The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (30 page)

The Web lacks editorial safeguards.
Serious writers rely on editors and others to review work prior to publication. This gets tricky when you’re publishing independently, and especially when you’re publishing quickly. It’s tempting to skip the editorial review, which means that errors are pretty much inevitable—and that, in turn, brings us to...

The culture of the Internet is deeply perfectionist.
You’ll find all the major perfectionist symptoms on abundant display throughout the Web, including grandiosity, machismo, dichotomized thinking, labeling, hyperbole, comparisons, and dramatic but unrealistic success stories. You’ll also find plenty of nit-picking, harshness, ridicule, sarcasm, and shaming.

Actually, the Web often moves well beyond perfectionism and into outright attack, and often those attacks are nasty and personal. There’s also a lot of sexism and other bias, with many women, queers, people of color, or members of other disenfranchised groups getting insulted or harassed when they speak up—and sometimes the harassment carries over into the “real world.”

To make matters even worse, all this can happen even in Web communities you would assume to be safe, such as progressive blogs.

The bottom line is that
the Internet can easily seem like one ongoing parade of traumatic rejection
.
Chabon again:

Then there’s that whole business of the Comments. Hell, it’s bad enough when a book’s coming out, and you open wide, and dig your nails into the arms of the chair, and wait for the stink of charred enamel to rise from the reviewers’ whirring drills. The pleasure of a favorable notice lasts about three hours and twenty-four minutes; the sting of a bad one settles down to a dull ache that can endure for decades ... Bad enough, like I say, but man, that daily assessment down there in Disqusland—even when it was mostly, even entirely, sweet and thoughtful and respectful, it was weirdly tough. Tough to withstand, tough to resist. And sometimes, today, tough to read. Maybe after a while a blogger hardens to it, I don’t know.

On the Internet, rejection is constant and often vicious. And it takes its toll, having, among other consequences, a silencing effect. Popular food blogger Shauna James Ahern has written an eloquent
cri de coeur
about the ongoing, horrible abuse she endures, and notes that at one point, in the wake of nasty comments about her three-year-old daughter, she almost gave up: “We didn’t want our lives public anymore. I thought about taking down this blog.”
2

Recently, I posted a political comment on a blog where I knew many people would be hostile to it. I wasn’t trolling
3
: It was a site where I had participated for years, and where many of my views were in line with community norms. This particular view wasn’t, however—although there were others who shared it. In fact, the blog owner had published a deliberately provocative post earlier that day, which other commenters had challenged, and I mainly wanted to post to support them.

For about an hour, I fretted over not just the wording of my twenty-line comment, but whether it was even appropriate to post, and whether I was going to be attacked, and, if so, how badly. Part of me wanted to forget the whole thing—I had work to do, after all, and who needs the stress? But I recalled abolitionist Abigail Kelley Foster’s famous quote, “Go where you are least wanted, for there you are most needed.” So I posted—and I’m happy to report that the blowback wasn’t all that bad: a few people called me ignorant and naïve, but no one got really vicious. Afterwards, I was careful to give myself Rewards (Section 2.11), despite my inner perfectionist’s disdainful deprecations that “it was only a blog post.” The truth was, it
was
a big deal in my morning, and I took a real risk; moreover, I could take pride in standing up for a viewpoint I truly believe in.

Maybe Web participation is easier for most people than it is for me—although I doubt it, given how many people (including nearly all vicious attackers) publish anonymously or pseudonymously. I always publish under my real name, however: partly to show pride in my ideas and values, partly to combat any tendency toward internalized oppression, and partly because anonymity seems such a pain to maintain, and also so easily lost. And so, I continue to wrestle with the above problems, and totally sympathize if you do, too.

I can understand why anyone, and particularly women and others extra-likely to be attacked, would be reluctant to publish on the Web. But don’t give up! We need your viewpoint and your voice, to whatever degree you feel comfortable sharing them. Figure out what you hope to accomplish from Web publishing, and devise a strategy for accomplishing it as safely as possible. One thing I always try to keep in mind is that, even if a few people are reacting obnoxiously to one of my posts, there are probably many more people who are quietly reading and thinking (and who see the bullies for who they are). Once in a while, one of those people kindly takes the time to write me and tell me that I’ve influenced their thinking.

The good news is, on the Web or off, the less perfectionist and more compassionately objective you get, the less rejection will matter. Yeah, it will still be “kinda bad” when someone criticizes your work, and “kinda good” when they praise it, but neither will actually matter much because you will be focused on the work itself, your internal rewards from the creative process, and the appreciation and respect of a few cherished readers whom you know “get it.”

1
Michael Chabon, “Tai Nasha No Karosha: Reflections on a Week of Blogging,” The Atlantic (website), January 14 2011 (www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2011/01/tai-nasha-no-karosha-reflections-on-a-week-of-blogging/69573/).

2
Shauna James Ahern, “Warm brown rice and grilled vegetable salad,” Gluten Free Girl and the Chef (blog), August 30, 2011 (glutenfreegirl.com/warm-brown-rice-and-grilled-vegetable-salad/).

3
Trolling is when you deliberately post something in opposition to the prevailing culture or norms of a blog, often with the deliberate intention of annoying people or provoking a fight.

Chapter
8

For the first time in the history of publishing, writers have the upper hand. Don’t piss that advantage away by thinking that this is still 1995.

—J.A. Konrath, 

The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing

Note:
In this section, I focus mainly on book publishing because that's a key aim for many writers, and also because new technologies and business models make it the most exciting and empowered arena for writers today. Also, for all intents and purposes, freelancing for magazines and newspapers no longer exists as a career, due to the Internet and other factors. 

