A writing life, interrupted

I returned to the writing world after decades away. Boy howdy have things changed.

This is a Rip Van Winkle story.

It begins with my agent on the phone, trying to temper her enthusiasm as she tells me how close we are to a deal for my first novel with a prestigious New York publisher. I’m pleased, but perhaps not as excited as she is since the book is not my only creative activity. I’m lining up a series of showings of my independent short films throughout North America and working on a new film/performance/installation piece supported by two grants. I’m curating an exhibition of California funk and pop art, I’m publishing writings on culture in a variety of periodicals, and I serve on a couple of non-profit boards. I’m teaching film history and production as a university adjunct, and I own a boutique marketing communications consultancy that supports my spiffy San Francisco lifestyle. I have a lot going on, all of it successful whether by generating income or raising my profile. So, I’m pleased about the prospect of a book deal, but perhaps not as excited as my agent is since she appreciates the significance in ways I cannot or will not, because I am young and arrogant. Because I assume it will always be like this. Yes, it is terrific that the editors are interested in my book, but I’m so used to things going my way and so accustomed to being seen as smart and talented and a horse to bet on that I find the book deal inevitable, not even the most meaningful development at the moment. I take all of it for granted, including — perhaps especially — my agent and my writing.

Then it all ends, suddenly, traumatically, irreparably. Perhaps this, too, is inevitable, given the arc of my story: the hurtling forward, the hubris, the inability to pause and step back and prioritize, my refusal to recognize dangers right in front of me. At first, I’m wrested away from my professional and creative activities, then decide to acquiesce and walk away from them, not looking back. The agent, the book deal, the essays, the exhibitions, the film work, everything is taken out to the dumpster in the back and tossed in among the other shattered fragments of a once-promising life. I close the dumpster lid with no plans to ever open it again.

Years go by.

I’m numb and angry. I drink too much and would be suicidal if I was more emotionally invested. I can’t maintain the tragic pose, however. I reinvent myself. I teach college for a while, but find the academic world frustrating, where there are no attractive returns on investments made in petty campus politics. I soon jump into the private sector and hold a series of leadership roles: at a telecommunication giant, at a few startups during the dot-com boom, at two of the top global business services firms. I make a lot more money than I would have as an academic, and while the cash doesn’t solve my problems it makes them easier to manage, to gloss over, to suppress.

I don’t have the stomach to create media art again. Early on I try to write a novel because it seems like something I should do even if I don’t want to, but it feels awkward and pointless, like attempting calligraphy wearing puffy snow mittens, all smeared ink and flop sweat. I shove personal storytelling into a box, another early passion wrecked, more of my life discarded.

Nonetheless I continue to publish the odd article on media or culture or business. I can’t help myself. I do it almost as a reminder that I can, not that anyone cares. I serve as associate editor of a communication journal, and in it I publish an essay describing a media production and distribution model later used by Netflix and Amazon Prime. For several years that piece is the journal’s most requested reprint. In this way I occasionally prove to myself that I’m not an idiot, that I can still put a few paragraphs together and make sense. This is meaningful only to me. Everyone else has long forgotten who and what I used to be, if they ever knew. I remain separate, observing. By most standards I live a very good life, but to me it feels like I have burrowed underground, hidden in a cave, despising both the light and company of others.

More time passes, the years become decades.

The realization that I want to write fiction again crawls up on my blind side. This is unexpected. I produce a new novel. Since I know how important it is to be a business partner as well as a creator, I set about learning the current book world. I exit my cave, blinking in the glare, looking out over the modern publishing landscape that I hope to re-engage. Boy howdy have things changed. I was in that cave longer than I thought.

Publishers have conflated into a few giant entities. There used to be so many houses! Now the few corporations are more invested than ever in tentpole authors. There’s no market reason publishing should be played as if it is a zero-sum game, yet that’s what looks to be happening. Publishers no longer know how to effectively market books, especially in the use of social media. This is deeply worrisome. All this talk about needing a huge social following before an editor will take you seriously; how can I collaborate with someone who doesn’t even understand what vanity metrics are?

Being an agent certainly seems like it is no longer the cool job it used to be. They all seem overworked and beleaguered, exhausted by the avalanche of queries. The last time I was here, in another era, my agent and I shared an acquaintance, we were introduced, she read my writing and liked it, and we were off in search of the right publisher, easy-peasy. Today writers on Twitter talk about how they got their agent in language more suited to winning the lottery or pulling off an art heist in the Vatican.

There seems to be a lot of trend-chasing, all over. I’m perplexed, since running after a bandwagon is bad business — the lifecycle of creation to acquisition to publication to reader connection is too long. Not that publishing was ever a meritocracy, and there was always an eye on the market. But if an agent, say, is posting on their MSWL something so specific that it sounds less like a book category and more like a marketing strategy it tells me something is seriously off. It feels desperate. It hits me on a personal level, too, since what most agent wish lists are looking for is not someone like me, writing what I write. I need to cope with this somehow.

MFAs in creative writing are everywhere, they crunch underfoot. Since some of my years away were spent in academia, I should have seen this coming, but it takes me by surprise. There’s been so much progress made since the last time I was here, with digital books making self-publishing viable, with the increase in writers, publishers, and reader communities of color, but the proliferation of degrees does not feel like progress. I witness people in conversation, in writing, on panels, wonder if it is possible to have a writing career without an MFA, and I wince. When advanced degrees are spoken of like this it sounds as if the industry has found a new elitist gatekeeping function.

So many barriers to entry now.

I’ve been attending conferences and sidestep any conversation about me or my writing, because I still haven’t figured out the elevator speech version. How to compress a lively, successful writing life and its subsequent three decades of exile into a couple of sentences without sounding either incoherent or pathetic? Silence doesn’t do me any favors, on the other hand, since at first glance I look like another schmo who retired from his corporate gig and imagines he can play at being a writer. I see the indulgent condescension in their eyes, and my pride is affronted. Perhaps I haven’t shed that hubris after all. They start to explain how the creative world works and I want to tell them this isn’t my first arts community, it isn’t even my second. I want to tell them I used to write nonfiction pieces that had impact: my articles prompted major artists to argue about me on the street, curators to accost me in underlit parking lots, museum administrators to fight with their boards. I want to tell them I have awards and exhibition posters from major institutions with my name on them framed on my wall at home. I want to tell them they weren’t even born when I earned my MFA.

But I don’t tell them any of that, of course, because they’re writers trying to make their way just like I am. I have no quarrel with them. It’s the business that has changed, not the writers. We’re all just doing our best, learning a little bit more each project, gaining confidence while we challenge ourselves. I have no quarrel with them, my quarrel is with time, and how its flow has caught me up and moved me along, with my full cooperation. I’m the one who left the party. I’m the one who strayed from the path, even if it was for my wellbeing.

I’m waist deep in the second novel. This one will be better, because lessons have been learned. This time, perhaps my age won’t be so severely held against me if I show how productive I am, that there’s more than one book in me. Perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter, not really, since I’m back at it, picking up where I left off, doing the work whether the business part turns out in my favor or not. “Just write every day of your life,” said Ray Bradbury. “Read intensely. Then see what happens.”