Last weekend I saw this sign on Brian Beattie’s recording studio door pointing the way to Valerie Fowler’s art studio. (Brian told me the musicians he works with find it pleasantly encouraging.) Almost too perfect, considering I’m working on illustrations for the book inspired by my talk, “How To Keep Going.”
“I’ve never had an overall strategy or a plan, you know? I’ve just always wanted to show off.”
—Leonard Cohen
On this day, 10 years ago, I was offered my first book deal. Sometimes I think that all anniversaries are arbitrary and to even acknowledge them is to waste time that could be spent moving forward, and sometimes I think if you don’t stop and look back once in a while, you can never understand how far you’ve come.
Three (simple) thoughts on a decade of publishing:
“What I wish I could have told myself when I was hopeless about my writing prospects is that I should have defined artistic success in ways that weren’t shaped by forces beyond my control… Writing and publishing are two very different things… The only thing you can control is how you write and how hard you work.”
—Roxane Gay
Writing can save your life. Writing, at its best, is a way of thinking. You put words down on a page to discover who you are and what you think. Writing is an ancient practice that helps you make sense of yourself and the world.
Publishing is simply the act of making your words public. If you nail a list of demands to the courthouse door, or photocopy a zine and leave copies all over your town, or click “publish” on a blog post, congratulations, you’ve published something.
The publishing business is just that: a business. It is the business of selling books. There’s a whole world of writing and reading that goes on outside of it, and it is possible to spend a full and fulfilling life immersed in books without having a single thing to do with the business.
The publishing business, like all businesses, can be summed up in the words of William Munny, life coach: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” People “succeed” in publishing based on whether their books sell, and whether their books sell really has nothing to do with their character or their intellect or whether the actual book is any good or not.
I was extremely lucky to take a “Publishing Marketplace” class from my writing mentor in my senior year of college. Afterwards I joked that if he taught it to freshman, there wouldn’t be any more creative writing majors.
Everyone who wants to be part of the book business should either work in a bookstore or a library at some point. My first real job out of college was working the reference desk at a public library. A good portion of the day was spent tracking down Danielle Steele and James Patterson novels for elderly patrons. I also spent a lot of time “weeding” — scanning books, checking their circulation records, and, if they hadn’t been checked out enough, putting them in a pile for the book sale (or the recycle bin). Comparing the circulation counts of the kind of books I read and wanted to write vs. the books that people actually borrowed and read was an invaluable part of my education.
“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”
—Jay-Z
My agent has at least 3 things he tells aspiring (nonfiction) authors:
All of this can be boiled down to: Run your own show.
You’re in charge of your own show, always. Whether you self-publish or publish with a major company, you are the one who has to do most of the work. You’re the one who has to actually make up the stuff, you’re the one who has to build your audience person by person, you’re the one who has to go out there and sell the work.
Two of my favorite authors are both self-publishers, and they exist on virtually opposite ends of the commercial spectrum.
On the one, extremely lucrative end is Edward Tufte. In 1983, after Harvard University Press wouldn’t let him have a hand in the design, he took out a second mortgage on his house to self-publish The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This led to a stunning second career after retiring from 30 years of teaching at Yale. Tufte has grossed millions of dollars from his books, and every year, he goes on the road like the Grateful Dead, selling out hotel ballrooms in cities around the country, giving his lectures. He’s stayed independent and in control throughout. The amount business he’s done out of his garage is just mind-boggling.
One the other end of the commercial spectrum is cartoonist John Porcellino, who’s been publishing his zine King-Cat for the past 30 years. John has published collections with Drawn & Quarterly, but his constant output is the zine. (He also started Spit and a Half to distribute zines and books by other creators.) Some of Porcellino’s stories have documented his struggles to make a living over the years. Recently, he’s started a Patreon, which he says has allowed him to save for the first time in his career.
Both these guys, even though they exist on opposite sides of the commercial spectrum, are about as DIY as publishing gets. I think everyone in publishing can learn something from them.
