IF YOU'RE A WRITER, HOW DO YOU "ROLL"?

People write for as many different reasons as there are people who CAN write, and probably more because some people want to write but assume they can’t.  Here is a brainstorm list:

1.  An expansion of correspondence — maybe copies to friends and relatives like a group letter or maybe even a book like the dialogue published as “84 Charing Cross Road” or — to be radical, the letters of Paul to nascent congregations that became the bulk of the New Testament.

2.  A record of descent like the roll of begats in the Old Testament.

3.  A record of laws in print, beginning with the Ten Commandments printed on stone.

4.  A written version of oral stories usually sung by troubadors long ago or maybe happening a whole lot more recently.

5.  Beautiful poetic metaphorical writing to be used for meditation or in a prayer book.  These days they are often “environmental”.

6.  A way of seeing what you think, ordering ideas. 

7.  Political persuasion, polemics offering evidence.

8.  A tool of education, flushing out information that can be and should be shared.

And so on.  Lots more angles and new ones always.

At some point along comes the “novel” which is “immersive,” romantic, sexy, generational, anchored by a place and time, and dynamic — things happen.  Novels sweep the board, dominate everything, become synonymous with books.  Then those split out into genres: mysteries, Westerns, sci-fi, and so on.  And these, made into versions of a “codex” with printed paper between covers, become objects that can make money, reform cultures, defend the stigmatized, become elegant enough to be art objects. 

THEN, overnight, it all goes virtual, online, not necessarily the same manuscript through time.  Alternative endings, fan fiction, prequels, sub-expansions of minor characters, and whatever else people can invent.

Just now on the telephone I was wrestling with my bank which, adding insult to injury, has been charging me $2 a month for sending me a paper accounting and now want to know whether they should hire a collection agency after a one dollar deficit showed up.  They are trying to force me to go online but I keep telling them that in Valier one can’t count on internet, electricity or telephone and anyway EVERYTHING that goes online is public — I don’t care how many passwords a person has. 

I tried to tell her about yesterday’s bank scandal — $30 fee to cash a Canadian check for $29.97.  “I’m a writer,” I said, recklessly.  

“What do you write?” she asked.  

“Books,” I said, suspecting she wouldn’t know a blog if she sat on one.  

“Romance, mysteries or adventure?” she asked.  Those were the only categories she knew.  Nothing about neurology, deep time, or theory of existence.  

She thought for a moment.  “Do you live in Vermont?” she asked, evidently thinking that’s where all writers live.  

“No — Montana.”  She thought for another moment.  

“Why don’t you just drive over to Canada and cash the check?”  It’s a three hour drive to the University of Calgary Press and I don’t have a passport.  You have to have a passport to go to Canada these days.  She didn’t know.  Anything.

I did the monthly laundry yesterday where my fav laundry attendant, a WWII veteran and lifelong railroad man, struggles to understand me.  He can’t figure out how I can have two master’s degrees, have taught school, read a lot, and was married to a famous man — but not have a fame and fortune.  His indicators won’t compute.  He’s not alone.

The people I’m reading are in Aeon, sometimes Edge, not TED; often through specialty groups and mailing lists.  Mostly in Canada, which was an accident and often from aboriginal groups because of following Paul Seseequasis on Twitter.  I follow HIV-AIDS issues.  Outside of that, I read high-powered books and google their bibs.  That often links me into other groups but it’s unusual for those people to be in Montana.

The bottom line is that I write because I’m a print freak and an idea hound and that’s the way I roll.

One of the major book symbioses that I see is between women and novels, and looking at the attendees at book readings here, it dawns on me what’s going on.  They are looking for evidence about managing families and their own lives.  They prefer regional, pioneer and early day stories, but not so much tribal people unless they’re enrolled.  The Hutterite women, who also love novels, always include the dynamic of religion.  Everyone is solving troubled kids’ problems, finding the perfect man or redeeming an existing marriage, and always cherishing the fantasy of writing books themselves. 

This state has some very strong and informed women who take on environmental and political issues, but I don’t get the impression that they read novels or watch TV.  They are addressing real issues and a lot of the time they are cutting trail, but networking.  I admire them, but don’t travel with them.  But THEY travel a lot, which means they listen to audible books while they’re on the road driving the long Montana distances, or if they’re flying to Washington DC or conferences in foreign countries, they take whatever version of Kindle they use, fully loaded with books — maybe not novels.

Kathy, the Valier librarian, goes through her quiet hours (when we’re all snowbound or traveling to a tournament) with a little gleaming tablet that tells stories.  She’s on the main desktop computer to do her work — ordering, database maintenance, filing — or just at the counter laminating covers or stacking books into categories.  If there are patrons reading, she uses earphones.  She calls it her “little buddy” and clearly that’s what it is.  She knows that books are not just what’s on the shelf but also all the peripherals.

