Patricia Ann McNair holds some measure of responsibility for the fact that I still write stuff. I’m not sure that she deserves praise or derision for this dubious honor. But in all truth, she’s the sort of selfless writer who can be a mentor, friend and teacher, all the while passionately pursuing her own craft.
Her book Temple of Air is coming out this fall.
She was also recently kind enough to include me in her blog series, Views from the Keyboard.
They slouch across oceans, across borders, have been for years, leaving a trail of footprints, litter, hope, the occasional corpse.
They descend on our fields, neck-deep in crops dusted with pesticides, the spore of new construction, bringing life to otherwise dying small towns in Kansas.
Many have the audacity to bring their families, to stay, sometimes for generations, and to speak the language given to them by the Conquistadores for a while before eventually losing it.
Often, they sing.
And they’re singing now. A family, several families, maybe thirty of them have rented a rowboat on a crystal lake that drowns a hidden forest amid frozen lava flows, an ancient reminder that this part of our country is still considered young by geologists, changing, heaving, convulsing beneath our very feet, reducing the idea of maps, borders, to a silly notion.
Eight of them crowd into the rowboat while the rest wait their turn on shore. The oars squeak as they zigzag, leaving little whirlpools from each kiss of a blade on the water. They draw sideways stares from the other fishermen, but they don’t care.
My daughter is fascinated by their joy. The smiles on the faces of the children. So much more compelling than my insistence on fish that never materialize. She sings along. It’s all one language after all.
And we’re both glad that they’re here.
There has been much wringing of hands by publishers, agents and serious readers of all stripes over the fate of the paper book. They lament the loss of their sacred vehicle for delivery of the long story: that dusty, pulpy, tactile experience that smells at first like a newly slain and bleached tree and then later like a musty treasure dragged from your grandmother’s attic.
All of us who prefer reading and writing in the long format rather than in sad little electronic dibs and dabs are staring at an unfolding revolution. I’ve come out on the side of this digital tsunami of change having a positive impact on storytelling.
But others aren’t so sure. The latest post on this subject that has taken my attention is this one by Johann Hari where he says:
The book — the physical paper book — is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all.
I’ve been hearing this for years and paying special attention given my own (albeit fading) preoccupation with making the list of top American novelists under 40. I turn 40 this year and other things, which include movies, work, a kid, red wine and fishing, are all conspiring to sap my energy for the sort of literary navel gazing required to write the type of novels I’m interested in. I’ve done the dance with agents and heard their lament all too often. They’re wonderful people, but they’re challenged by the state of the publishing industry. Here’s what one nice agent recently wrote me about a novel manuscript I sent her:
So I think you’re a strong writer – I have to say I enjoyed reading this and was very impressed by your talent which is obvious throughout. You’ve written a difficult novel but made it engaging and tense, and kept the reader wondering.
But I feel that there are some big problems…at a different time I might have encouraged you to think about a rewrite and to show it to me again, but now it’s such a difficult climate for fiction, that I’m not going to do that.
I used to get that “difficult climate” line a lot. Maybe it’s a way to let someone down easy…to pass on a manuscript but encourage a <40 writer to keep his chin up and keep at it. Maybe it’s a polite way to say I suck. Or maybe it’s an earnest reflection of the pressure they’re feeling as this era we love so much, that of the long form story in print, goes gently into a good night lit by glowing rectangles in various sizes. If it’s the latter, this tells me that in a previous era I probably could have had a shot at landing that top agent and staking out a modest career in the low stakes world of literary fiction.
But instead I’ve moved on to making documentaries and other distractions, and I’m finding less and less time to write.
But I’m still a reader. If I don’t have at least two books on my nightstand in various stages of completion, I feel a hole in my existence that can’t be filled by either the lesser experiences of social media or the Great American Lobotomy Machine. And being a reader of both long stuff and very old stuff gives me several distinct advantages that make me relavent in a tightening marketplace:
If you can read a long, rambling Russian novel with a myriad of characters each of whom inexplicably has three or four names, all of which sound similar to those of the other characters, and if you can concentrate long enough, and hard enough, to get through a thousand pages and then be so moved that you weep like a child when it all comes together in the end…then you can pretty much analyze any situation, no matter how dark and tangled, and find your way through to the other side.
