Everybody wants to write a book. Writers who have published a book on any subject will tell you that they get more emails about how to get published than they do about the actual content of their work. Most published writers have at least one uncle/neighbor/ex-boyfriend who is currently querying agents.
There is this big, fat fantasy that writing the book and getting it published will make it so you don’t have to work ever again. Not even so much, you know, on the actual writing part, really.
And in the fantasy, the writing is not actually work, it’s just sort of happy typing away happily in your Architectural Digest-featured home-office waiting for your husband astronaut Mike Dexter to bring the ginormous peony bouquet your publisher flew in for you from Japan, just cause it’s Tuesday.
(Ummm. . . . I’m not sure if that’s my fantasy or Liz Lemon’s? But bear with me—)
Anyway: to those of us who have been in the trenches surrounding the publishing industry, we know how very, very far from reality this is. We know that book advances are shrinking, that substantive fiction has been sitting in drawers for years and years, that publishers don’t really want to sign you on unless you have a sizable blog following and email list and general, you know, “platform.”
Yet this fantasy persists—maybe deeply hidden in the hearts of those of us who are jaded and remember the days when people could occasionally get $250,000 for a first book of short stories.
The book advance is now a mainstream Cinderella tale. This fantasy is not limited to literary people or people who love to read—but we’ve still got it, in the “lottery” corner of our brain. But the book advance’s overtake of Lottery Corner is bigger than that—in fact it is so core to our culture right now that writing a book that happens to become a huge bestseller is actually in many cases the replacement for the “and I married Prince Charming” ending in chick lit.
And it is even more total bullshit now than it was back in the nineties when the spawn of Candace Bushnell started pushing this particular flavor of crack.
I honestly believe that this same common fantasy, with an after-market hifalutin sheen of literariness, is fueling most MFA writing programs. And there are dozens of these. And people often pay tens of thousands of dollars to go to these.
In most cases, MFA programs are big fat cash cows for universities. (Not where I went, btw, where everyone who gets in has their tuition covered equally. This is possibly the best financial decision I’ve made in my life.) The degree does not qualify you for any sort of actual employment whatsoever! And the classes themselves are generally kind of sucky, with a few amazing teachers thrown in here and there for good measure.
It’s not that people involved in MFA programs don’t care about the writing. About literature. About voice, truth, art. They do.
It’s just that there is not much of an honest discussion of how to fund the writing/literature/voice/truth/art.
Such a total removal from reality creates a giant thought vaccuum around money and survival, in which it is impossible for the book advance fantasy not to move on in and set up shop.
The book advance fantasy is pretty much to writers exactly the same thing as the Prince Charming fantasy is to women’s finances: a big fat lie that is the most likely thing to leave you totally broke as you are approaching retirement.
MFA programs are lodged in academia, which is so completely removed from the realities of the marketplace that not only do writing students not get training in how to blog, create a platform, or tailor their content to be marketable, but I think that in many places the reality that almost nothing substantive at all can get published anymore has not yet arrived by the carrier-pigeon system academic life seems to prefer.
Yet there are new MFA programs sprouting up every year. What is the deal?
I honestly think people are so passionate about their writing, and the process of writing a book is so one of the most amazing things you can do in life, that most people sort of dive in, get halfway through and realize how fucking hard the actual writing part is, have to finish in order to not want to kill themselves, then look up and realize five or seven or ten years have passed and publishing is worse than before and the likelihood of getting published is almost impossible and. . . THEN WHAT???
Then, you’re backed into the corner with the rest of us, baby, and it’s time to become an entrepreneur.
Because really you have no option: if you’ve become wired as an artist, you are not going to do so well in most corporate jobs. Or non-corporate jobs for that matter.
Your brain has been transformed by writing a book—your left brain and right brain become knitted together in a really amazing, sophisticated way that is probably only otherwise available by years of meditation or enrollment in a mystery school, and you now have no option, you have to do something interesting, useful, and risky with your time here on earth.
Even if the traditional publishing route did work for you at one point, the way things are now, you still have to think like an entrepreneur.
