Slaying the Monster Narcopiteous.
Of all the strange and wonderful creatures the Forgotten Writer is likely to encounter on the Darling Plain, none is more fearsome, more sly and insideous, than the many tentacled serpent known as Narcopiteous, or in plain English, Self-pity. This ravenous beastie has destroyed more than one unwary Forgotten Writer who fell into its clutches, so I thought we’d devote a post, right at the start, designed to help newcomers to this realm recognize, combat, and slay the venomous villain.
Since he lurks in darkness and comes out only at night to attack his victim while it sleeps, you may never see one of these creatures face to face. But you will recognize him by the way his presence begins to warp and usurp your normal patterns of consciousness. If you find yourself drinking more and enjoying it less, avoiding bookstores and libraries, no longer drawn to literary journals, preferring instead vapid TV shows like "The Bachelor" and "Real Housewives of Bloom County," or cruising the web for alluring new forms of pornography; if you cringe at the mention of a young novelist who has been recently discovered by the literati, or you bristle at the thought of an older writer whose works are still widely admired (the cad!), you can be sure the serpent has you in its clutches. It’s only a matter of time until he subverts your intelligence and integrity to such an extent that you can no longer call yourself a writer at all, forgotten or otherwise. It is time to take drastic measures.
Step 1. Immediate sustenance required. Go to your own bookshelf and take down one of your own published novels, or a story in a magazine you were proud to publish in. Sit down in a nice comfortable chair and start reading. Allow yourself to enjoy the prose, relish the imagery, admire the sharply drawn characters and swiftly moving plot. Yes, you wrote these words. This was you at the top of your game, and weren’t you good at it? Like Dickens, you may wish to exclaim, "By God, what a writer I was then!" Of course you were. Did you think fools and amateurs ever succeed in this craft?
Step 2. Thus fortified, you move on to sterner measures. You go into your study, to the file cabinet, desk drawer, or wherever you have stored your unpublished manuscripts. Open the drawer and take one out. Make it one you once had high hopes for, though you know you didn’t spend as much time on it as you should have. Now sit down at your desk with a red pencil and start reading carefully, critically. Mark the stuff you don’t like. Cross out excess verbiage. My word, what a mess this piece is! How slowly it moves! How heavy and plodding the language! If, after five or ten pages, you can bear to go on reading, you must be seriously blind to your own failings. But sit back; reflect seriously; compare this garbage to the work you published. Is it any wonder your career had its ups and downs? Too much of this stuff and anyone would wind up forgotten.
Step 3. Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve already lopped off several of the worm’s tentacles, but there are more to be destroyed. We proceed to the general situation in which you find yourself today. First, financial. If you taught at a certified public or private institution, you surely must have taken part in a pension plan. Are you now receiving that pension? Is it adequate to your needs? Great, now reflect that the pension was based on your salary, which was in part determined by your merit raises, which in turn reflected your publications. See, you are still receiving royalties of a sort! You haven’t been forgotten after all.
Now regard your domestic situation. Are you married, or happily shacked up with someone you love, or at least like a whole lot? Does he/she love you because he/she thinks you’re a great writer? Man, you should be in seventh heaven! Do you have children? Are you in touch with them? Maybe grandchildren you see on occasion? Are in you in reasonably good health? Do you have a few hobbies you enjoy? Golf, fishing, knitting, cooking? With every good thing you can identify in your life you have severed another of the worm’s tentacles. You are draining it of its life’s blood. I think it’s time to celebrate with a drink, and by taking your significant other out for a good dinner. Maybe afterwards you’ll stroll through a bookstore (if you can find one these days) and take note of the new titles by writers you’ve never heard of before. Wouldn’t it be fun to read one of these books? Noble to buy it? After all, we who live by the arts should also cultivate the arts. Noblesse oblige!
Step 4It is now time to look back on your entire life and ask yourself what else in the world you would have wanted to do. You were certainly not cut out for medicine, the law, business, the military, or any of those technical or manual jobs. Machines hate you. Labor tires you easily. Sales strikes you as a particularly unhappy way to earn a living. Computers? Forget it! So you correctly chose your profession and, judging from Step 3 above, you did fairly well at it. So you’ve been temporarily forgotten–but perhaps this exile here on the Darkling Plain is only temporary. One successfully published book and you’ll be right back in the limelight, with folks paying top dollar for your out-of-print books. That’s right, my friend–one more good book!