After my third book, Show Your Work!, came out in 2014, it became clear that I could probably keep eking out a living at writing for at least a few more years. But what if I couldn’t keep it up? What if I wanted to go back and get a day job and some health insurance? I took a hard look at what I was doing, and tried to lay out for myself what my show consisted of. What did I own that I could pour my efforts into that I could keep independent indefinitely? What could I do, every day, to run my show, regardless of whether I kept publishing books or not?
For me, it has always been this website and blog. (This is why I’ve been daily blogging again since October 1 last year.) My newsletter, the primary way I keep in touch with my readers, is really, in my mind, an outgrowth of this blog. It’s pretty much done the same way I started blogging in 2005: writing about what I’m thinking, pointing to stuff I love.
Every writer who wants to publish should try to think about this: What can you set up right now that is your own show that you can keep running no matter what happens?
“I had never had any desire to be a writer. I wanted to be a reader.”
—Adam Phillips
I actually kind of hate writing books. I often tell people I became a professional writer so I could be a professional reader, and I feel like they never believe me. What I really, really love is reading books.
Everything I do has its origins in being a fan first. I was such a fan that I desperately wanted to join in the fun, you know?
I learned how to write my stuff by being real about what I loved to read. When I got out of college, I started reading the literary magazines I thought I could try to get published in, and I quickly realized that I actually sort of hated them. Why would I try to write and submit work to magazines I didn’t even like reading? (What I really loved at the time was reading comics and design books and nonfiction books.) Also, the internet seemed much more interesting to me than any literary magazine I came across. So I started a blog.
I learned how to give a talk by attending a lot of readings and talks and drawing the speakers. Some of those speakers became friends of mine because I drew them and they then helped me along.
I learned how to draw my books by drawing other people’s books.
In my work, problems of output are problems of input. If my work sucks, it’s usually because I’m not being a good enough fan. I need to read, and read voraciously, searching for that thing that’s going to get me back on track. Read books, write books, repeat. That’s the deal.
I remember sitting in the audience during readings and wanting so badly to be the person on stage. Now I find myself relishing any chance I get to be a fan again. I love pointing to people’s work and sharing the stuff that I love. I love linking to great books in my newsletter. I love sending my agent links to good writers looking for an agent. One of my far-out dreams is to have my own little publishing imprint.
All of my favorite artists and writers, they never stopped paying attention to what was going on around them. They always remained fans first.
That’s who I want to be: Someone who’s always a fan. Always a student.
Like I say in Steal Like An Artist: All fiction is, essentially, fan fiction. Great books are written by great readers. Read the books you want to read, and if the book you want to read doesn’t exist, write it.
That’s all I know. Thanks, as always, for reading.
A few days ago I suggested “What do you want to learn?” as a replacement for the question, “What’s next?”
One response I saw could be summarized as: “Ok, fine, but if what you want to learn isn’t tied in to your career somehow — if your boss doesn’t see value in it or if you can’t squeeze value out of it for your customers — it’s not professional development, it’s a hobby.”
Sometimes I don’t even know where to begin.
First off, I’m trying to imagine Thoreau or Leonardo limiting their interests to “professional development.”
Second, I am so tired of hearing “hobbyist” and “amateur” thrown around as pejorative terms. It’s such a lame, macho move. God forbid we ever do anything for pleasure or love.
On top of that, there’s a long history of amateurs making huge contributions to their fields of interest. A recent American Masters, for example, tells the story of how bombshell actress Hedy Lamarr helped develop a crucial technology for wi-fi and GPS. (I write more about the amateur spirit in Show Your Work!)
As for the importance of hobbies, it’s well known how many great thinkers practiced an art or a craft or some kind of tinkering outside of their profession. Take Hedy Lamarr, again, as an example: She kept a little lab on set during filming, and her fascination with how remote controls worked made her think that maybe you could control torpedoes the same way.
Setting aside the importance of hobbies and the amateur spirit, what worries me the most is this faulty idea that you should only spend time learning about things if they have a definite “ROI.” Creative people are curious people, and part of being a creative person is allowing yourself the freedom to let your curiosity lead you down strange, divergent paths. You just cannot predict how what you learn will end up “paying off” later. Who’s to say what is and what isn’t professional development? (An audited calligraphy class winds up changing the design of computers. Etc.)
