A few years ago, as I was on a Blue Line train on my way to the loop in Chicago, I was reading Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (Apex, 2016) and listening to Hole’s Celebrity Skin (DGC, 1998). At the exact moment that I read the phrase “all dressed in white” on page 57 of Rosewater, Courtney Love sang the same phrase in my ears on the song “Use Once & Destroy.”
A few months later, I was clearing some records off my iPod to add a few new things, including the newly released Jay-Z record, 4:44 (Roc Nation, 2017). When I finally stopped deleting files and checked the available space, it was 444 MB. Just minutes later, while reading the latest Thrasher Magazine (July 2017), I happened to notice the issue number: 444.
Yesterday, I was browsing the clearance racks at Hot Topic (closely guarded fashion secret) as “MakeDamnSure” by Taking Back Sunday was playing. Just as Adam Lazzara sang “You are… you are so cool,” I slid a True Romance shirt into view that read “You are so cool” on the front.
Cliff’s Notes to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in Miracle Mile (1988).
I watched Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile (1988) the other night. I found this movie in quite a roundabout way. A few years ago, William Gibson posted a picture of the Cliff’s Notes for Gravity’s Rainbow with the caption “The Key.” This sent me on a search. I dug in thrift stores, looked in bookstores, asked proprietors. No one seemed to know whether these particular Notes existed.
A couple of years later, I found out that the Cliff’s Notes to Pynchon’s most famous and confounding work were a prop for De Jarnatt’s 1988 apocalyptic love story, Miracle Mile (Gibson also mentions it in his 1993 novel Virtual Light, which I recently reread). The movie is wild, overdone in some ways and underdone in others. It reminded me of two of my other all-time favorites, Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006), though it’s not as intentionally campy as the former and perhaps not as fully realized as the latter.
Sometimes things just sync up with no meaning outside of themselves. Sometimes there’s no alignment evident whatsoever, like how I came to Miracle Mile. Other times the path is important.
Sometimes I get a book in the mail or from the library, and I can’t remember how I found it. In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, finding more Rebecca Solnit and Guy Debord, discovering Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. I remember the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost completely unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates, new discoveries, and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I’d read what. So, I started keeping a research journal.
While those journals — I’ve been keeping them ever since — help me remember things I’ve read, they’re less helpful in tracing my path to the things I read.
Skateboarding/zine-making/movie flowchart, December 8, 2019.
I do sometimes try to keep up with the paths with flowcharts like the one above. It’s not a new idea. Early versions include Paul Otlet’s 1934 Traité de Documentation and Vannevar Bush’s memex from the 1940s. The memex — a portmanteau of memory and expansion — was a dream machine for navigating and researching with the vast stores of information of the time using cameras, microfilm, and print — an analog hypertext system. In his 1945 article “As We May Think,” Bush wrote, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”[1] The problem with the way that Bush proposes such “associative trails” is that they are of little use to anyone aside from the researcher who’s trod them. I mean, do you find the above flowchart useful without some narrative context? As Donald Norman puts it:
Following the trails of other researchers sounds like a wonderful idea, but I am not convinced it has much value. Would it truly simplify our work, or would all the false trails and restarts simply complicate our lives? How would we know which paths would be valuable for our purposes? […] If you, the reader, were to follow these trails, you might not be enlightened.[2]
Maybe the mystery is better. I have so many precious books and movies and ideas that lack provenance or lineage. Does it matter? A meandering or aligned path doesn’t change the end result.
You can plan not synchronicity nor serendipity, but magic happens every day.
[This piece was originally published on Lit Reactor.]
[1] Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 176 (1): 101–108.
[2] Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011, 134-135.
Quoting and paraphrasing are common in writing disciplines such as journalism and academia, but plagiarism is anathema, punishable by excommunication. While endemic to the creative practices of hip-hop, the practice of interpolation is also hotly debated. The orthodox rule there was no biting, but if you can take what someone else wrote and make it better, that’s worthy of respect. “I can take a phrase that’s rarely heard,” Rakim once rapped, “Flip it, now it’s a daily word.” Because of the perils of plagiarism, in writing practice, riffing on the work of another is not widely accepted, but it can be quite fruitful.
