Negotiating with the Dead - Part Four

Dear Margaret Atwood,

Today we're talking about money and the God of Art, so I've brought you to a jewelry store.  It's supposed to represent both since someone has to design the pieces while someone else has to sell them.  Jewelry also has a 200% markup and that's something we can never enjoy as authors, so we're drooling a little bit.

The Great God Pen

I loved this chapter.  I have loved all the chapters.  So, the question is whether or not we write for money or for the art of it.  

I started writing novels at thirteen and I knew that writing was going to play a major role in my life because I was good at precious little else.  It did feel like the God of Art chose me and sometimes I've felt like that was quite cruel of him.  The thing that they never tell you is that there is no satisfying conclusion to your art.  There's no end.  If you've finished writing your novel, there's a bug in your ear whispering that you should start another.  If you failed, you have to try again.  If you won, you have to win again.  Go. Go. Go.  Forever.  

At a tender age, I knew that I was not going to be able to write for a job in my adulthood.  My cousin was a journalist and a photographer.  Sometimes, she took her younger sister and me out on assignments.  It wasn't terrible as far as work goes, but neither was it the high I experienced when I wrote a novel.  That was a good time, even if I ended up with a bad novel.

I also knew I wasn't going to be able to make any money as a novelist.  The only person I had ever met who had written a book and had it published was another cousin of mine who published one YA book and I couldn't see how the royalties from that could pay the water bill.  After all, there was only one copy in the school library and everyone read that one copy.

Yet, I was bit by this hellish bug.  

I already knew all about what poverty was like.  I had an accountant in my brain pushing numbers into a calculator and shaking her head.  "You can't be a novelist," she'd say, "the numbers don't add up."

She was quite right.  Most people don't know how the $20 they spend for a book is divided, how little the author gets, and how quickly that tiny stash of money is swallowed by expenses that don't feed the author or pay their rent.  They are expenses that exist just to give the author the opportunity to keep on writing.

My inner accountant screams a lot.  Yet, I've already done so much to placate her.  

When I left home, I did not go to university.  University had a different price tag attached to it for me than it would have had for you, Margaret.  The university education would have put a burden of writer's debt around my neck that I might never have been able to pay off.  Instead of that, I went to college and then got jobs working in offices in universities.  So, I worked and wrote at the same time.  

I have to say that is not an ideal situation for a novelist.  Maybe it would work for someone who wrote something smaller, but a novel requires great hunks of open brain to formulate.  Typing all day at work only to return home to type some more left crinks in my fingers and shards of steel in my back.  

My inner accountant was happy during this time because instead of using my spare cash to pay off a student loan, I was putting money aside for when my writing was better.  By this point, I had begun publishing my books online and it was quite clear from reader feedback that I had a long way to go.

I did not marry money, but I had my eyes out for the right sort of man to marry.  I was very much aware that marrying the wrong person could ruin my artist life and thus, make me wish I was dead.  So, the man I was going to marry needed to be the sort of man who was understanding toward writing, thought that books were worthwhile creations, and enjoyed books himself.  If I was really lucky, he would also be the sort of man who could make enough money that he wouldn't share the same views as my inner accountant about how my art needed to be profitable.

I became a good enough writer to be published by the time I was 25.  However, getting published was a completely different matter than I had been led to believe and the situation has only gotten worse since then.  I was a good enough writer, but I was also throwing up into an empty ice cream bucket and breastfeeding, so I didn't get a book published with a publishing company until I was 29.  

It was then that I made a startling discovery.  I knew much more about publishing than I thought I did.  In the years that I worked and squirreled money away, I had learned heaps about graphic design, publishing, PR, and advertising.  The publishing contract I'd been able to land was with an honest publishing company, so there was that, but they weren't going to be able to give me a launch as fancy as one I could give myself.  Not only that, but I knew authors who wrote well, landed contracts with publishing companies (after dozens of attempts), and still lost money.  

