as an artist, I am less concerned with the validation that comes from a contract or sales and more concerned with my own judgment of my art. And not the brute "good" or "bad" judgment either (though at times, that still needs to be made, sadly). It is simply a matter of whether or not I was true to the thing I wanted to express. Did this story do its job well? Did I express the feeling that I wanted to express with this story? Did I evoke the experience I wanted to evoke?

I was going to add, did I make the reader feel something, but actually--no. I can't make readers feel things. That is their own choice, and that reaction, too, has to be separated from my creation of the art. On some level, ultimately, I am standing in a vast, empty white space, just me and my words, and I am the final judge of whether it is true or not, because the only person it can be true to is me.

If this sounds solitary and scary, well, it is. There are wonderful ways in which an artistic community can be helpful in helping maintain the energy necessary to create. But the community doesn't do the work. Only the artist does the work. The artist in that empty room of the mind.