While some still consider the interpolation of rap lyrics an act of biting, others see such a move as metaphorical and central to the art form and indeed historical African oral traditions. In the use of allusive appropriation in hip-hop, a practitioner must make something new while still adhering to the traditions of hip-hop. In this way, lyrical allusions can be viewed a lot like the musical samples over which they’re spoken. The tension between biting and innovating has been around since the beginning of recorded rap. The lyrics to the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” were lifted straight from the streets. The fact that those verses belonged originally to Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush Brothers is the oldest bit of rap lore. One person’s clever quip is another’s cliché. Novelty is as cognitive as it is cultural.
My most used example of this practice comes from Eminem. In his 2000 song “The Way I Am,” he says:
I am whatever you say I am If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?
His words have their direct meaning in response to his treatment in the news media at the time, but they also allude to the 1987 rap song, “As the Rhyme Goes On,” by Eric B. & Rakim. In the earlier song, Rakim raps:
I’m the R to the A to the K-I-M If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?
The line has also been flipped by Nas (on both “Got Ur Self a…” and “You’re Da Man”), Jay-Z (on “Supa Ugly”), and Curly Castro (on ShrapKnel’s “Lazy Dog”). Allusions as such pose a communicative problem in that they employ and require shared knowledge. At least a passing familiarity with the Eric B. & Rakim song interpolated by Eminem heightens its meaning, gives it another layer of significance and signification.
They’re also a great way to learn and improve your craft. Ursula Le Guin once said that while musicians practice by playing another’s music, we expect writers to just bust out with their own work from the start. Kathy Acker used to rewrite great novels as a writing practice, some of which ended up in her published books. You can write and rewrite whatever you want in your practice.
You can use allusions and interpolations yourself as a writing exercise. Take your favorite bar from a rap song or a line from a poem or a book, find the central idea, and flip it. For example, on Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Chuck D raps:
When I get mad, Put it down on a pad, Give you something that you never had
I rewrote that like this:
I lace the white page When I write with rage
It might not be quite as forceful or have as much impact as Chuck’s version, but it’s mine.
Another way to approach this is by recontextualizing a lyric. You can use a bar as a jumping off point or you can introduce a bar with your own, giving the latter new meaning. This is common in hip-hop and a common exercise in improvisations of all sorts.
On the song, “Get Off My Dick and Tell Yo’ Bitch to Come Here,” a less family-friendly Ice Cube raps:
All I got is hard dick and bubblegum Just ran out, my last stick, is where I’m comin’ from
Several other rappers have interpolated this line: Blueface on “Disrespectful,” Fabolous on “Bubble Gum,” Big L on “7-Minute Freestyle,” Jay-Z on “Show You How,” Bun B “Pourin’ Up,” and Gucci Mane on “Killin’ It,” among others.
In a recent exercise, I re-introduced the second line with this one:
All this dynamite is getting quite cumbersome Just ran out, my last stick, is where I’m comin’ from
Changing the first line gives the second line a whole new context and meaning by changing what the word “stick” is referring to.
This is a good writing exercise for loosening up, for expanding your practice, or just for getting better at paraphrasing. It can also be applied as an advanced technique for hiding messages or references in your work. As in the Eminem example above, if you don’t know the Rakim lyric, you’re not in on the reference. You get left out. An allusion like this is a great place to nod to your network and to hide information from your enemies. Try it!
If you happen to try the exercise above, feel free to share. I’d love to see what you come up with.
[This exercise originally appeared on Lit Reactor.]
The process of writing is one of those things that eludes even those of us who do it every day. Sometimes sentences just pour out of you. Sometimes you go weeks with nothing. When I’m in the flow of the sentences, I’m always trying to figure out how to make them the best I can. When I’m in the nothing of the nothingness, I’m always trying to figure out ways to recalibrate my approach. Maybe if I do that part first instead… Maybe if I sneak up on it this way… Maybe if I have a snack…
Eating and writing sometimes feel inextricably linked. They are both done sitting at a table after all. There are also so many things done in the service of eating that aren’t eating and in the service of writing that aren’t writing. I’m thinking of recipes and cooking done before eating and the cleaning up done after; the planning and research done before writing and the editing done after.