I didn't lose money, but I fell out of love with the idea of getting a publishing company.  It didn't make sense to send my books off to publishing companies where they would sit waiting for someone to decide whether or not my book could make money for them.  My books were intended to be casual reading, but they were not pornographic or titillating, and that felt like the only type of thing that made money.  

I put the whole thing on pause.

For a season of my life, I was quite busy, caring for others, caring for myself, and holding back floods. I only wrote one book in six years.  That was unprecedented for me.  I had written 19 novels in 17 years.  When the storm stopped, I was quietly cleaning up the water and wondering what I ought to do with the rest of my life.

I didn't want to go back to writing novels, even though the money was lined up better than it had ever been before.  By this point, I knew there was no happy ending to being a writer.  I'm an inventive person and I had a crafting business, so I thought maybe I'd do that.  I decided, most seriously, that when I crossed the threshold out of my bathroom, I'd stop being a writer.  I'd put all that away and focus on crafting.  But the God of Art stopped me before I could take that final step.  He stood behind me and told me that I had to continue writing.  I had been chosen to write.

I cried.

The unseen God of Art explained things and pointed me in the right direction.  What was most notable about the experience in retrospect was that the elusive God never once said that I'd make money.  I've been working as an independent author for several years now and I still haven't spent all the coin I set aside when I was a young warthog taking money from a university instead of giving them any. 

My inner accountant is still unhappy.  I made more money last year from my writing than I ever did before, but she's squawking, angry I lost that sweet contract.  She doesn't want me to whore myself off.  I'll tell you what she really wants.  She wants my balance sheet to show that I didn't spend money, but I made money.  She wants me to pull money out of thin air.  Not even successful publishing campaigns do that.  No one does that, but it's what she wants.

I need her to shut up.  It has never occurred to me that my inner accountant should be silenced, but I see now that would probably offer me greater peace and strength than anything else.  

You don't mention an inner accountant in your chapter.  You say that you need to write to the market if you want to make money, but you don't talk much about what compromises you made, or if you didn't have to make any at all.  Instead, you dedicate the majority of the chapter discussing how terrible it is to serve the God of Art, who doesn't care if you're fed.  I'd like to say that the inner accountant doesn't care if you're satisfied with your art, as long as the numbers look right.  Now, I'd like to say something rude about both the inner accountant and the God of Art since they both seem heartless, but I can't afford to offend the God of Art.  I still have to finish my trilogy.

Thank you, Margaret.  I feel refreshed.  Can I offer you one of the free pamphlets advertising diamonds that they have on the counter of the jewelry store?  They're free!

With a sparkle in my eye that I hope is as charming as a diamond,

Stephanie Van Orman 

Novelist

Negotiating with the Dead - Part Three

Dear Margaret Atwood,

Today as we talk about our unseen selves and the monsters we hide within, we're in a costume store.  It's not like one of those tacky places where both of us would be concerned about contracting an illness placing unfamiliar masks over our faces.  Everything around us is glittery and clean.  We're Canadian girls in our hearts, so we like the fox's pointed faces and the deer horns.  We wonder which one of the masks suits us best as we go from being virginal princesses to devils with a wave of our hands.  I settle on a raccoon face because I have always thought of a raccoon as my spirit animal.  In creating my art, I have always sorted through trash with my hands and broken crabs on the rocks.  I feel a raccoon suits me best with black and white fur outlining my eyes.  You look at everything and decide on nothing.  As a polished author, you've turned yourself into so many things, choosing one when we've no place to wear our costumes seems unnecessary.  You wear all of them at least once.

The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double

It's very interesting to me that you didn't capitalize any of that.  Once a poet.  Always a poet.

I found your observations on this subject most intriguing because I have never thought of the version of myself that writes as something different from the part of me who cleans the toilet.  Sometimes my characters clean toilets.  They come along with me and I go along with them.  They're not real.  I'm imagining them.  I'm alone.  I'm talking to myself and I hear myself.  Sometimes I think I sound stupid.  Sometimes I think I sound mean.  I am the self observing myself, but I can't make my left hand do something my right hand hasn't already done.

However, after I considered duplicity in regards to writing, I discovered a few different ways that it applies to me.  I am curious about what you might think of them.  Are they the same thing as what you describe or something completely different?

