Christy Writes: On Being an Old Writer in a New World
I’m writing this piece on my laptop.
Not a particularly big newsflash, that, but it’s about as current as I get. I have many of the accoutrements of the modern writer around me, but the fact is, I’m an old writer, trapped in a middle-aged body, and swimming upstream in a river full of much younger contemporaries.
I’ve been a writer for years. Years and years and years. As I’ve mentioned in previous pieces, I still remember people asking me when I was a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I’d always answer, “A writer.” Then they’d coo and chuckle and say “Isn’t that cute? She wants to be a writer someday.” And I’d think, “What are they talking about? I’m a writer now. And when I grow up, I’m still going to be a writer.” Sometimes I think people grievously underestimate the power of children to know who they were born to be.
Fast forward some 40 years, and here I sit, still writing away, but faced with the new dilemma of how to not only compete in a field that has changed so drastically since I started out, but how to make my voice heard in this cacophonous crowd of others, all shouting to be noticed.
It’s not easy, being an old writer in a new world. I used to send meticulously written and proofread letters to agents, or sometimes publishers. I’d send excerpts to magazines, I’d talk with published writer friends and take their advice. I had spreadsheets and lists of places I’d queried and it was always shifting and changing as I added some names and crossed off others. Lest this make me sound like a giant loser who regularly sends agents screaming into the streets, I should add that I didn’t do this every day, just periodically when I’d come up from my writing for a breath of air and a bucket of cold reality. But the good part of it, the best part, really, was that it taught me the system. I knew it inside and out. Other writers would come to me with their questions, even though I’d never quite scaled the mountain. I was the Susan Lucci of traditional publishing.
Then self-publishing took on a life of its own. While I was distracted putting stamps on envelopes stuffed with query letters, everyone who didn’t already have a book contract had begun publishing their work themselves, and using words like “indie,” “epub,” and “Kindle.” They were promoting themselves on Facebook and Twitter. They were getting big boxes full of their shiny new books delivered to their doorsteps, selling them, pocketing the profits, while I was standing on top of a mountain of paper and old Writer’s Markets going “Indie what? Where? Buh?”
That’s where my story took a plot twist. I did exhaustive research into what was involved with this new world of self-publishing, and decided to give it a shot. I’ve done pretty well – my first two books have seen decent sales – but I’ve also discovered that indie publishing may bring in giant figures for J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and David Mamet, but I’m facing the same struggle I’ve had since the beginning: how does an unknown writer make his or her voice heard? How can I make my work stand out from the crowd?
This is where I should launch into an explanation of all the answers I’ve uncovered, but the truth is I’m still working on it. The one answer I can share is that I’ve learned, first and foremost, the best way for a writer to rise above the crowd is by being an amazing writer. Sad to say, self-publishing has made it easy for anyone with a computer to proclaim themselves a writer, pound out a book, and slap it up on Amazon for 99 cents – typos, grammatical errors, slopping writing and all. It even makes me feel a twinge (but just a tiny one) for agents and publishers and what they must have to weed through every day to find the good writers. Yes, anyone can write a book and publish it themselves, but unless it’s a good book, the kind that makes people tell their friends “You have GOT to read this” and makes them eagerly wait for your next one, your work isn’t art. It’s nothing more than a commodity.
The idea of it taking a year or more to write a book is one that’s becoming more foreign as our instant-gratification society has lost what was left of its patience. And writers seem to have somehow caught that bug, the one that tries to make everyone believe that anything worth doing is only worth doing right now. That’s where my old writer soul steps forward and draws a line in the sand. I’ve been writing my current book for a year and a half, and I’m easily another four months from being finished. That’s a mighty long time in this day and age, I agree. But I’m enjoying the process – the research, the rewriting, the learning.
I’ve found that to be probably the most important aspect of writing for me: what I’m learning from reading the world’s truly great writers, what I’m discovering about myself as a writer, what I’m hearing in my own voice now that I’m actually listening. My favorite contemporary writer, Jonathan Franzen, said it best in his memoir “The Discomfort Zone.” In a line so profoundly moving that I printed it out and pinned it to the wall in my writing room, Franzen said “The season had changed overnight and I was reading better books, and trying to write every day, starting over from scratch now, by myself.”
For me, it’s not about speed, it’s not about how many books I can get up on Amazon in the course of a year. There’s a reason you can’t find books by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth in Amazon’s free e-book bin. It’s about quality. Writing is an art, and it’s time we get back to treating it as such.
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