Tablet books work here because this has been a radio culture for a hundred years and was an oral culture before that — both whites and tribal people.  But also, they penetrate much farther into local lives than bound books ever would, going along on the tractor or through laundry and kitchen chores.  For people who download rather than buying and shelving books, the saving in space is major.  For people who move among households all the time, including kids, it’s a reassuring source of continuity.

All this is great but there is one big DISCONNECT:  the creation of the materials.  Kids can even make Hollywood-grade films using the computer and they do that.  But who is writing radio scripts?  Who is writing to read into a microphone?  Who is a writer sensitive to sounds and dialogue rhythms, aware of the “beats” of action?  In my grade school, in fourth grade, there were two teachers who specialized.  My teacher’s focus was hand-puppets; the other teacher’s focus was radio.  Anyone doing either now?

We just haven’t gone “wide” enough yet, which means we still don’t know all the reasons to write, which doesn’t have to be in print.

PAPER AUTHOR VOOK

A book is not the same as an e-manuscript.  Right.  A book is a physical thing that requires supplies like paper, and manufacturing like a printing press -- therefore a book is a product of capital.  The skill set of the reader (both the recognition of letters and ability to see through the writing to the ideas) is more crucial than even an editor or type setter.  Print has no usefulness if no one can read it. Once it is made, it can be physically altered by marking or tearing out pages or burning, but it is as real as a chair or a bicycle.  No instrumentation is necessary.  Just a mind.  (You can read with your fingertips.)  Learning to read is a public good that justifies basic schools.

Translating to electronic media means one does not require learning language code, not even spoken.  It may be entirely in terms of images or sounds or graphic symbols.  It does not exist in reality, but only in the arrangement of cybercodes and its reception by a person with an ordinary set of senses.  And a mind.  It requires special machinery to detect: a hard-drive, a screen, maybe Internet.  The education has not been provided by schools.  Access may be handheld, but it will need electricity.

A barrier to either kind of communication (paper print or electronic media) is instrumentation, the same as radio, or at a very primitive level, a musical instrument, but a human body is the ultimate instrument of communication.  It can sing, dance, tell stories, give backrubs and have sex. It can sign-talk and code things like eye-blinks in order to convey information and meaning.

We are all struggling with the problem of how to create gradients of value for the purpose of creating profit from writing.  Not for paper and a press, but to keep the creator eating.  A book, like any physical object, can be physically seized, locked up, destroyed, in the most direct way.  It can be artistically bound or encrusted with jewels.  The creation of the actual choice of words is mysterious and mostly misunderstood or misrepresented as when something is print was supposedly dictated by a god or a spook.  It was once mysterious.  When print is changed for the purpose of making it worthy of sales, we call that editing.  Now that editing is controlled by profit, and distribution of books means physically storing and moving objects, it falls into the paradigms of widgets which have been heavily industrialized and pounded into advertising concepts: defining consumers, promoting directly to them, pandering, associating with celebrities.  Music is a little different.  As long as people can whistle, there will be no real copyright for a tune.

Swerve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiDTK8uFy4o  This is a link to a trailer for a course that can be taken online from the U of Chicago.  I don’t know whether anyone else in my circle of readers has access to this course, but I’m going to try to take it.  It’s nerdy stuff and I may get lost, but I think I need to have the concepts.  I want to escape widget marketing.

So what are the prospects.   Once past the status and keeping up with the Joneses,  the great cry is always for “immersion,” an experience.  How does media become an “experience” instead of an object to leave on the coffee table?  (Or maybe hide somewhere private.)

“Shared experience” like a roller coast ride together or sitting on a bench together watching a sunset might be a good paradigm for non-print “vooks.”  Unique experience is probably the key to a lot of social goods, even more than money.  It’s the missing part to the HIV puzzle, the Ebola puzzle, the war puzzle, because empathy is a moral empowerment.  But it is not immersive to simply be in someone else’s head, esp. if they are rather different, unconventional, like a Somali or Tibetan child.  You can’t just empty their lives into someone else.  There needs to be artistic shaping to deliver the message.  The problem is how to do that without simply playing Procrustes and smashing them into the already established stigmatic patterns.  It cannot be one-size fits all, can it? 

Another problem is that not every person who has been stigmatized and abused will want to make their life available.  They will need disguise, interpretation, and protection.  And there are bound to be people who want to seem worse than they are.  If bad is going to get attention and money, some can be badder than anyone else.  No problem.  Happens all the time.  Deal with it.  That’s what fiction is about.  Learn from it.