I
f you want to see how the disempowering forces discussed in this book can converge on a writer’s career and life, you need look no further than Tom Grimes’s memoir
Mentor.
You’ll find perfectionism aplenty in it (Sections 2.5 and 2.7), as well as a mentor relationship gone awry (Section 3.10) and traumatic rejection (Section 7.2).

Grimes’s real disempowerment begins, however, when he starts selling his novel
Season’s End
. From the moment he starts dealing with agents, editors, and publishers, he is manipulated and treated like a hanger-on to his own project. At one point, he spends an agonizing month awaiting feedback from his agent Eric on manuscript changes he had made—and that Eric himself had requested—but won’t call him because “Protocol demanded authorial patience. The agent made contact, not the writer.”

Later in the sales process, Eric obnoxiously says to him, “Several editors this week want to talk to you to see if you’ll be difficult to work with ... No one likes a prima donna.” (See the similarly manipulative and condescending “I won’t be your mother hen” comment from the thesis advisor in Section A.3.)

But the worst instance of manipulation and control comes when Eric calls Grimes at 3:45 p.m. on the day of his book auction and tells him that it has come down to competing bids between Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Little, Brown and Co.:

“Okay, let me think about it,” I said, “And call you in the morning.”

As if he had to tell a child that his dog has died, Eric’s voice took on a plaintive quality. “Tom, I can’t ask these people to wait until tomorrow. They’re sitting by their phones. They’ve been at this all day.”

“I have to decide now?” I said.

“I can’t put them off. They want to know, and it’s five o’clock.”

I said, “I’ll have to call you back.”

Grimes calls his wife, who has no idea what to do, and then his mentor, Frank Conroy, who recommends that Grimes go with Little, Brown based solely on the larger advance. The decision turns out to be a disaster as
Season’s End
is first “orphaned” (the editor who bought it left, and no one else stepped up to champion it to the marketing and sales teams), and then ineptly marketed as a “baseball book” instead of a literary novel. It sold few copies and got disappointing reviews from
The New York Times
and other important venues (although good ones elsewhere). Grimes, who had been pumped up by Conroy and others to expect stratospheric success, was devastated, and later suffered severe mental illness in part due to the experience.

Bad vs. Good Mentors

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of
Mentor
is how Grimes repeatedly blames himself unfairly for setbacks caused by others. “The paramount reason [for the book’s failure] was my stupidity. First, I sold my book after considering my options for less than fifteen fraught minutes.” But he asked for the time and wasn’t given it—and nor did his mentor tell him to insist.

Also: “It’s clear to me now: I’m a failure as a writer because I’ve overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent.” But it was Conroy who irresponsibly inflated Grimes’s ambitions and hopes from the beginning, and who never took responsibility for doing so. Moreover—and this is not unusual in tales of disempowerment—in instance after instance, Grimes appears to have made reasonable decisions in the absence of information and support, and to have advocated for himself. Within moments of meeting Grimes at Iowa, for instance, and based solely on the fragment of the novel Grimes had submitted with his application, Conroy offers him “the best agent in America” (his own agent, Candida Donadio). I admire Grimes for maintaining his cool
and
focus at that moment, as he responds: “Thanks. Is it okay if I don’t commit right now ... I’d rather write the book without that pressure.” (At that moment, he’s actually doing both his job and Conroy’s, who, as the mentor, should have been the voice of pragmatic caution.)

Conroy also offers Grimes a prestigious scholarship, which Grimes shrewdly turns down in favor of teaching assistantships he thinks will aid his future job prospects.

Of course, Grimes was aided in his self-blame by others who either didn’t take responsibility for their actions, or blamed him for problems he didn’t cause—primarily Conroy, but also Eric:

Little, Brown mailed Eric twenty-four review clippings: each positive, each approximately twenty-four words long, and each from a newspaper’s sports section. With a trace of exasperation and complaint in his voice Eric said, “Tom, I can’t do anything with these,” meaning, the reviews were worthless. He couldn’t use them to promote the book ... I don’t believe Eric intended to make me feel responsible for the length and nature of the reviews ... nevertheless, he did.

Some of Grimes’s decisions did turn out to be wrong, but of course you can’t predict or control outcomes, so there’s no point feeling bad if you’ve honestly done your best (Section 2.10). Grimes’s most serious mistake, it would appear, was his continued reliance on Conroy, Eric, and other inept mentors; and one of the most excruciating aspects of
Mentor
is the occasional appearance of competent mentors who stand in stark contrast. These include a woman at a party who tells him, “The next time you get an offer from Farrar, Straus, take it,” and Sam Lawrence, a renowned publisher who looked kindly on Grimes and his work and advised him, “The next time someone tells you that you have fifteen minutes to decide what to do with a book you spent two years writing, you tell him to go fuck himself.”

Early in
Mentor
, Grimes notes in passing that while working to support himself as a writer he had managed two successful businesses in Manhattan. He’s clearly a competent person who had also managed to rise from a difficult background. Only in a fundamentally disempowering system would such an achiever fail so short of his goals and blame himself so unfairly.

Grimes is not the only writer to have gotten treated like crap by publishing professionals, only to subsequently blame himself for his own disempowerment. S.J. Culver is another. I mentioned her article on the effects of having gotten a rejection slip
838 days
after sending out the manuscript in Section 7.2. Elsewhere in the same article she writes:

On my computer’s hard drive languish five partial drafts of the novel I began writing in 2008. All of the drafts are between 100-200 pages in length. I don’t think any of the abandoned drafts are terrible, which, in a way, is worse than thinking they’re just unworkable. Those drafts make me think the problem is simply that I cannot finish a book-length work. I don’t have the stamina, the attention span. I have game, but I can’t close. Some of this paralysis is surely caused by ineptitude—if I knew how to write a novel, I would have written the damn thing by now—but I’m suspicious of the effects of the writer’s gospel of resignation.