People who don’t read Russian novels might reach points in their lives or careers where they feel stalled or impossibly entangled. What you learn from Russian novels is that if you just plod through, if you just focus and turn the page, eventually it will come together. Through sheer brute tenacity, you can reach the conclusion of any given situation.
This has helped me survive any number of challenges, from persisting through numerous creative obsessions to surviving crazy bosses and any number of seemingly hopeless situations of the personal or professional variety.
Persistence pays off. And if the reading of long-format books is truly dying in this age of 140-character interpersonal communication, then I’ve got a secret weapon the next time I face that brick wall and start slamming my forehead against the mortar. I can keep myself sharp through this long slog of life and career, and the fewer folks out there who know this Secret of Dostoyevski, the better the chance that I’ll reach the other side first.
I’ve acquired a reputation, not quite honestly, as being something of a creative guy. I’ve heard it over the years at various corporate and institutional jobs. “Hey, you’re the creative guy, you go figure something out.”
It’s always felt unearned. Mainly because I’m not that creative. My creativity stems largely from stealing things written by dead guys who can’t sue me. That advertising copy? That was a riff on Dylan Thomas or Ovid. That story concept? Straight out of a letter by Flaubert, with imagery from Rilke. The latest commercial script? Heavily influenced by Walt Whitman, whom I read a snippet of daily to help me earn that creative guy label.
Of course, I’m not the only one who “collaborates” with Walt Whitman – the best advertising people all do this, and some aren’t afraid to admit it:
Some folks spend small fortunes on psychotherapy or golf, trips to the Far East, yoga classes, you name it, all to achieve some sort of meditative balance in their lives. I’ve got my own distractions that cost me in both time and treasure, not the least of which are wine and fishing. But a paper book is the perfect, portable, inconspicuous, low-cost way to slip into a different plane of existence in order to achieve that distance from the electronic cacophony that is our daily lives.
A novel habit could be the very thing that keeps you sharper than the competition, especially with fewer and fewer folks out there who hone the same required level of concentration that allows you to read something good. If you have an easy, accessible, inexpensive place to retreat for a few hours or moments at a time, then you don’t need that trip to the day spa or those pricey extra eighteen holes to get away. You can save your coins for more important things such as red wine, vitamins, or maybe an MBA degree.
I’m not afraid of books going away. I can go to our local library book sale and load up on really good stuff for five dollars a box. There are so many classic works going back some two thousand years that I have yet to read that, should the practice of writing books cease tomorrow, I could still map out a lifetime of reading.
So I’ll always have this refuge, this bargain retreat that can take me to the Great Russian Steppes or down the Mississippi on a raft with that pesky Huck and my long-time hero and mentor, Jim.
So in the end, I’m not afraid of the cessation of publishing or the disappearance of reading from mainstream culture. Why? Because it’s always going to be my thing. I frankly don’t care if other people (other than my wife and daughter) continue to read stuff or not. I want my kid to read because it will give her the same advantages that I perceive reading gives me. I don’t have to worry about her, because at seven she is obsessed with collecting fairy books and she begs to hear more chapters of Little House on the Prairie every night. She’ll be just fine when it comes to reading.
If publishers stop publishing and people stop reading, maybe the box loads of books at the library book sale will drop from five bucks to two-fifty.
If publishing and long-format reading collapse, I’ll retain my secret advantages. I can remain the creative guy thanks to Walt Whitman. I can retain my strategy for plowing through difficult situations.
So if long-format books become “my thing,” I’m fine with that. I recall listening to this little known band from the Bay Area when I was a kid. They were called Metallica and they had this album called “Kill ‘em All” that none of the radio stations ever played because it was too raw and angry and poorly produced. This meant that the only way to hear their music was to read about it in some photocopied, pathetic little music zine or to have a friend hand you a copy.