I’m a person who wants to do the right thing, to see what’s happening with accuracy and sympathy, and then to do something that helps, if only providing insight.  It’s not enough.  The culture has to see with accuracy and sympathy and then act.  Even so enlightened and educated a group as a Unitarian Universalist congregation will have a pattern that they believe and it will be hard to get past.  They won’t attack or question, it will just be blank.  Worse, some may get off on the drama of it all.  But mostly they just won’t get it.  And they’ll go to widgets: banners and t-shirts.  Celebrity marketing.

It’s easy to see people one doesn’t know very well as just pegs with no intentions or preferences.  BIG mistake.  Don’t think they can’t shuck and hustle and blow smoke and even participate in what is best for themselves.  Or worse.  Out of desire.  They can be infuriating.  How do you make people want to immerse in THAT? School has taught too many the evil of fearing ambiguity, even more than the Other.

I’ve been thinking about two dimensions of doing the right thing that address content rather than style.  One is compassion, when one understands suffering and moves to oppose it.  (“Black Beauty,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Girl, Interrupted,”  "Dispatches")  Compassion towards oneself is included.  The other one is justice.  It’s on the logical/rational side of the room where Science lives.  Law comes to visit, but law is more about social accommodation on the group level, in print.  Skillful and inspired writing does come into it but how it works in a specific case will be different.

They say that a cardinal or maybe even the Pope once remarked that hearing the confessions of nuns was like being pelted with popcorn.  Maybe the equivalent (for similar reasons) among American aspiring female writers is something like being plunged -- not into a searing cauldron -- but into a jet-circulating hot tub with plenty of bubble bath.  It is class-written bliss dependent upon equipment.  Like “Shades of Gray.”  Watch the very popular film, “Half the Sky,” and note that it took movie stars to get the story told.  It is THEIR immersion that we are watching, not the Third World women and girls.   Are you realizing why I prefer CSI shows, even with the glamour (magic) of fantasized Miami?  The tragedy of it is how sexy and bizarre the violence has to be to pull people into the story.  BUT it is accessible to anyone watching, not just readers.

Reading is distancing for some people.  Writing is a little different.  Even writing logical clarity can put the writer into a state of “flow,” which is when you are working at the edge of your skill level, no matter whether it is beginner or master.  “Flow” is an active version of immersion.  Flow is more effective than opium, can get you higher than meth, can pull you into extraordinary emotion -- maybe healing and maybe not.  It can give you an orgasm.  In fact, orgasm and ejaculation IS your body coming to flow, the obliviating edge of experience.  To many of us, writing is making love.  It’s combat.  It’s parachuting out of an airplane in the dark without knowing whether it’s flying over land or water, much less where.  

And you don't know who packed the parachute.  Or when your next meal might be.  But that was the same with paper.

MARKETING WRITING

Suppose I got tired of producing written content and finally turned to the other half of what the middle-class worshipfully admires as “publishing,” which is the commercial exploitation of content.  I look at that alternative now and then, mostly when the bills mount up.

In the past, sales have been based on the idea of “quality,” dictated by experts, including institutions like the New York Times list of best-sellers (implying that the “cloud” reflex of paying customers is an indicator) or Book-of-the-Month club (without readers understanding that the choices depended as much on unseen contract negotiations as on the quality of the writing).  Today in this huge haystack of available content there are two governing indices:  one is the cult of personality that we are used to because of movies and TV; the other is sales figures, which are partly based on customer studies.

Alvina Krause

I’m using blogs several different ways: one is simply an archive and reflection about a professor of acting, Alvina Krause.  One is a repository of posts about Blackfeet matters for the Blackfeet to ponder.  (They can’t afford books but can get access to computers.)  One is an archive of materials about Bob Scriver.  These blogs are focused on a specific audience but they are not widely read.  

The students of Krause numbered maybe forty at a time, which over the years would amount to maybe 1600 potential readers of a book, many of whom are now dead or elderly.  Outside of her students there is not much prospect of sales based on her teaching.  There would be more if a writer were to focus on the fact that the School of Speech at the time was covertly gay-friendly which stirred up backlash among the righteous administration and ultimately forced out AK.  Then there would be the element of her post-retirement renaissance in Bloomsberg, PA, where her ideals support a fine repertory theatre.  The audiences of Northwestern, Eaglesmere, and Bloomsberg would be another source of sales, but only Bloomsberg is recent enough to amount to many numbers.  Raw population density is the secret of success for theatre audiences and physical book sales, though today -- through video and internet sales -- the world via google and UPS is the only real limit.  Still, people like to read about their own familiar world.  On the other hand, theatre has drastically changed from the “Method” based realism of AK to spectacles involving fire, trapezes and “flying.”