Here's one way.  When I write the first draft of my book, I am the creator--the writer.  I don't often keep track of how many drafts I've done, or if I do so, it is only in the broadest way.  I often do extra that I don't keep track of, going through the novel with the intent to correct one particular aspect.  I go and go and go and then I stamp FINAL DRAFT on it.  I'm satisfied with the story.  It's going out like that.

I send it to the editor.

Except, I'm the editor.  There is no point in sending it to a professional editor before I've edited it myself.  I'll edit it five times and by then, there's very little work for an editor to improve upon that has much importance.  I've already cut 10,000 words and trimmed all the fat.

When I become the editor, I can't believe the crap my writer self thought was brilliant.  I'm stunned as I slash sentences, whole paragraphs, and sometimes, whole chapters.   I look at excerpts with a crook in my eyebrow.  Did I really write that?  I make notes for what is missing.  Sometimes my editor self can fill in the missing parts.  Sometimes she can't.  She has to wait for the writer to wake up.

I've always thought this was the difference between my right and left brain.  That one half of me is a novelist with a beautiful word resting like a caramel on her tongue, and the other half of me is a stodgy accountant with a runny nose and bad news.

The other way I show duplicity is that I am supplying the dialogue for our sweet princess, but I am also supplying the dialogue for the wicked witch.  This means that though I look like a perfectly ordinary person on the outside, I am capable of saying something that is so awful that if an onlooker were watching and I delivered my line and was thereafter immediately slapped, the onlooker would nod and say, "That's fair."  Heaven help the person who provokes me to say the worst thing I can think of, cause it is bad, and it's personalized, so it's extra bad.

Actually, I haven't had cause to say something like that out loud in so long most people would scarcely believe that a monster of that strength and foulness exists under my pale skin

Naturally, this runs me into your next chapter, so I'll save the introduction to the half of me that is an accountant for the next entry.

I think the mermaid mask looks best on you.

With love,

Stephanie Van Orman

Novelist

Negotiating with the Dead - Part Two

Dear Margaret Atwood,

I used to visit my grandmother at one o'clock in the morning.  When I would visit the area when my children were infants, I wouldn't have much time, so instead of sleeping the night before I left, I would go to her house and chat with her until three.  She didn't mind.  She said she didn't sleep.  Visiting with her in those quiet hours has become one of my most precious memories.   Instead of having a little tea party like I did in my last post, this time, I'm visiting you at one o'clock in the morning.  I haven't decided yet if we're still wearing our makeup or if our faces are very clean.  I guess it depends on how much I want to hide who I really am.

Who do you think you are?  What is a writer and how did you become one?

I was a particularly talentless child.  All I wanted was to play pretend.  I grew up in a poverty-stricken household in rural Alberta and though I had a few toys, I preferred my imagination.  When I began to read, I found the exercise to be unbearable.  Why were all the books so boring?  It was like the author of every single story had found the most mundane way to approach their subject matter and we were all supposed to go along with it because those were the books that had been 'chosen'.  If I had to read a book about solving the mystery of who left the cookie crumbs in the sink or go babysitting within the pages of a book, I'd drop the book.  That was as a preteen, but even as a tiny child bouncing on my mother's knee, I wanted to rewrite the story, fix their outdated wording, simplify their meaning, and write about something interesting.  That was on the inside.  On the outside, the only talent others recognized was that I had an unusually large vocabulary for a child.

I finally gave myself permission to read books intended for an adult audience when I was 13 and I was surprised by those books.  The words used to make them were more interesting than the YA books I had access to, but they were awfully wordy for seemingly no reason.  I wanted to rip up their paragraphs and turn them into single sentences that accomplished as much.  What I learned from those books was that authors were morons.  Clearly, any idiot with a pen could write.  So, I started writing my first book at age thirteen.

I finished it.

I read it, recognized it was crap, forgave myself, and began a new novel with an emphasis on the parts that I particularly failed at in the last book.

I did this over and over again.

It has been almost thirty years and I still do this.  

