4 - Publication

I've talked about the "plan" part of my writing pursuit, so now I'll talk about the "purpose." Truthfully, my idea of the purpose of my writing is a little hazy. I don't have a single, well-defined, consistent end goal. Instead, I have a complex of related but distinct goals. In my head it looks a bit like a word cloud. They're not mutually exclusive but they compete for priority, and have risen or fallen in priority since I first knew I wanted to be a writer. This post is called "publication" because having my work published was the first goal I conceived of all those years ago. All the other goals grew around this original goal of publication, and many of them specifically exist in opposition to it, or at least in opposition to the idea that publication is my only goal. 

What a strange place the concept of "getting published" has in the mind and social milieu of a young aspiring author. In our capitalist society, the value and virtue of any activity is measured by its ability to make money. Publication is the only way a literary work can make money, so it's often viewed as the only legitimate reason to write. Any aspiring author will remember being asked when they're going to publish their work or, even richer, if it's already been published, by relatives or friends who probably think getting published is a lot easier than it actually is. On the other hand, many people more or less accurately understand getting published to be very difficult and, even more damningly, unlikely. Publication is thus seen as the only reason why someone would write and, also, impossible, or at least unattainable on the level of winning the lottery. So, young aspiring authors are often asked by their other relatives and friends to profess an adjacent aspiration that's more acceptable to the capitalist worldview, resulting in the inevitable question: "So you want to be a… journalist?"

I guess if I enjoyed any and all kinds of writing equally, and wanted to make my living doing it, I could have gone into journalism. On the other hand, there have also been, and sometimes still are, creative writers who don't really enjoy writing, treat the process of writing like a menial job, and treat their literary works like interchangeable widgets. But I and most other creative writers are obviously attached to our particular kind of writing, and all writing is not, as the archetypical well-meaning relative seems to think, interchangeable. We're committed to our unique creative visions, so our works-in-progress remain hobby-horses—collections of idiosyncratic scratches on pages—unless and until publication can elevate them to the status of salable, scalable assets, at which point the act of writing has conferred upon it, retroactively, the prestige of entrepreneurship.

A wiser kind of well-meaning relative, along with writing teachers and successful authors giving out writing advice, will acknowledge the challenge and unlikelihood of getting published while also seeing beyond the blinders of capitalism and professing the value of creative writing as a hobby or personal pursuit. They urge the aspiring author not to write only for publication, but to keep in mind other goals—fun, sharing with family or friends or community, the practice of and improvement at the craft—and find value in them. These will sustain the creative process while the aspiring author is waiting to get published or, in the event that publication never happens, serve as worthy ends in and of themselves. It is out of this sound argument, as well as out of a growing anti-capitalist attitude in myself, that my complex of other goals grew.

I agree that publishing a creative work and finding an audience, no matter how you go about it, is challenging. Self-publishing has made it so the unlikelihood argument holds less water—it's possible for anyone with the means, no matter the quality or appeal of their work, to publish—but it's probably true that aspirations to be traditionally published or to find a large audience self-publishing have an element of lottery. I personally sort of think that, maybe, if someone hones their craft and crafts their style to the specifications of the industry, plays the market and tailors their work to fit the current trends, and then queries agents or markets their self-published work very savilly and persistently, they can bypass the luck part of it and guarantee themselves a traditional book deal or moderately successful self-published book, or at least boost their chances get themselves close to a guarantee. I often see traditionally and self-published books that I'm tempted to think are products of authors who single-mindedly pursued publication by any means necessary—maybe, I imagine, because they're pursuing the entrepreneurial prestige and legitimacy of publication or maybe because they want to make money by treating their books like widgets—but I don't think very many authors are actually that cynical. Literary tastes, after all, are influenced by what someone reads, and what someone reads is influenced by a mainstream book market that's influenced by trends. Maybe having tastes and creative interests that happen to align with publishing trends is its own kind of luck. And finding any audience for any creative work or, hell, even making it remotely comprehensible to any other person, inevitably necessitates compromising on one's personal, pure creative vision. Nonetheless, at some point I decided that publication isn't so much more valuable than my personal creative vision that I should discard the vision and pursue publication, traditional or self-, single-mindedly. How well do my creative interests align with the priorities of the  profit-motivated book market? The part of me that wants to view myself as a unique, ingenious creative renegade wants to say that they don't align very well at all. The part of me that views publication as prestigious and worthwhile for other reasons, which I'll get into, wants to say that they align well enough for me to have a decent shot. 