This is the trouble we often have with schools, of course: When education is seen as an investment, we decide what students should be spending time on based on what is shown (or believed, rather) to have a return on investment in the marketplace.
As Milton Glaser says, sometimes personal development and professional development are at odds. What’s good for business is not always (not often?) good for your soul. There’s always a balance between making a living and making a life.
The lives of great thinkers teach us that learning is the verb of life. The trick to lifelong learning is to exercise your curiosity as much as you can and to let it guide you where it wants to go. To pay attention to what you pay attention to. To not worry too much about where things are going to lead. To learn for learning’s sake, not because it’s going to get you something, necessarily, but because you have faith that the things that interest you will help you become who you need to be.
Your interest and your desire and your instincts are your compass. They show you the way.
It’s a hard thing to internalize, but once you do, it’s one of the most powerful things. It sets you free.
A group of graphic design students at Serra i Abella in Barcelona, Spain made this video inspired by the 10 points in the Spanish edition of Steal Like An Artist. Bueno!
The U.S. birth rate sank to a 30-year low in 2017 (gee, I wonder why?) and the supposed clash between parenting and creativity is a hot topic in publishing. In the past half decade, we’ve seen a whole batch of mothering/art books, many of them quite wonderful, including Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write, Jenny Offill’s Dept. Of Speculation, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. A few years ago Meghan Daum published a collection of writers on their decision not to have kids, called Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed. This year there’s Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. (These are just the books I can name off the top of my head.)
Earlier this year, I was sitting in a theater next to someone who works in publishing (a rare event for me, believe it or not) and he said, “Yeah, you know, there’s a ton of books about art and motherhood, but not a lot new out on art and fatherhood.”
Right on time, here comes Michael Chabon’s Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve really liked Chabon’s previous writing on fatherhood, including the great essay “William and I,” from Manhood For Amateurs, which begins with the perfect line, “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” Another great essay was “My Son, The Prince of Fashion,” about attending Paris Fashion Week with his son, Abe.
The excerpt from Pops currently making the rounds is “Are Kids The Enemy of Writing?” Chabon recalls standing with a Famous Lit’ry Man and being warned, if he wanted to be a Great Writer, not to have children. “You lose a book,” the man said, “for every child.”
Chabon was clearly disgusted by the interaction and is more than okay with his decision to have his four children, saying he’s going to die no matter what and his books will probably be forgotten anyways, and:
Once they’re written, my books, unlike my children, hold no wonder for me; no mystery resides in them. Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back. Anyway, if, 100 years hence, those books lie moldering and forgotten, I’ll never know. That’s the problem, in the end, with putting all your chips on posterity: You never stick around long enough to enjoy it.
A beautiful thought. But what I’m puzzled by in this piece is that Chabon, though he seems like a devoted father, never really questions that equation “you lose a book for every child,” even though it is demonstrably untrue in many cases.
Take, for example, several classic children’s books. A.A. Milne made up Winnie-the-Pooh for his son, Christopher Robin Milne. Astrid Lindgren’s bedridden daughter Karin asked her to tell a story about some girl named Pippi Longstocking. C.S. Lewis convinced J.R.R. Tolkien to turn the fantastical stories he told his children into The Hobbit. The list goes on and on — and that’s just children’s books, not to mention all the art and music and film that’s been inspired by children.
I am the father of two beautiful boys, but I am not an evangelist for having children. (I mean, have you looked around?) Having children in America is difficult no matter what your profession: health care is dismal, the costs of child care are astronomical, our public education system is being stripped for parts, inflated tuition and student loans have turned higher education into a one-way ticket to indentured servitude, and adulthood, if you survive to enter it, is not all that hot, either.
No working writer with kids is able to write without a ton of help.
The bad equation “for every child you lose a book” and all that “Pram in the Hall” nonsense is the kind of toxic thinking that gives writers an excuse to be negligent parents — “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children,” Faulkner growled — but it also severely underestimates the creative potential of children.
Rather than seeing my children as a constant drain on my creativity, it has made me a better father and a better writer to see them as creative catalysts, or energizers. (See my post: “Borrow a kid.”) I have been helped along to this point by the terrific example of so many creative mothers and fathers I’ve been lucky to know, and it’s for this reason I often share, on this blog, some of the creative shenanigans the boys and I have been up to.