Step 5. We are now nearly finished with our short course in monster slaying, but there is one more, supremely important thing you must do to make sure the serpent is dead and stays dead. You must go to your computer and GET TO WORK! Yes, that’s right, friends–there is nothing that can banish that old demon self-pity like a day spent writing something new. Or at least revising something old. As the words tumble onto the page, as the ideas form in your feverish brain, as you transmit these phantoms into the living, breathing essence of fiction, you will once again experience the joy, not to say the ecstasy, of the living writer. It won’t be long before he who was forgotten will be found and the Darkling Plain will be but a gloomy splotch in your rearview mirror. Trust me, I’ve driven through this place before.
If any of you know of similar monsters and have found effect ways of coping with them, please do let us know. This blog is meant to be an open forum, so send me your comments and ideas. You will surely get sick of reading my stuff before long. Until then, this is your friendly blog-master, Sinbad the Sailor, signing off.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
The Forgotten Writers' Blog
Gingerly I dip my toe into the vast sea of the internet. The sea is calm tonight, the water not too cold. I see tiny shell-things swirl up from between my toes. Near the bar, a school of flying fish go by, while out on the horizon a whale sends his kingly spout into the breeze. And what are those things closer in? Are they sharks' fins? Have I gone out too far? I can feel icy water now around my calves, in the crook of my knees . . . . can I make it back to shore--?
Of course I can. Here I am back on the sand, amid the stink of algae, dead fish, decaying marine life. I can walk along this beach, seeking others of my kind. Perhaps a mermaid or two will appear. Lift a conch shell to your ear and what do you hear but the sad song of the forgotten writer. "I grow old, I grow old, I shall my trousers . . . "
Let me tell you a story.
Once there was a young man who grew up wanting to become a writer. As a child, his parents read books to him every night, like The Little Engine that Could and Make Way for Ducklings. He "read" his own books, guessing the story-line from the vividly colored panels. He listened to his favorite programs on the radio: "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger." He learned continuity and dialogue from such programs, suspense, sound effects, the vast theater of the mind. At the age of four he dictated his first "novel" to his parents, who dutifully wrote it down and preserved it for posterity. A career was launched.
In school the boy learned the sterner pleasures of the written word and soon found his favorite medium. At home he now read books. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was his favorite; he read it start to finish three times. Older, he read westerns, science fiction, hard-boiled detective novels, all the time groping his way toward (ta-dah!) SERIOUS LITERATURE. In highschool he was allowed to read books like The Old Man and the Sea, The Grapes of Wrath, Crime and Punishment, The Catcher in the Rye. He knew now what kind of writer he wanted to be and figured it was just a matter of time before he became one.
In college he discovered the English major and through its required courses the dreaded dragon of the CANON. Promptly he began sawing off its limbs. Meanwhile, he took creative writing courses and received modest encouragement from his instructors. He wrote his stories on a typewriter and read them to his girlfriend, who thought they were wonderful. He resolved to marry the girl, who also kissed like gang-busters and had other endearing qualities. He began to think about graduate school. Life was good. The young man thought he had it all, or would soon achieve it. What could stop him?
Well, I'll stop him, because at this point I'm wondering how many writers out there--writers of "a certain age"--share a similar story. Many of us did go to graduate and took advanced degrees leading to teaching jobs in colleges and universities, where creative writing programs were just becoming a growth industry. We did publish our work in various magazines, large and small, and found publishers for our novels. We were able to hold our heads up in academia, feeling we had earned the right to call ourselves writers. And so we trained other young people who wished to become writers, never guessing we were sowing the seeds for the generations that would render us obsolete. We founded MFA programs and literary journals. We organized conferences and built organizations. We were surfing the tide, riding the wave, and then . . .
We woke up one morning to discoved the tide had gone out and we were stranded on the shore. We could no longer find publishers for our work. Agents weren't interested. The literary journals were edited by young writers who didn't dig our prose, our irony, our whole approach to the art of fiction. The publishing world was changing, we heard. The old houses were crumbling, and in their place rose the terrible fortresses of the conglomerate. There was something in the wind called the Internet, the e-book. What could this portend but doom?
If you fit this profile, this blog is for you. Even if you don't, you're welcome to come in, look around, and collect what pearls of wisdom you can find in the shells scattered along the shore. You're also invited to submit pearls of your own discovery. But first, a few important rules:
1. Having read a post, please leave a brief (or if you wish lengthy) comment. I will review all comments and figure out some way to feature them on the blog itself (I'm pretty new at this, you see.)