Sadly, I do not think that being an author is a miraculous thing.  You make a book the same way you make anything else.  You twist your yarn around your knitting needles.  You fling a few words on a page and they add up like the thousands of stitches needed to construct a sweater.  I don't think being a writer makes me high-minded or more worthy of praise or love than the person who knits the sweater.  

When people attach academic prowess to the construction of a novel, I think they misunderstand the assignment.  The goal as a novelist is to get the reader to finish reading your novel.  If they drop the book, you've lost.  Thus, the main goal is to be interesting and you have a collection of tools to accomplish that.  One of those tools is your juicy brain, but that isn't your only tool.  You have every part of your unseen self - things no one would ever imagine about you: your feelings, dreams, memories, pain, and anything else that happens inside you that the casual observer cannot see.  That is the purpose of writing anything... to part the curtain of your skin and allow someone in.

How far in is a different question.

When I think of my ideal reader, I think of a woman who has just received some unpleasant news in a hospital.   Whether she has to stay in the hospital because she needs treatment herself or she needs to be there to support someone close to her, it doesn't matter.  She can't leave.  Even if she's not receiving treatment, she's somewhere unfamiliar and the next few hours will be difficult.  It's not going to help to stress over what she's just learned.  There is nothing she can do, except stay in the hospital and wait for the test results.  She opens a copy of one of my books and begins to read.  The story takes over.  It's different from what she usually reads, so it keeps her guessing and the hours fly by as her eyes race across my words.  When she has finished the novel, all is well.  The book has not taken an emotional toll on her.  It has been surprising but like a grown-up version of a pop-up book.  It has not unsettled her already unsettled mind.  It has made her wonder and given her a pleasant way to pass the time when she needed it most.

Though I was not personally in the hospital, I was there for her in an out-of-body way like the ghost of a storyteller that can be revived with the cracking of a spine... or a click on a phone.  Whichever you prefer.

However, this is where it gets tricky.

I have been the woman in the hospital, waiting, sick myself, trying not to think of the frozen veins the IV is giving me.  I'm going to be that woman again.  When it happens, it may last the rest of my life, and I think and wonder what I'll need to pack for myself when I go on the trip that I can't return from.  It's not death.  Death would be awesome.  No, it's a kind of mind madness that can last so many years, it can turn into decades.  I know exactly what I'll want.  I'll want some fine reading material and only I can make it.  Even when I can no longer read, I'll still want to hold the cover.  

Next time I'll talk about which one of me does the living and which one of me does the writing.

With love,

Stephanie Van Orman

Novelist

P.S. I no longer think novelists are morons.  I think I was reading the wrong books.   

Negotiating with the Dead - Part One

Dear Margaret Atwood,

I have begun reading your book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.   I am far too shy to write to you or trouble you with the wonderings of my mind.  I doubt you reading this would add anything to your day, but as I read I find that I very much want to reply to you like we were having tea and having a conversation.  You say to me the words that you have written in the book and I reply in a way that is so quiet, you can't hear me and I can't interrupt you.  I doubt my reflection on your thoughts would add anything to your great vault of knowledge and experience, but I'd like to dissect them more carefully.  

Into the Labrinth

Who are you writing for?   Why do you do it?  Where does it come from?

I'm taking from your list of why people write and commenting on the ones that apply to me.  

1. Because I knew I had to keep writing or else I would die.

I feel this all the time.  I am working on a trilogy right now and I am writing all three volumes at the same time.  I wonder why I'm writing it.  No one cares whether I write it or not.  I have done very little to raise any hype for it.  Reader hype for my books stresses me out.  Promising the reader a good time makes me think of a hooker who promises vague sexual favors saying her customer will be 'satisfied', but how does she know what will satisfy him?  And how will an unsatisfied customer react when his anticipation was not rewarded?  But that is another issue.  What does matter is that I must write my trilogy and I don't exactly know why.  