It’s not that my boys magically made me a better person and a better artist, it’s that my boys make me want to be a better person and a better artist.
“Art is too long, and life is too short,” wrote Grace Paley. “There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.”
Of course, every creative life requires sacrifices, but I would encourage us to not accept the “for each child you lose a book” equation in the first place. Children, like anything else in your life, if you love them, pay attention to them, spend time with them, and reflect on your experiences with them, can lead you to your best work.
Above: drawings by my 3-year-old
In the NYTimes this week, there’s a feature on “procrastibaking.” It’s a form of what I call productive procrastination — avoiding work by working on something else. (More in Steal Like An Artist.)
The piece includes lines from Grace Paley’s poem, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative,” found in the collection Begin Again:
I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
Later in the poem: “everybody will like this pie… / many friends / will say why in the world did you / make only one / this does not happen with poems.”
I’m reminded of Beverly Cleary, who bakes while writing:
I like writing in the morning while baking bread. I used to bake bread while I wrote. I’d mix up the dough and sit down and start to write. After awhile the dough would rise and I’d punch it down and write some more. When the dough rose the second time, I’d put it in the oven and have the yeasty smell of bread as I typed.
I never realized how much baking was about precision (as opposed to cooking, which is more forgiving) until I lived with a baker. Then I found out that the easiest way to become a better baker is to buy a kitchen scale and start measuring ingredients by weight.
Baking is also a wonderfully sensual activity, in direct contrast to so much so-called “knowledge” work — your hands in the dough, little tastes, the smell taking over the whole house. (If you want to make a place smell like home, bake some chocolate chip cookies…)
Photo above courtesy of LaRay’s
I’m finishing up The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. Clocking in at 4 1/2 hours, the documentary presents a portrait of a man never satisfied, always searching, sort of modeling his career and life on Samsara, the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
Shandling’s diary entries are presented in little snippets throughout the documentary, and one of the of the things I wished for when watching is a longer, closer look at the pages. This morning I discovered that Garry’s friends have been posting them on his revived Twitter feed.
Shandling owed a great debt to George Carlin, who gave him encouragement when he was first starting out. Shandling adopted Carlin’s attitude towards cycles and reinvention. (Carlin famously threw out material and started fresh every year.)
What they both figured out is that the easiest way to re-invent yourself is to find something new to learn.
My book Show Your Work! is basically about learning in public — allowing people to sort of look over your shoulder as you’re working — and in chapter 10 I quote Milton Glaser, who said, “Whenever Picasso learned how to do something, he abandoned it.”
The video that quote is taken from is basically a summary of Shandling’s career, and it’s so good that I’ve transcribed a huge portion of it below (emphasis mine):
When I talk to students about the distinction between professionalism and personal development, I very often put it this way: In professional life, you must discover a kind of identity for yourself, that becomes a sort of trademark, a way of working that is distinctive that people can recognize. The reason for this is that the path to financial success and notoriety is by having something that no-one else has. It’s kind of like a brand, one of my most despised words.
So what you do in life in order to be professional is you develop your brand, your way of working, your attitude, that is understandable to others. In most cases, it turns out to be something fairly narrow, like ‘this person really knows how to draw cocker spaniels,’ or ‘this person is very good with typography directed in a more feminine way,” or whatever the particular attribute is, and then you discover you have something to offer that is better than other people have or at least more distinctive. And what you do with that is you become a specialist, and people call you to get more of what you have become adept at doing. So if you do anything and become celebrated for it, people will send you more of that. And for the rest of your life, quite possibly, you will have that characteristic, people will continue to ask you for what you have already done and succeeded at. This is the way to professional accomplishment–you have to demonstrate that you know something unique that you can repeat over and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it. The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn’t aid in your development.
