READ IT AND WEEP

A great body of consumers out there wants to know "how to write" and keeps the advice coming from both people who know and don't know.  The most recent is a series called "MasterWorks.com" featuring big names who describe how they work, with the assumption that imitating them will make one's own self also great.  A number of forces interacting are the REAL reason why some people are praised and/or make a lot of money.  (The two aspects don't necessarily go together.)  

The first necessity for a writer is to go out there and LIVE.  Otherwise, you won't have anything to say.  But it's not necessary to do exotic or dangerous stuff, just to really absorb and reflect as things happen.  The way a brain works is by building circuits from experience.  It is closely paying attention -- while also considering possibilities -- that makes the brain able to build a circuit, which is not a conscious process.  It's electrochemical and entirely real. Organic.

Creating habits is also circuit building.  If a person does not have or know how to get to the "frame of mind" that allows them to write, then the rest is useless, sealed off.  Often a dependable schedule and familiar equipment will help build the circuit, but also reading, not necessarily any particular thing, because your brain will be recording and digesting it all.  You will begin to pull it into your circuit.  You will know without knowing you know, just feeling it.  Sometimes certain music helps, a fav food, lots of coffee, a little fetish about pencils.

Those who don't write think it happens when the marks hit the paper (or screen) but in truth the necessary part of writing is the thought world it comes from, which is probably quite wordless: diagrams, doodles, daydreaming, dawdling.  These not-yet-circuits, plus some others, like observations about life and what it all means, are the basic equipment.  But a person can use them exquisitely, produce regular or even inspired writing, and still not be a success.

The secret no one tells writers (though some figure it out) -- but publishers know very well -- is that writing is only half of what happens: there must be reading.  Those who read control the book.  If they "get" it, want it, want more like it, and experience the writing as though they had lived it, then the point of a book is achieved.  A book, closed, on a shelf, is nothing.  Paper.  Though it also exists in potential in the mind of the writer until there are readers who will "get" it.  But, for instance, indigenous people believe that white people have some advantage because they are white, but the truth is that white writers have readers because the READERS are white.  Or gay, or political, or feminists, or whatever.  Few people read outside their "lane."

Indigenous writers so far are mostly read by nice suburban liberal ladies -- white.  For the most part indigenous readers don't have the kind of income to buy many $30 dollar books.  So they don't go to bookstore readings.  And they don't critique and promote indigenous books.  Publishers know that.

The point of publishers is to figure out what people want to read enough to pay for.  They ask, "What is the mood of the buyers?"  Publishers gamble on their ability to guess this, because it's just a potential as well as not being something that can be measured.  But it can have a contagious potential and, if it works as well as measles, it can catch fire and pull dollars, lots of talk, and more books like it.  Publishers vary a great deal and will try to control writers to make them write what they think is more saleable.  Managing publishers and their apparatus, like agents and editors and publishers and critics, can consume all the energy a person has for writing.  And the publishers will try to bill the writer for the cost of it.  It only works because of the honor of it all.

At all levels it is important to make connections, to know people who know how to find things, to make introductions, to link you up with sympathetic and encouraging people, access research, and so on.  The dark side of this is that because no one teaches English in public schools anymore and many of the students don't speak English anyway, at least not as a first language, so reviewing and understanding books in English drifts over to trying to interpret and label the writer.  If you become popular, you and your friends and your grandmother will be ransacked, assigned nationalities they never heard of, and sometimes vilified, accused of dirty treasons.  These are what we consider interesting and worth reading about.  

This afternoon I briefly glanced at a paper claiming to explain why "Anne of Green Gables" is racist.  (Which the original is.)  But the dingos and hyenas still have not got gotten hold of the reality of L.M. Montgomery, her miserable marriage to a depressed minister and her final surrender in suicide.  Instead they promote her sentimentality.  It helped that she was in Canada a lot, where everyone is nice.  Even if you offer a colorful backstory you made up yourself, it may be torn apart to make room for the journalist version.

Publishing without thinking about money is possible.  That's often forgotten.  As the medias change, narratives go from being something told around a campfire, to being something written in a private diary, to being copies of something (Bible) penned by hand and then -- much later but by the same impulse -- to copies by xerox.  For a while and maybe still today there were what I call "backpack books."  Typed, xeroxed, stapled, maybe missing any kind of cover, often half-worn out and marked up by avid readers who rarely loan them willingly.  Some become "properly" published later. 

My "thing" is long-form blogs.  Accessible to anyone who knows they exist and can get to a computer but strangely double: hard to erase and, yet to a techie, easy to remove, and in fact sometimes disappearing for no reason anyone knows.  It has some resemblance to a campfire narrative, except that on any day it is read by two or three hundred people and on an exceptional day it can be read by a couple of thousand all over the planet.  If numbers are a measure, that's beyond books.  Good or bad?  No idea.