What a shame that you weren’t gang raped - or the ship didn’t go up in flames
Creativity
Sensory overload. No doubt many creatives suffer or benefit from this, as do I. Everything I see, hear, taste, smell, and feel impels or compels me to write (Everything’s an Essay, after all). An essay. A haiku. A nasty note. Some of them make it to the page, or to the internet’s stage; others waft into the air like so many untethered helium balloons.
Other artists: other media. Musicians sing their emotions. Painters and sculptors work out their conundrums on canvas or in clay. Actors and dancers allow their bodies to channel their passions.
I suppose the process of translating feelings into art is as unique as the oeuvres themselves. For me, it follows a predictable, always slightly different, and sometimes frustrating and agonizing and sometimes joyful and liberating pattern: Something captures my attention. Makes me curious. Annoys me. Delights me. Then it percolates in my mind like coffee in a 1950s Maxwell House commercial.
I think about it and think about it when I’m not thinking about it. I think it’s a dumb idea to write about and then think I should stop being so self-critical and do what I tell my writing students to do: Just write. Then I think about it again from a different angle.
Next, I have to convince myself to actually sit down and write. I circle around that deliciously virginal white lined paper like westward-heading pioneers circling their wagons for support and protection. I have to select just the right pen: oh, the pen selection! It has to have the right heft and feel and ink color (never black; usually blue, sometimes purple).
And then I procrastinate. I’ve become quite adept at prioritizing Instagram, laundry, and the state of my cuticles over sitting my butt down in the chair.
Then, just as the hummingbird or bee finally alights to drink in the flower’s nectar, I finally succumb to the siren. The ink flows longhand before I type because my brain works faster than my fingers can, and so I can’t get ahead of myself. And the eventual typing affords me the opportunity for the first revision. Once I begin in earnest, I often slide happily into the “zone.” I remember Tiger Woods once saying that when he tees up the ball or stands over a putt, nothing else exists. I’m not quite sure I get that deep into the zone, but time passes without me. My normally hungry, hyperactive senses settle on the letters that form words that form sentences that form paragraphs that form pages.
Reality
Then, again, as I imagine most authors do, I grapple with how to get the words out to the world. I have control over the haiku (daily) and the essays (biweekly or whenever the muse sprinkles fairy dust on me): I post those to the interweb across all pertinent social media so that my vast :) audiences can gobble up the content.
The memoirs are a whole different story (writing pun very much intended). To publish or not to publish? Yes, that is the question. And if the former, how to suffer the slings and arrows on the seemingly infinite continuum: Self-Publish, Hybrid, Indie, Traditional?
This type (another intentional writing pun) of sensory overload is decidedly less joyful than that which sparks storytelling in its various guises. This shifts the focus from the realm of the right brain to the decidedly more mundane - and practical - left brain: facts and figures and all business.
The first publisher I approached with my first memoir, Nothing But Blue showed great interest. He had begun a small indie imprint and wanted my story to be among his first offerings.
“What a shame that you weren’t gang raped, or that the ship didn’t go up in flames,” he said when we finally connected by phone after he read the manuscript.
“I’m sorry?” Had I actually just apologized for averting disaster and great bodily and emotional harm? I also wanted to point out that the ship would have gone down in flames but thought that might not be the optimal moment for pedantic semantics.
“Yeah, it’s just that it’d sell better if something traumatic had happened to you.”
That opportunity did, in fact, go up in flames like he wished the ship had. I’m not certain if the publisher meant to imply a James Frey-level of embellishment, but I was unwilling to cross, or even approach that line.
The barrage of questions requiring answers for the book proposal/agent query letter/I beg you to publish my work plea seemed relentless and daunting:
Where will it sit in the bookstore? In the library?
Who is your target audience?
What are the book comps, and how have those sold?
Why this memoir, why now?
How many followers do you have across your social media platforms? (They like 20,000; I barely had 200)
What are likely sales numbers?
These and myriad other questions weighed me down like the ten-ton anchor on the container ship I’d worked on for a summer, and about which I wrote. The material I’d have to amass to even have a shot of getting an agent who might even have a shot at getting a traditional publisher remotely interested dragged me down like a New Jersey shore riptide undertow.
I naively thought getting the book down in writing was the hard part; now it seemed that that was akin to conception and gestation, and that the real labor lay in pushing it out into the world. Touting and marketing myself makes me, and other creatives, immensely uncomfortable. It is not our forte, and many of us feel cripplingly inept at the exhausting and frustrating effort of waving our own flags.
“What do you actually want for and from this book?” Asked my writing teachers. Asked my son who edited the second one. The answers to that question would steer me to the best path. It led me, like I did with my car, to opt for the hybrid approach. Neither the gas-guzzling albeit more luxurious option of the traditional publisher, nor the fully eco-friendly but stripped down model of self-publishing, the hybrid suited me well. It was, as Goldilocks might exclaim, “just right.”
For an initial investment (which any author serious about producing a quality piece would spend anyway on various essential services), a hybrid publisher (once they accept the manuscript) provides all those through a team of curated professionals: copy editors, proofreaders, cover designers, layout experts, digital marketing wizzes, traditional marketing and distribution gurus. And, unlike in most traditional publishing contracts, I retain the rights to the book and 100% of the royalties.
At times, I felt like I was settling or compromising by not reaching for the big brass ring of a well-known brick and mortar publishing house. But the reality is that while both books are solidly decent, neither is destined for mass market firework-inducing success. I hope my writing is interesting and relatable, but the events are neither scandalous or apocalyptic enough (as that first publisher noted), nor am I famous enough to attract a huge audience. The topics do not speak to the zeitgeist; and Puck has not waved his wand over the influencers to make them wake up and fall in love with either book: Oprah will not include either in her book club; nor will Reese Witherspoon try to option the film rights.
I wanted simply to tell my stories. To hold the books in my hand. To give my boys some insight into their mother. And to make my parents, wherever they are in the ether, proud. Mission accomplished.
The new one, The Undiscovered Country - Seeing Myself Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, due out on September 6 (my mother’s birthday) is available for preorder now.