So my goals for my writing are numerous and exist on a hierarchy of priorities and prerequisites. Publication is among them, and always shows up eventually, but its never the highest priority. There's fun—as I've said, I enjoy writing—but that would still be a goal if I were writing as a hobby. Sharing my work with friends and family is an interesting one. At times I've found it very gratifying; it can be a method for a strange and beautiful kind of communication that wouldn't be possible without art as an intermediary. The author John Green has said that the first and highest goal of making art must be to make a gift for the someone in the artist's life. But at other times, I've felt that the loved ones with whom I share my work don't fully understand or appreciate it. This is understandable, and inevitable when I'm writing in a genre that some of my loved ones don't enjoy, and in response to a body of works in that genre that they aren't familiar with. If I conceptualize my family and friends as a market and imagine myself trying to sell my writing to that market, it would probably flop. 

Hard as it might be to admit, I'm often writing not for the people in my life, but for an imagined future audience of strangers who come to my work because they understand and like what I'm doing. The only reason I'm imagining this hypothetical audience in the first place is because I was raised in a capitalist media environment where, as I said, I was trained to value publication as my first and, at one time, only conscious goal, and my tastes and creative interests were influenced by a mainstream book market that was influenced by trends in the tastes of hundreds of thousands of readers. If I had grown up in a different, more community-minded world, maybe I would only be writing for my immediate community. But at this point my creative interests are what they are, and so if I want to share my work with people that will appreciate it, I need to access a larger market, specifically the large market that produced the works that influenced my creative interests: the mainstream english-language book market. 

The desired result—sharing my work with a large group of people who I don't personally know and may never meet—is a… weird thing to want. I can imagine that it's sort of a larger-scale version of the kind of gratification I get from sharing my work with my loved ones, but I know for a fact that it wouldn't be remotely the same At the very least, it doesn't enable the kind of intimate emotional communication I get from sharing my work with loved ones, because an audience of strangers can't directly communicate back to me and don't reach any deeper level of understanding of me, because they don't understand or know me in the first place. I don't know exactly what having my work shared with a massive or even moderate number of people would be like. And it's strange to say with my full chest that I want something when I don't really understand it or what I would get out of it. Do I want love and validation heaped not upon me but upon a parasocial effigy of me created collectively by hundreds or thousands or millions of strangers? Do I want my stories and the ideas therein to spread to the highest possible number of people like a memetic virus? Do I harbor the conviction—or suffer under the delusion—that the world would be a better place if my stories were so infecting it? Do I harbor the more modest ambition that, were my stories to be read by a large number of people, they would enjoy them, and that I could do good in the world in that way? I think its a combination of all of these things, to different degrees. I don't know if successful publication and literary fame would make me happy. I'm pretty sure that, in my heart of hearts, I'm not desperate for literary fame, specifically because I'm so unsure of its value. But I do still want it. I plan to keep pursuing it and, if at some point it's within reach, I'll grab it in a heartbeat. 