Once you’d discovered Metallica, you became part of an underground movement, a sort of greasy, black tee-shirted clan of socially awkward individuals who possessed this power of frothing, addictive music that they only shared with others of their kind.
To connect with this clan, all you had to do was hum, in a nasal falsetto, the opening bars of “Seek and Destroy” and you’re fellow clansmen would begin banging their heads: “bwananaa, bum bwananaa, bum bum bum bum bum bwanahh!” You then knew that you could safely talk about music and anarchy with them.
Later on, when Metallica’s fame grew and and you could find them in records stores and on the radio and in music videos, our desperately awkward clan lost our secret muse. When the band ceased to be underground, they ceased to interest us. When they stopped eating sandwiches of stale Wonder bread smeared with stolen ketchup packets form fast food chains, their mystique diminished. They were now “lame.” By virtue of earning a living, they had “sold out.” We had to look elsewhere because we now shared the secret with the general populace, and that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.
So if books go underground…if they become the purview of a few strange individuals sitting around staring at bleached pulp for hours on end, I will not be afraid nor saddened. Instead, I’ll know who I’ll be safe to sit next to on a bus when I don’t feel like talking – someone engrossed in a book is less likely to start some inane conversation. I’ll know who I can trust. I know who I can safely talk to without being bored to tears. I know what I’ll be able to look for on park benches or in airport lobbies to find others of my kind.
If books finally begin to disappear from mainstream culture, maybe I’ll find my tribe again.
About six years back I figured I’d stumbled across the great secret to writing fiction, in particular to writing a novel. I remember I was sitting at a cafe on the north side of Chicago with my friend Bill, another struggling writer-type. He’d just read a draft of a novel I’d completed and had some kind words and solid critiques, and he asked me how I’d managed to finish it. “What was the key?” he asked.
Flushed with the victory of actually having completed something somewhat coherent after 140,000 words, I arrived upon an answer to his question: “The key,” I said, “is learning how to write bad stuff. Anyone can write the good stuff…the shit that flies across the screen when you’re accosted by the muse of literary pretension. But writing the bad stuff is hard. That’s the stuff you have to cut later, or rewrite. Or maybe you even get lucky and it turns out to be not as bad as you thought even though it was painful as hell to get down.”
Writers, even unsuccessful ones, are famous for aphorisms.
But I still think that’s largely true. Though I’m also now convinced that I don’t have the first clue about how to write fiction or a novel. I’ve got a couple that I’ve finished and like well enough, but the fact that they still exist solely as doublespaced, Times New Roman manuscripts gives me a clue to what the marketplace thinks of my literary greatness.
But to finish a novel, you do have to learn to write the bad stuff. Or at least write through the bad stuff. Take tonight, for example. Two hours ago I decided I’d sit down and write 600 words on this new project I’m trying to get through. It started as a short story, turned into a screenplay and now seems to want to be a novel. So I’ve given myself a goal of 600 words per day, good or bad, so that I’ll have a draft to look at in July to see if the first stab is good, bad or ugly.
But then I started writing and became completely dejected. The whole project fell into question. I reread some other passages, which seemed uninspired and vapid. I was certain that I’d never be able to get 600 words…even 600 bad ones.
But I started typing. The first two sentences took me 15 minutes. But then I found and followed an image of a woman pulling radishes from a garden bed made from old tractor tires. And the below passage is the result. I can’t say if it’s good or not, or if it will even wind up in the finished piece. But it’s 1,200 words long and it doesn’t make me cringe.
I don’t know any secrets to writing. But I’m pretty convinced that finishing anything of length requires you to sit down and beat your head against the wall and write a whole lot of stuff you’re convinced is absolutely lousy. If you have the discipline to do that, you won’t have a problem hanging on long enough to type “The End.”
WERE WE EVER HAPPY? I hold a vague recollection, something so distant and faded that it might be a memory of a memory. Or maybe it was even something I’d created in a dream. But it’s there, a warm bright moment in the light of a spring afternoon. For an instant we were happy: my father, my mother and I.