I’m writing about writing here of course, but these ideas are applicable to other creative pursuits as well. So, with lunchtime in mind, here are three food-based tips for research and editing.
Making Waffles Out of Spaghetti
After the success of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (HarperCollins, 1992), the self-help relationship subgenre shelf saw many more man-woman binary metaphors. In one such book, Men Are Like Waffles, Women are Like Spaghetti (Harvest House, 2001), Bill and Pam Farrel argue that men compartmentalize all the things in their lives like the griddled grid-shaped breakfast food, that they think in boxes. And women think of everything as intertwined like so many wet noodles. It’s a ridiculous analogy, but one that I thought about for years.
One day in the library on campus, while tracking down yet another citation for whatever paper I was working on, it hit me: Writing is Like Waffles, Research is Like Spaghetti. When we’re putting together the theses, arguments, paragraphs, and sections of an article, a chapter or a book, we’re compartmentalizing the information into an easily digestible, grid-like structure. The research we do in the service of those waffles is like pulling apart noodles. It’s like we’re making waffles out of spaghetti!
It’s only an analogy, but one that has helped me make sense of some of the research process.
No Brown M&Ms
Arena-rock pioneers Van Halen infamously insisted on M&Ms with the brown ones picked out, as shown below on page 40 of their tour contract. Everyone I heard tell the story accused them of being diva rock stars because everyone knows the M&M colors all taste the same.
In his 1997 memoir, Crazy from the Heat (Hyperion), erstwhile frontman David Lee Roth explains the candy-coated demand:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
It was a colossal production, any mistake pregnant with the potential of not only crippling the show but also destruction of property or injury to person. “So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he continues, “well, line-check the entire production… They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.” It was a test. A brown M&M was an indication that everything might not be up to the requirements of the contract.
If you see a small spelling, grammatical, or factual error in a piece of writing, it makes you wonder if the piece has been edited, copyedited, or even looked over one more time before it reached you. That’s a brown M&M. It casts doubt over the whole thing. As a writer, you want to make sure you remove all of those.
Table Etiquette
Okay, I couldn’t come up with a third food-based piece of advice, but this one is close: Do a table read. One of the most satisfying things about writing scripts is hearing them read aloud by a cast. There’s also nothing more helpful in finding out what’s not working on the page. Awkward dialog, weird phrasings, and unnatural rhythms will all be evident in a table read.
For example, if you write “fill wind” when you mean to write “will find,” you might not see it on the page, and your spell-checker won’t catch it. If you read it out loud, you have a much better chance of catching brown M&Ms like that. You can do this with any kind of writing. Just read it out loud. All kinds of things you won’t catch editing on the screen or page will pop out when read aloud. I can’t recommend this enough.
No one can really tell you how to write. It’s a matter of finding what works for you. Since posting my last piece on writing, I talked to several people about their processes and remembered some things that should’ve been included last time around. I consider most of these higher-order aspects of the task, but they might not seem so to you. It all depends on where you are as a writer, and I’m not exactly an expert. Either way, this should be taken as an addendum to the other piece.
Writing Space: I am enamored of scenes of bands working in the studio. My musician friends tell me that being in the studio is no fun, so I know I’m romanticizing it. Maybe it’s just leftover boyhood dreams of being a rock star, but seeing the way that artists occupy the temporary space of the recording studio while making records inspires me.
I try to emulate the studio experience that I imagine with my writing space. The walls around my desk host white boards and butcher-paper mindmaps, as well as posters and images that inspire me to write depending on the topic. Books chronically clutter every flat affordance within arm’s reach, which can be a burden as well as a boon. If applicable, I also listen to relevant music. For instance, while working on a chapter heavy with material about Laurie Anderson, I put up my Home of the Brave movie poster and listened to a playlist consisting of songs from all of her records. Immersing oneself in the subject matter is one way to dip your writing deeper into it.