The truth of the matter is that understanding development comes from failure. People begin to get better when they fail, they move towards failure, they discover something as a result of failing, they fail again, they discover something else, they fail again, they discover something else. So the model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success. As a result of that, I believe that Picasso as a model is the most useful model you can have in terms of your artistic interests, because whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it, and as a result of that, in terms of his development as an artist, the results were extraordinary. It is the opposite of what happens in the typecasting for professional accomplishment.
Yesterday, Dan Pink posted a video with Whitney Johnson, author of Build an A-Team. She says:
Every single person is a learning machine. You want the challenge of trying something new, figuring out how to do it, mastering it, and then starting all over again. You want to Learn, Leap, and Repeat.
As I wrote in Show:
When you feel like you’ve learned whatever there is to learn from what you’re doing, it’s time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.
So, perhaps, instead of asking that dreaded question, “What next?” turn it into this question: “What do you want to learn?”
Works whether you’re 5-years-old or 85-years-old.
This morning I browsed the Austin Public Library’s fantastic zine collection (highlights: Nathaniel Russell’s Fliers and Jillian Barthold’s Scenes From Big Bend) and this afternoon the 5-year-old and I made a zine using Bruno Munari’s Plus and Minus transparencies that I picked up in Milan last year and lines from the APL’s events flier. Pretty fun day.
“And even after you have achieved greatness, the infinitesimal cadre who even noticed will ask, ‘What next?’”
—Ian Svenonius, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group
In 1987, Disney aired their first “What’s Next?” ad. Michael Eisner recalls how the ads came to be in his memoir, Work in Progress:
Early in 1987, [we] had a dinner inside Disneyland with George Lucas and several celebrities we’d invited to promote the opening of Star Tours, among them Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan. The couple had made headlines a month earlier by piloting a single-engine plane around the world on one tank of gas. At some point in the evening, my wife turned to Rutan. “Now that you’ve flown around the world and done the most adventurous thing imaginable,” Jane asked reasonably enough, “what are you going to do next?”
“Well, we’re going to Disneyland, he replied sincerely. As soon as she had a chance, Jane pulled me aside and described the exchange. “This would make a great advertising campaign,” she said.
“What’s next?” is one of those dreaded interview questions, as evidenced by these two tweets I noticed in the past week:
The first is funny, the second is heartfelt, but they both point to the same borderline paralyzing predicament of having finished something you’ve put everything into.
bell hooks describes it this way in Teaching To Transgress:
Whenever I finish a work, I always feel lost, as though a steady anchor has been taken away and there is no sure ground under my feet. During the time between ending one project and beginning another, I always have a crisis of meaning. I begin to wonder what my life is all about and what I have been put on this earth to do. It is as though immersed in a project I lose all sense of myself and must then, when the work is done, rediscover who I am and where I am going.
In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem describes the unique period between when you finish a book and when it’s published as “The Gulp”: “that interlude where the book has quit belonging to you, but doesn’t belong to anyone else yet.”
In Show Your Work! I suggested “chain-smoking” as a way of avoiding stalling out in between projects: you never really stop working, you just use the end of one project to light up the next. (Joni Mitchell, for example, says that whatever she feels like is the weak link in her last project gives her inspiration for the next.) But sometimes chain-smoking is just impossible. Sometimes how the current project does and where it goes determines what you’ll do next. And sometimes you just have to bug out, get away from work for a bit, recharge, and figure out the next thing.
I think of “What next?” as a sort of ongoing existential crisis best handled with a daily practice. You’re never really going to be sure what’s going to happen, you just know that tomorrow and the day after that you’ll go out to your studio, or you’ll open your sketchbook, you’ll start pushing things around, and you’ll see what happens. No forcing it. Just see what comes.
I’m reminded of comedian Tom Koch’s obituary, which featured this paragraph:
People would say I must have had such a great life doing this,” Mr. Koch once recalled, “people who were engineers, doctors, insurance salesmen or whatever. But it was the kind of work where every morning I would wake up and think, ‘My God, I wonder if I can do it again today.’ There is no way you prepare to do it, or even know how you do it.”
Uncertainty is a huge part of the gig. I can already see the finish line for my next book, so I’m already thinking about what I’m going to start working on when I enter The Gulp. I’m already formulating my own “I’m going to Disney Land!” answer to that dreaded question, “So what’s next?”