Bob Scriver

Bob Scriver’s case is a little different.  First, he is ambivalently “located” on the Blackfeet Reservation which can’t really decide whether they love him or hate him.  Second, he was on the periphery of what I call the Cowboy Art Cartel, which is based on the marketing of Remington and Russell, rigidly controlled and defending a mythic patriotic understanding of what cowboy art really is.  Third, most people would not be interested in Scriver as a person, except in terms of what makes his work worth money.  His work is ‘trading stock’ and books can increase or decrease value.  The interlocking complex of auctions and “museums” are really semi-religious institutions defending that same myth of cowboys and Indians that Bob accepted and illustrated in his work -- not in his life.  Revelations of reality will hurt sales.

available on www.lulu.com/prairiemary

The blog I call prairiemary (www.prairiemary.blogspot.com) is the closest I come to a personal writer’s platform.  But my life-path is in compartments located differently with different audiences.  Unless I could find enough readers for any one of them, or somehow combine them into a grand theme, they wouldn’t support a readership.  Two other people have tried to develop books about animal control, but were overwhelmed by the great romantic unreality of the Humane Society of the United Society which never saw an animal it didn’t want to convert into a human baby, though it is the American Humane Society that takes on both child-welfare and animal-welfare.  

Valier, MT

Small town infrastructure interests me greatly, since that's where I am, and could be developed if it were properly targeted.  A lot of people are struggling with the issues.  In fact, I think the pressure is great enough and closely enough related to Third World problems that a lot of technical breakthroughs that will change everything are in the pipeline -- not least the breaking up of grids and the most difficult the safety of the water/sewer cycle.  Doing this properly would mean a lot of research and travel.  It ought to be done by a younger, better- financed person.

The religious issues in the world consciousness are so potent and various that it would be fair to call them “fulminating.”  We are about to step away from the dogma, admit to the historical and territorial sources and expressions of religious institutions, and possibly to change the nature of the institutions themselves, finally recognizing them as variations in the theme of “nations” trying to defend and expand boundaries.  I don’t really have the chops to take on such an overwhelming paradigm shift.

My specific interest is reconciling neurological research about how the body operates to create consciousness and identity with what I know from experience as an ordained minister about creating ritual and deep experience.  Things are moving so quickly, partly in response to the chaos and damage of today’s world, that as quickly as I work, I fall behind.  Nevertheless, other people are strung out over a continuum between sorcerers to iconoclasts.  Those who could benefit from an intense spiritual retreat or a steady Sunday morning reassurance include just about everyone on the planet, but sales could only be made to a narrow span of that continuum.  Still, that could be a lot of people.

Available on Amazon

Now step over to the practicality of selling.  I’m told by publishers that they make few sales at the Montana Festival of the Book.  Placing ads in the Montana magazine of Western History produced no sales for me.  Despite a barrage of postcards I sent to them, the institutions that supposedly preserve Scriver’s work failed to realize his biography existed.  Review copies produced nothing. The blogs that monitor such things say that readings at bookstores don’t work, partly because there are too few bookstores, partly because readers cocoon.  Review sections of the major newspapers are defunct.  Magazines?  WHAT magazines?  Radio seems possible.  Both the local radio and regional newspaper are highly political.  I'm not.

Circles of people who know and promote each other are the real source of book publicity but they no longer lunch together. Recently the Missoula bell-mare went into the Bozeman range with mixed results.  Anyway, that foray was about a movie. The NY agents who used to have magic Rolodexes are gone, though a wave of dismissed editors has joined them.  Instead, the conversion of writing into actual books has migrated out to the grass roots, which haven’t existed long enough to form a thick and resilient turf, despite the efforts of a website like www.lulu.com, which represents itself as a printer with benefits, something like a friend with benefits.  (Sex is sales and replication.)  A book may require a bit of professional grooming.

Rhonda Abrams -- see what I mean about grooming?

Today’s business section in the GF Tribune includes an article by Rhonda Abrams of The Planning Shop.  http://www.planningshop.com  The topic is marketing.  If you are marketing by using a percentage of your profits, you will need to already be a major, prominent, advantage-generating entity whose simple existence IS advertising.  (Rhonda Abrams’ example is Costco.)  This is a variation on word-of-mouth.

If you are small and unknown, you will need venture capital.  The trick is to prove the product.  The third option is to create such a big controversial stink that people get to know your name and buy the book out of curiosity.  (Many will save money by reading reviews instead.)  For example, Krakauer is always writing about something sensational or purporting to reveal previously unknown and shocking facts -- regardless of consequences.  (Like, hiring big physical ghetto guys with respect-issues to be athletic stars -- and bringing them into a little white self-important town that aspires to be worldly -- will probably result in sexual boundary loss that will inflame a lot of cowboys.)  It works for the newspapers.  And lawyers.

So far, none of these options is attractive.  None of them would generate enough money to tempt me to give up the wealth I have, which is time and freedom.  I can sit here all day and write what I want to write -- immediately putting it out there for you read at no cost to either of us.  If you want print on paper, use your computer printer. Or go to www.lulu.com/prairiemary.  As for the cost to me, I prepaid with my life.