An Essential Tension: There is a tension between wanting to write and needing to write. I find that both are necessary, but neither is sufficient. Writing in a vacuum can be lonely, disheartening work, and writing strictly for deadlines can be just as soul-squishing. Writing for my website (I loathe the term “blogging”) has provided me a perfect tension between the two. I want to write because it is what I do, but having an audience makes me feel that I need to write as well. Maintaining this site maintains that tension and keeps me writing.
Get Critical: In a response to my previous piece, Howard Rheingold (who has a beautiful office/studio space himself) wrote:
Find good critics you trust. Much writing needs to be sheltered — don’t show it to anybody until you think it can live on its own, even if it will need minor or major surgery after reconsideration. Then get some smart readers — people whose intelligence and knowledge you admire, you are supportive of your work, but are unafraid of telling you candidly what didn’t work for them in your writing. You need to develop a way of judging criticism. Some of it needs to just bounce off. Some of it needs to be considered. Some of it directs you to make important changes. You need to develop a sense for criticism — and get accustomed to it.
This runs counter to my “Release Your Darlings” suggestion from last time, but it’s good advice. Find mentors who will give you solid feedback — encouraging as well as constructive. It’s essential for all areas of writing development. Now, which of your darlings you release and which ones you save for the private pressure of critical eyes is up to your own judgement. It’s a meta-skill that you’ll hone as you go.
Remember to Return: I spoke to a few writing friends who responded to my “write everything down” credo, saying that they never go back through their notes or journals. It’s not only helpful, but imperative for me to go back through my collected notes on a regular basis. I find myself digging through the latest one almost every time I write something for this site, looking for a half-remembered reference or quotation. I don’t want to go blaming the internet, but we seem to have a web-fueled obsession with the latest, the most current, the now. Sometimes the piece you need is tucked away in the archives. Remember to return to your notes; otherwise, why are you taking them?
These are just a few more things that have come up in the past few weeks. Again, no one can tell you exactly how to make it happen. You may know more than I do. What tips do you have for getting writing done? Feel free to leave some in the comments below.
Publishing has its problems. Academic publishing has its as well, and in turn public intellectualism has problems. With the rise of ebooks, self-publishing, blogging (oh, how I loathe that term), and the like, all of this seems to be coming to a head. I have chosen a path that attempts to eschew these issues. This is not to say that I am above academic publishing, but to say that I am not interested in being read by such a small audience. I am also not necessarily interested in scientific rigor as such. Interesting ideas to me come from many sources, and those are rarely academic journals (I’m more of a Feyerabendian than a Popperian). No offense to those who pursue that path, but it’s not mine. Today, Cory Doctorow posted a piece to bOING bOING about the problem, and The Guardianchimed in as well. Steven Shaviro has been very vocal about the issue, having run into it specifically with Oxford University Press, writing,
I was asked to sign a contract for an essay I have written, which is scheduled to appear in an edited collection. Let’s leave aside the fact that I wrote the essay — it was solicited for this collection — in summer 2010, and yet it will not appear in print until 2013. I think that the glacial pace of academic publishing is a real problem. But that is not what is bothering me at the moment…
What’s bothering him is that the piece would have been “work-for-hire.” That the contract stipulated terms as follows:
WORK-FOR-HIRE. The Contributor acknowledges that the Publisher has commissioned the Contribution as a work-for-hire, that the Publisher will be deemed the author of the Contributior as employer-for-hire, and that the copyright in the Contribution will belong to the Publisher during the initial and any renewal or extended period(s) of copyright. To the extent, for any reason, that the Contribution or any portion thereof does not qualify or otherwise fails to be a work-for-hire, theContributor hereby assigns to the Publisher whatever right, title and interest the Contributor would otherwise have in the Contribution throughout the world.