I was four. It was our second year on the old Richter farm, which had stood for a long while as overgrown pasture and blackberry thickets. My old man had leased the two hundred acre property adjacent to my grandmother’s farm. It was his bid to make a go of it on his own, and he’d planted corn and beans and then sweet sorghum on the poorer ground for silage and with the intent of making molasses to sell at the farmers market in town. My grandma had been selling off acreage to pay the medical bills from the kidney failure that had consumed and killed my granddad the year before. My dad wanted to leave her free to do what she needed to with her land.
He liked having his own place even if everyone said nothing would come of it. The soil was poor I think we were happy enough there. My mother had wallpapered the kitchen and bedrooms with money she earned cutting hair. She had a stool on the old shade porch, and women would bring their boys from town to sit on it while Ma ran the clippers over their skulls. She charged two dollars less than the barber shop in town for pretty much the same result.
She had planted winter beds in old tractor tires, and they were already lush with spring greens, beats and even a few strawberries. I remember the day clearly. It was late morning and I was helping with the garden, more likely just pushing dirt around, when I noticed the absence of the sound of the tractor running in the back fields for the first time in weeks.
I spotted my dad by the well spigot near the barn, and he was washing the dirt off his forearms and splashing the back of his neck. Ma looked up from the bundle of vegetables collected on the lap of her garden dress. She smiled with surprise.
“Let’s fix a lunch and go to the creek,” he said. He wasn’t quite smiling. I couldn’t say that I’d ever seen him smile in earnest. But there was a light in his eyes. He took off his cap and wiped his brow.
Ma sliced radishes and cheese and rye bread. She poured some cream in an old jelly jar and then filled the balance of it with strawberries. She wrapped slices of deer sausage from a March doe in waxed paper and bundled all of it in a bandana.
Dad brought along a heavy wool Navy blanket and a couple of cane poles, and we walked a path he kept mowed short enough that we didn’t have to work about ticks. It took us all the way to the back of the farm where there was a gate that let out on a stone county road, more of a twin-track that was used by the local farmers. We climbed up past my grandmother’s place and then down into a draw near the base of Carson’s Ridge where Bonne Femme Creek still ran clear and swift, eddies coiling into long, deep, rocky pools.
We found a grassy spot on the bank of our favorite pool, and I can remember the chicory and blue-eyed grass giving a splash of color. Ma found a warm, sunny spot near the rusted metal gates of an old family cemetery. I don’t know if anyone knew who those old headstones belonged to, maybe the very first family to farm this country after it had only been Osage land. The names were weathered off and weeds grew up inside the iron fence.
We ate the strawberries and cream first. Ma gave us each a spoon, but they left most of it for me. We ate sausage and sliced radishes on the rye bread and then dad laid back on the blanket and began to snore softly within moments. I stared at his brow and watched it twitch as a bee hovered close.
Ma and I took up the poles and dug for worms in the soft bank with driftwood. We cast bobbers into the pool and watched the sunfish expertly remove our worms, red and white floats dancing in the riffle and then gliding even once they’d removed their quarry. We didn’t catch anything. We didn’t speak. We just sat on the banks and smelled the turned earth and the rich, sweet green of adolescent spring leaves and the early wildflowers. It was nice because there were no hard words, no impatient questions from my old man or vacant responses from Ma. Even as a small child I could read there was little they cared for in one another. But this day none of that showed.
We came back to the blanket and Dad was cutting on a walking stick, notching lines on one end for the handle, scraping off bark. I hoped that he was making it for me, but I suspected that he wasn’t. Maybe he was just filling time, and he’d leave it when we packed to go, in which case it would be mine to take. Greed exists in the most basic form in children.
Ma lay down on the thick, coarse wool and Dad laid down next to her on his side, his head propped by one elbow, his chin in his palm. They weren’t touching.
At first I thought he might be staring at her hair as it was stirred by the balmy spring breeze, but then I realized that he was staring at the old family grave plot. He looked for a long time, and then I remembered that he sat up suddenly and shaded his eyes, staring into the tall grass between the weathered old markers.