You have to move it, you have to hustle, you have to protect your time and find ways to earn that leave you enough meandering thinking creative time in order to write. And that is definitely an entrepreneurial endeavor.
There simply is no just quietly showing up for work from 9 to 5 and not having a big plan, not taking risks.
There is no survival as a writer without being very strategic, engaging your audience, incorporating technology to serve you instead of enslave you, creating your own day and priorities. There is simply no other way to do it anymore.
The great news, to me, is that what writers need to be looking at in facing all of this reality is how to create new modes of self-support.
This is not something to whine about. This is something to celebrate.
Yes MFA programs and the Prince Charming Book Advance Fantasy are totally separate from reality and can leave you high and dry. Fortunately, reality is pretty easy to find, once you start looking. These days, it lives. . . on the internet.
The number of online resources on how to run a microbusiness and start funding your life through selling your awesome talents is fortunately huge. This was not true in 2003 when I started my own writing school as my day job. I had to learn marketing from tacky pushy people and try to adjust it so it felt good for me and I felt super isolated and kind of crazy, stuck between these terrifying marketing people, my art, publishing, and too much email.
But now—there are oodles of amazing people making amazing amounts of money doing what they believe in, selling to their right people. You just start, just read the microbusiness blogs, Seth Godin, Hugh MacLeod, Ittybiz, whoever resonates with you, and eventually you find out how to do it.
Figure out what you have to give, figure out how people need it, figure out who your people are, start a website, start a list, and Go To Town.
The fact is, the economic solution you create to support your writing is almost certainly more important than your writing on its own.
Yes: your writing is important but changing the world to a more livable, less corporate hell hole is more important. You don’t do that in your writing: if writing could effect that kind of change, the Huffington Post would have fixed everything already, no?
The way you make the world, in your own little microcosm, more human and decent and livable and beautiful is to take charge of your money and your time. To figure out how to provide a service and to be valued for that. To have really great business relationships. To provide an example to other people that earning a living doing something you love is possible and wonderful. To tell the truth.
For 99% of writers, taking a leap into creating a life and income you love will have way more effect on the world than another book will.
How badly does the world really need another book? And then: how badly do you need a life with enough time, meaning, sustenance, peace, creativity, and money?
None of this requires a book deal. In fact, you get to this a lot faster without one. All of this stuff creates enormous change in the real world, in actually a lot less time than how long it takes to even just sell and actually publish a novel, never mind finish writing it and find an agent.
The old fantasies are lame, dead.
You don’t need to live in New York to be a writer. You need meandering time, rest, support, food for your right brain.
And little of that comes with Brooklyn rent, especially now that Wall Street husbands are so few and far between. . .
The bottom line?
To keep being creative, there is simply no way forward for any of us but to become responsible for our own time, our own business, our own marketing, our own vision. The only option for survival is to become an entrepreneur.
As hard as this sounds, I actually think it is a lot easier than writing a half-decent novel, which can easily drive you insane. There is a lot more company in being an entrepreneur. And a lot more money.
Becoming an entrepreneur is definitely more fun than sitting through two years of your average half-assed, treacherously pretentious MFA program, I’ll tell you that.
Plus, it is just so boring to try to maneuver yourself into being a Jonathan Franzen-style success story. It is delusionally boring.
Even Jonathan Franzen isn’t Jonathan Franzen anymore, if you know what I mean. The rock star writer is an anachronism. It is simply ridiculous to try get your self worth and daily momentum from contorting to a fantasy.
The challenges of reality, however, are quite sexy. Reality tells us that 1) the publishing industry is simply too weird and in transformation to support almost anyone anymore, and 2) you can now easily get your stuff out online for free.
The sexy question has therefore become not how to get your work out to the world, but HOW DO YOU GET PAID?
Creating economic structures that allow for creativity and humanity: this is where the edge is.
Avoiding it, denying it, as with any intense zeitgeist, means your art itself will suffer and is likely to actually end up boring as hell. So then where do you go? The internet, baby. Go to the internet, make better friends with marketing, Paypal, and WordPress and see what you can brew up.
The adventure is exhilarating.