2. To delight and instruct.

If I was serious about delighting my reader, I probably wouldn't write what I do.  My readers often have tiny complaints that my books are not heartfelt enough or sexy enough.  I recently lost a valuable book contract and all signs point to the fact that I am not sexy enough as the reason why.  As for instructing my reader... I want to show my reader what a healthy romantic relationship looks like.  I find a lot of romance novels model poor relationships and I'd like to correct that.  It doesn't make me popular when everyone these days wants to be owned with a contract, whipped six times, controlled, sexually abused until they like it, and more.  I cry at the absurd contradiction of entertaining someone and informing them.  Only a select few are entertained by information.   

3. To please myself.

This is the one comfort that no one can take from me and it was very hard to earn.  I think a lot of writers quit because they have an idea of what they want their story to feel like.  They write and during the process they feel like they're on fire.  Time passes and they read what they wrote and they see it for what it is - a first attempt.   They hate that.  They want to be an excellent writer already.  They feel like an excellent writer inside themselves.  They are very entertained by their own thoughts.  Why doesn't that come across in their writing?  It's terrible to have to explain to someone that I didn't enjoy reading my own work until my twelfth book.  They hate the idea of writing eleven books that don't satisfy them.  Yeah, well, I hate listening to them whine about how they don't want to work.

4. To spin a fascinating tale.

As a child, I was always impressed by how predictable everything around me was.  When I write, I want to take the reader down a different avenue.  When I get praised for my writing, this is almost always what I am praised for.    

5. Compulsive logorrhea.

If you sat me down, blindfolded me, and told me that I was allowed to talk about whatever I wanted to for as long as I wanted...  I would never shut up.  Under normal circumstances, I am not really allowed to talk.  I use a remarkable amount of restraint so I can compliment others by hearing what they have to say.  I was practically taught that it is wrong to talk. I had to have an outlet, or I'd die, so I write.

See?  Wasn't that informative?  Didn't it make a pretty circle?

Most of the other reasons you listed why people write were far loftier than mine.  Out of dozens of political, religious, psychological, and academic reasons, I probably chose the five humblest... aside from revenge.  I would actually love to take revenge on someone by writing (how elegant), but who and for what?  Most of the people I'd like revenge on are dead.  That happened to me at a surprisingly early age.

One of the reasons that surprised me was writing to earn the love of a particular person or anyone in general.  If I wanted to earn the love of a particular person with my writing, I'd write them a love letter. I'm quite good at writing those.  Their reaction would make it clear whether they could love me or not.  If not, it was not the fault of the letter, but my fault... because something inside me didn't fit with something inside them.  And if I wanted to earn the love of the world at large, I wouldn't have lost that sweet contract.  

When I think of myself and the author inside me, I do not think that I am important in the grand scheme of most people's lives or humanity at large.  I'm going to live and die like a little dandilion growing by the side of the road.  And when I am gone, I want no grave to mark where I am, because book covers work just fine for gravestones.  At least, they have better art.  Don't you think?

I feel as though that answers the first two questions of: Who are you writing for?   Why do you do it?  Now I must answer the last question: Where does it come from?

In your book, you describe people working it out in the darkness, fumbling in the dark, wrestling invisible angels, until everything becomes clear, the author is the victor.  You stressed firmly that the strongest commonality between different writer's processes was the darkness--twilight.  I agree most wholeheartedly.

When I write, I imagine that I am standing in twilight and there is a star above me.  It is high above my head, but it is possible to reach it.  I start by placing a brick on the ground.  The brick is my premise and it is connected to my star by cords that cannot be seen.  When I go to write the next chapter after my premise is established, that chapter is the next brick.  I cannot place the second brick just anywhere willy nilly.  I have to place it on top of the brick I've already set down.  The contents of the second brick are always the same thing... they are the most interesting thing I can think of after the premise.  I cannot do anything that would send me in a different direction then the way that would lead me to my star.  I go on like this until I reach the climax, the conclusion, and at last, I land with my feet square on the surface of my star.  I am quite good at wrapping up stories because what needs to be done is so clear in my mind.

In my next blog post, we'll talk about how I began a writer.

With sincere appreciation, 

Stephanie Van Orman

Novelist