“What is it?” Ma asked, and he just shook his head and lay back down, glancing sideways into the cool, tall grass as he did so.
That’s when I heard a plop and I rushed to a bank to see a huge alligator snapping turtle scoot into the depths of the pool. I watched the trail he’d made dragging his thick tail across the mud of the bank. When I got back Ma and Dad were wordlessly packing up the picnic. Ma smiled and hummed to herself and dad glanced at his watch and then the sun to see how much time he had left for tractor work.
I remember hearing a crow caw as we left the creek bank. “That was nice,” Ma said later as we crossed our property. She reached out absently and brushed the back of my neck. There was a gentleness underneath her calluses, and a strength in her fingers, and it was the kind of touch that makes a boy know that there is good things in the world.
That was the only time I figure all three of us were happy. Even my old man. The following spring the banks of Bonne Femme would flood the bottom ground well into planting season so that a few neighbors wouldn’t even get their corn in. By August, Ma would be dead. And a year after, my old man would walk past me into the kitchen to take down the twenty-gauge he kept on the ledge above the Frigidaire.
Here I am back in my hometown of Chicago, slouching toward the birth of the new year, the year in which I’ll hit the big four-oh. Maybe it’s too soon to start in with the hand-wringing that usually accompanies the reaching of the rough middle point of one’s journey across this great green and blue rock. But navel gazing is a specialty of us writer-types, especially those of us educated by the MFA writing program industry.
Midlife crises are nothing new to me. I’ve been having them on and off since my teens when a sudden growth spurt ended my unlikely gymnastics career. I then turned to tennis, the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, a stint with a rock band, a pair of failed attempts at the Foreign Service Exam, three stabs over a fifteen year period at writing a Great American Novel, a solid near miss at writing for the screen and my current preoccupation with making a (low-budget) feature film of some sort.
Most of these endeavors have involved storytelling of one form or another. Partner that with my career in public relations and institutional communications, and it involves a whole lot of fiction. In short: bullshit. This penchant for stories arises mainly from a hell of a lot of movies and books over the years. I love both of these forms, and not a few of them have changed the course of my life as I’ve struck out in a new direction dragging my wife and kid along as I go. Books are dangerous and powerful things. Sometimes. Other times they put you to sleep. Often, at their best, they just make you smile and lay the pages in your lap, closing your eyes and savoring the funny way they make your brain feel.
Storytelling is an art and a craft and a compulsion. Some people do it really, really well. Some are just pretty good. Most suck at it. I haven’t quite figured out where I fit on that spectrum. What I do know, though, is that I’ve run out of roughly half of the time endowed to me to find out. And now the chances will grow slimmer with each passing minute. This doesn’t frighten or frustrate me that much. Sure I sense the sand slipping through the hourglass. But I’m also starting to approach an acceptance of the fact that I may never really know.
As a writer, I’ve been good enough to show well in a contest here or there. Outside my day job, I’ve earned a grand total of less than five thousand dollars for my scribblings. Not bad, actually. How many people have hobbies that pay them back? How many people approach, say, the watching of television like a part-time job? Instead, I tell stories. Sometimes people read them. Sometimes they even pay me for them.
Add to that a few plane tickets to LA, and one dinner in particular in Santa Monica that I recall where a producer asked me, without irony, who I’d like to play the lead role in the film of a screenplay I’d written. “What about Leonardo DiCaprio?” I asked. The producer frowned. I thought he might laugh. But he didn’t. He was thinking. “No,” he said, “don’t think we could get him. Who else?”
That film didn’t get produced. Neither did the next half dozen scripts I wrote outside of one short film, which I made myself with the help of friends. That turned out to be one of the more exhilarating storytelling experiences in this long, ambling and not very lucrative part-time career.
And while all of this other stuff was going on, this reading and writing and filmmaking, etc, I’ve wound up having a fairly rewarding actual career in another aspect of the bullshit biz. I’ve clawed my way up to middle management in a PR shop for a state institution, which sounds quite horrid but actually isn’t. I have no problems punching a clock, growing up as I did in a union household. My old man counted money in a dingy, smoky vault below crooked horse tracks under the direction of a state racing commission and various and occasionally nefarious wealthy families. For fun he golfs, dotes on a fancy car and for many years cared for and operated a speedboat, treating a host of family and friends to lake holidays over the years.