2. If you have a longer offering you'd like to post, please send me an email with the text pasted within it (no attachments). You'll find the email address in my profile, but make sure you specify in the subject line that your message concerns the blog, otherwise I'm likely to delete it as spam. This blog will not venture into politics, religion, sex, or other really important matters, except as they happen to bear on our major concern--the problems and resources of the Forgotten Writer.
3. Since I am now revising my next neglected novel and cramming all the writing I can into what remains of my life, I make no promises about how often this blog will appear. It will appear when it appears--watch this space.
I will await your submissions while I scout the beach for mermaids.
Yours,
Tom (Sinbad the Sailor) Bontly
Of course I can. Here I am back on the sand, amid the stink of algae, dead fish, decaying marine life. I can walk along this beach, seeking others of my kind. Perhaps a mermaid or two will appear. Lift a conch shell to your ear and what do you hear but the sad song of the forgotten writer. "I grow old, I grow old, I shall my trousers . . . "
Let me tell you a story.
Once there was a young man who grew up wanting to become a writer. As a child, his parents read books to him every night, like The Little Engine that Could and Make Way for Ducklings. He "read" his own books, guessing the story-line from the vividly colored panels. He listened to his favorite programs on the radio: "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger." He learned continuity and dialogue from such programs, suspense, sound effects, the vast theater of the mind. At the age of four he dictated his first "novel" to his parents, who dutifully wrote it down and preserved it for posterity. A career was launched.
In school the boy learned the sterner pleasures of the written word and soon found his favorite medium. At home he now read books. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was his favorite; he read it start to finish three times. Older, he read westerns, science fiction, hard-boiled detective novels, all the time groping his way toward (ta-dah!) SERIOUS LITERATURE. In highschool he was allowed to read books like The Old Man and the Sea, The Grapes of Wrath, Crime and Punishment, The Catcher in the Rye. He knew now what kind of writer he wanted to be and figured it was just a matter of time before he became one.
In college he discovered the English major and through its required courses the dreaded dragon of the CANON. Promptly he began sawing off its limbs. Meanwhile, he took creative writing courses and received modest encouragement from his instructors. He wrote his stories on a typewriter and read them to his girlfriend, who thought they were wonderful. He resolved to marry the girl, who also kissed like gang-busters and had other endearing qualities. He began to think about graduate school. Life was good. The young man thought he had it all, or would soon achieve it. What could stop him?
Well, I'll stop him, because at this point I'm wondering how many writers out there--writers of "a certain age"--share a similar story. Many of us did go to graduate and took advanced degrees leading to teaching jobs in colleges and universities, where creative writing programs were just becoming a growth industry. We did publish our work in various magazines, large and small, and found publishers for our novels. We were able to hold our heads up in academia, feeling we had earned the right to call ourselves writers. And so we trained other young people who wished to become writers, never guessing we were sowing the seeds for the generations that would render us obsolete. We founded MFA programs and literary journals. We organized conferences and built organizations. We were surfing the tide, riding the wave, and then . . .
We woke up one morning to discoved the tide had gone out and we were stranded on the shore. We could no longer find publishers for our work. Agents weren't interested. The literary journals were edited by young writers who didn't dig our prose, our irony, our whole approach to the art of fiction. The publishing world was changing, we heard. The old houses were crumbling, and in their place rose the terrible fortresses of the conglomerate. There was something in the wind called the Internet, the e-book. What could this portend but doom?
If you fit this profile, this blog is for you. Even if you don't, you're welcome to come in, look around, and collect what pearls of wisdom you can find in the shells scattered along the shore. You're also invited to submit pearls of your own discovery. But first, a few important rules:
1. Having read a post, please leave a brief (or if you wish lengthy) comment. I will review all comments and figure out some way to feature them on the blog itself (I'm pretty new at this, you see.)
2. If you have a longer offering you'd like to post, please send me an email with the text pasted within it (no attachments). You'll find the email address in my profile, but make sure you specify in the subject line that your message concerns the blog, otherwise I'm likely to delete it as spam. This blog will not venture into politics, religion, sex, or other really important matters, except as they happen to bear on our major concern--the problems and resources of the Forgotten Writer.
3. Since I am now revising my next neglected novel and cramming all the writing I can into what remains of my life, I make no promises about how often this blog will appear. It will appear when it appears--watch this space.
I will await your submissions while I scout the beach for mermaids.
Yours,
Tom (Sinbad the Sailor) Bontly
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