That leaves practicing the craft. I think craft gets a bad rap sometimes, especially among creative types who hold in high regard the pure vision. I also hold the pure vision in high regard. I said earlier that I'm not interested in pursuing publication at all costs because I'm personally attached to my creative vision. But I would argue that craft is not just a tool for shaping and warping a pure creative vision to the demands of a capitalist media market, or for judging the potential of a work to succeed in a capitalistic market, as I've heard it argued before. I don't even think the utility of craft stops at making a creative vision comprehensible to other people. I've had a lot of pure creative visions throughout my life, some of which I imagined executing in one artistic medium or another and some of which I didn't: imaginary friends and worlds and characters and stories, swimming around in my head, unmoored, at least for now, from the demands of external legibility or artistic convention. And the thing about all these pure creative visions is that they suck. My pure creative visions are wispy and insubstantial, consisting of a loose collection of characters and ideas and moments that play and replay in my head, constantly shifting and gradually bloating as I haphazardly graft new ideas onto them. They have a tendency to become so complex that I lose the ability to keep track of them in my head. And as they continue to spin their wheels up there, they tend to become stale and lose the power to compel me. A good story, meanwhile, which represents a creative vision brought to life through craft, is well-defined, tangible, and potentially infinitely compelling. Its elements, instead of being arbitrary and indulgent, are in fact optimized for their power to compel and enable personal reflection. Playing with pure creative visions in daydreams is fun, but I've always felt compelled to crystalize them into definite and effective pieces of art, and the way to do that is the craft of storytelling. In some ways, this is sort of tragic. When I make a decision about a creative project—discard one idea in favor of another—I limit the potential of what my creative vision might be. Where before it was floating and undefined, shimmering brilliantly in my mind, now it's solid and dull: one thing only. To me, writing is sort of the art of inflicting structural violence on my daydreams. But it's worth it, because doing so doesn't only make my creative vision more comprehensible, satisfying, and meaningful to other people, or to a market, but it also makes it more comprehensible, satisfying, and meaningful to me. If the goal is ultimately pure, innocent play, I find in-progress novel drafts and finished novels to be much more entertaining toys than daydreams. 

Of course, there's more than one way to do craft. Why have I chosen to crystalize my daydreams specifically into the form of linear, diegetic narratives told through traditional english-language prose, usually in past tense close third person, consisting of somewhere between 200 and 500,000 words? It's simply because my biggest influences happened to be in this form, and because it's a form that's familiar to and preferred by the public at large, which will allow me to share my work with others and, yes, with a market. Maybe it would be more interesting to buck convention and turn my creative visions into… I don't know, a series of non-linear interconnected wiki entries, or a two-hour immersive experience in a garden of circuitous hedgerows and abstract onyx sculptures. But I like stories and novels. I consider them to be a worthy form, and, at least for now, the best forms for my ideas to take. 

And here's the thing: that form is more collaborative than many people realize. Almost all of the great stories I've read—the stories I want my stories to be like when they grow up—have been great partially because of the involvement of editors and similar professionals. Editors and other publishing industry gatekeepers are executors of the will of the unfeeling market, but they're also essential contributors to the artistic forms of the short story and novel as we currently understand them. Short stories and novels usually can't become themselves without editors. I'm not saying, like some editors do, (cough cough Gordon Lish) that the editor is the most important part of the process and that all authors owe their artistic and commercial success almost exclusively to their editors. Also, I'm not saying that all stories necessarily need the intervention of an editor in order to be great. In the course of human history, I'm sure people have sat down in an attic and pumped out an unimpeachably perfect final product all on their own. But I am saying that I couldn't imagine writing a great novel without an editor's help. Maybe the publishing industry is pulling the wool over my eyes and I should actually expect to make a great piece of art all on my own, or at least without the help of people with an explicit profit motive. But if I'm right, then the fulfillment of the creative potential of any work in an entire artistic medium is contingent upon its ability to further a profit motive according to the deeply entrenched traditional New York book publishing industry, or alternatively upon the author having the means to hire a freelance editor as an investment to secure later returns in the form of sales of a self-published work. Should we say… oops? 

Listen, the profit motive broadly sucks, and I'll always applaud attempts to create art outside of its influence, but at the end of the day, it's inseparable with the world we live in, and you can still create great art within a profit-motivated system. There is no ethical creation under capitalism, but there is more ethical and less ethical creation. Not to mention, other art forms are even more deeply intertwined with capitalism because they developed in tandem with it—look at video games or film. If I want to make an avant-garde short film, but I need to shell out a couple hundred bucks to Panasonic for a camera to shoot it on, does that make me a corpo scuzzbag? Why should we expect literature to be so much more pure? 

So, as weird as it is to say, I want to make my pure creative vision into a corporate commodity specifically so that it can achieve its greatest possible creative potential, partially in order to share it with other people—maybe a lot of other people—but mostly for my own satisfaction. That's the purpose.