Instead of speedboating, I make up stories in my spare time. Instead of planning the union picnic, I make super low-budget movies. My endeavors may be a tad Quixotic compared to my father’s and his race track friends’, but they’re no less enjoyable.
I don’t want to give the actual, paying job short shrift. I’ve had some nice rewards, not the least of which being health benefits and a steady paycheck that over the years has enabled world travel and helped with the acquisition of not a few nice bottles of wine. We sent our daughter to a solid private preschool. Cutting corners means forgoing a vacation rental in favor of tent camping or putting off buying a new lens for my camera for a month or two. We’re not rich. We’ll never be rich. But, right now, anyway, we’re not hurting.
And building websites and helping put together marketing campaigns online has brought some creative satisfaction and a bit of recognition. It amuses me that I get to travel around the country and give presentations to folks about some of the things I do on a job I never expected or wanted in the first place. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate or enjoy said job. It’s just that I always thought I’d be doing something else. Like cashing checks from New York publishers or Los Angeles producers.
But I’ve learned that this isn’t really how the world works. Maybe for some people, but not for the vast majority. As I slouch toward forty, I’m realizing that this kind of sucks, but then it’s also not really that bad. If I could have my choice of a career, I’d be sitting in a book-stuffed cabin near Sisters, Oregon with a view of the three volcanic peaks, hacking away at a vintage typewriter, amassing pages, which I’d slip into an envelope and send to an agent. Every so often, a check would come in the mail. I’d occasionally get up to split wood and feed the fireplace. I’d pick my daughter up from school and then fix dinner for the family. In the evenings we’d watch Francis Ford Coppola movies or I’d actually have time to read the New Yorker weekly. On weekends I’d fish for trout or sketch landscapes. Maybe I’d take photographs of flowers with a macro lens.
But that’s not how it works. Maybe reaching forty means that you begin to accept and realize what’s fantasy and what’s not. Right now my goals are less ambitious than the National Book Awards or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I’d like to get a little nicer house so that we can have guests without feeling cramped. I’d like a six-burner stove and more time to cook. I’d like to be a little less stressed at work and have a little more time to engage in bullshit artistry: I’d like to take a shot at another novel or script. Maybe one will be something I’m really, really pleased with, whether or not it’s ever published or produced. I want to fish more, go backpacking with my daughter, and increase the number of times per year that my wife and I take in dinner and a show.
All of these goals seem reasonable. I even hope to accomplish one or two of them in 2011. And the rest should be easily attainable sometime over the next forty years.
Here’s the latest dirge for the noble book and it’s toiling author in an article from the Guardian. Author Ewan Morrison laments the passing of the book. Well, it’s a little more callus and self-serving than that. He’s not morning the loss of the texture and smell of those paper books we all love, of the way a great story can wrap us in its narrative and distract us for hours or haunt us for years. Instead, Morrison has a more important question:
But let’s leave the survival of the paper book alone, and ask the more important question: Will writers be able to make a living and continue writing in the digital era?
Ah…here we are. The crux of the issue for Mr. Morrison and all writers of his ilk who share this lament. Nevermind the actual books…let’s instead worry about how writers (like, perhaps, Mr. Morrison himself) will be able to cash in in this era of the free and ubiquitous. Or, to put it bluntly,why the fuck would I read Mr. Morrison’s work when I can download–say–Mark Twain for free? Great question.
Mr. Morrison goes on in that infuriating article to mourn “The Retreat of Advances” and other such hardships that novelists are having to endure these days. Ah, the fat advance. Morrison insists that a huge advance is actually the key to great literature (and to think I’d always thought it was those muses):
To ask whether International Man Booker prizewinner Philip Roth could have written 24 novels and the award-winning American trilogy without advances is like asking if Michelangelo could have painted the Sistine Chapel without the patronage of Pope Julius II. The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.
I like Philip Roth as much as the next guy, but he’s been retreading the rather narrow, angst-ridden, semi-autobiographical streets of Newark, NJ in his Nathan Zuckerman novels for years. Have these advances really inspired Roth to greatness? Or have they just prolonged his navel-gazing? To compare Roth to Michelangelo is…well…kind of a stretch. And then to insist that the main reason that such fine Rothian literature gets produced is due to the corporate publishing model–with it’s Victorian roots and gaggles of agents, editors and mid-level marketing execs cashing in at every stop in the process between author and reader–is beyond silly.
I’m tired of hearing the dire refrain. I’m actually inspired by the new possibilities in storytelling. But for folks like Morrison, it all boils down to this: “If I don’t get paid to write my semi-autobiographical bourgeois ’literature,’ and if…God forbid…I have to get a real job, the world as we know it will begin to crumble!” Writers, literary writers especially, think they deserve to receive checks in the mail for what they do. Which is horseshit.
I’m not saying that just because I’m a working stiff writer with very modest publishing credentials. The main reason I find Morrison’s sentiment pathetic is due to my recent foray into independent filmmaking. If anything, it’s a more demanding pursuit in terms of persistence, blood, sweat and treasure than writing. And I’ve met folks who have mortgaged their houses, sacrificed marriages, given up careers and moved in with their mothers at the age of forty…all for the sake of creating their art. And I’m not talking about pulphouse B-movies…those genre films actually have a chance at making a little money. I’m talking about very excellent, thoughtful, well-crafted and intelligent independent features and documentaries.
There’s very little money in filmmaking. The old saw is, “If you want to make a small fortune in the film business, start with a large one.” I see people with leaky roofs and trashy cars maxing out their credit cards to buy camera gear or to pay for catering to feed volunteer actors. I’ve borrowed money from friends and family. I’ve begged for cash. It makes me sick to slip around with my hand out, expecting folks who don’t have much money to begin with to kick in for my project so I can play around with a camera. But in film, if you want to finish a project, that’s what you have to do. Plenty of months go by when I invest in a film before I make that deposit into my kid’s college fund. I’ve managed to (mostly) avoid the credit card debt with plagues so many indie film folks. But I’ve kicked quite a few chips into the kitty over the years. Writers actually have it easy: their art costs them nothing to make. Zero! Zilch!
Writers actually have it easy: their art costs them nothing to make. Zero! Zilch!
Sure, there are film folks in LA getting rich. Many of them even make fantastic movies. But if there is a genre in film that compares with great literature of the ages, it’s that independent genre that is fueled by espresso, tips from waiting tables and maxed out credit cards. Folks give blood to make moves. Robert Rodriguez famously sold his body to science to finance his first film.
So after hearing a jackass like Morrison whine about how all those who love books are duty bound to defend the old publishing model, I’m ready to relinquish the title of “writer.” I’ll still write scripts. Maybe even another novel or two. I’ll most likely end up giving them all away, or in the case of a narrative film, end up investing my retirement fund in making it happen. And instead persisting to carry the whining title of “writer,” I’ll pick up the title of “filmmaker” where I’ll be among blue collar folks who are willing to roll up their sleeves and make sacrifices for their art, to beg money off of family or to work a real job to make ends meet, putting together projects nights, weekends or during two week vacations from work.
And if writers like Morrison and Roth truly require corporate patronage to be inspired to create great work, and if the absence of the fat advance renders them literarily impotent, then I just have to say “good riddance.” Go sulk. Quit writing. Somebody else will be willing to step up and write something solid. Or I can always go back to Mark Twain.
Just a word of caution, though. If you quit writing, or if those advance checks stop rolling in, you may find you have to go out and get a real job. And if you can write HTML code or solid advertising copy, and if you’re willing to bust your ass while you’re on the clock, then you’re even welcome to come apply where I work. And, if you want, you can come out to a shoot some weekend and help by holding a boom mic. I might even feed you if you do.