Shaviro continues,
I found this entirely unbelievable, and unacceptable. Since when has original academic writing been classified as “work-for-hire”? It is possible, I suppose, that things like writing encyclopedia essays might be so categorized; but I have never, in my 30 years in academia, encountered a case in which primary scholarship or criticism was so classified. Is this something widespread, but which I simply haven’t heard about? I’d welcome information on this score from people who know more about the academic publishing situation than I do. But it seems to me, at first glance, that the Press is upping the ante in terms of trying to monopolize “intellectual property,” by setting up an arrangement that both cuts off the public from access and denies any rights to the henceforth-proletarianized “knowledge worker” or producer. I am unwilling to countenance such an abridgment of my ability to make the words that I have written more freely available.
I don’t think I have permission to actually reproduce the words of the editor from OUP, so I will paraphrase. What he basically said was that traditional publication agreements are insufficient because they only give presses “limited sets of rights.” In other words, he was openly confessing that OUP seeks complete and unlimited control over the material that they publish. The justification he gave for this was that old neoliberal standby, “flexibility” — OUP is seeking to do all sorts of digital distribution, and if rights are limited then they may not be able to control new forms of distribution that arise due to technological changes. Of course, the mendaciousness of this claim can be seen by the fact that, as was confirmed to me by one of the people involved in putting together the volume, the “work-for-hire” provision was in place long before the Press even got the idea of supplementing physical publication of the volume with a (no doubt password-protected and expensive-to-access) website.
I have exactly one piece “published” in an academic journal. It was a book review. It was due on November 15, 2008, and appeared in the September, 2010 issue of the journal — two years later. As much as I am thankful for the opportunity (my master’s thesis advisor Brian H. Spitzberg had passed the chance on to me), and I know that’s a normal publication period, it was a freaking book review. Why would I ever pursue that avenue again? My friend Alex Burns has a great post on how academia kills writing, which is a great fear of mine: I want to write books, and I want to write books that people actually want to read.
Alex Reid has an excellent post about why academics keep writing books that no one wants to read, which is because academics largely write books in the pursuit of tenure, not in the pursuit of an audience. Ian Bogost calls this “vampire publishing.” Their shared concern draws an important distinction between writing to be read and writing to have written (a distinction my professor at UT, Katie Arens, has drawn as well). In academia, there’s a strong push toward the latter. Bogost writes,
The reason there is no irony in my simultaneous support of Alex’s position and my continued participation in scholarly publishing is quite simple: people actually want to read my books. They buy them, both in print and electronic format. And I’ve tried very hard as an author to learn how to write better and better books, books that speak to a broader audience without compromising my scholarly connections, books that really ought to exist as books. Imagine that!
The problem doesn’t stop there though. As a scholar who pursues nonacademic or para-academic routes to publication, I am appalled at how insanely bad some of the channels outside of academia have gotten. Case in point: TED. TED, the “Technology, Entertainment, Design” conference originally envisioned by Richard Saul Wurman, has been watered down to the point of self-parody. If they hadn’t once done great things, this wouldn’t matter, but a once visionary site of Big-Idea exchange has become the Starbucksification of public intellectualism, what Benjamin Bratton calls, “the Thomas Friedman of Megachurch Infotainment.” If the following doesn’t make you lose your shit, then you should probably stop reading this post-haste [runtime: 3:47]:
vDHET3aCI2U
“John Boswell, of the ‘Symphony of Science’, came to TED2012 and made this remix of the speakers onstage.” It’s a TED-sponsored promotional video! It’s not a parody, it’s a self-parody! (Have you ever seen the Bank of America “One Bank” video?) TED, once the bastion of non-academic public intellectualism, is now this. SMFH.
The problem — the real problem — is that there should be a gate-keeping function to scholarship, but that the ones in place are currently failing us. TED’s former elitism wasn’t necessarily the answer, but their new openness is total, indisputable crap. Couple that with the aforementioned problems of academic publishing, and you’ve got yourself a crisis — a big one.
My main gripe with all of this is that Big Name people basically copyright ideas via TED (Bogost calls it, “American Idol for non-fiction trade books”). I’m all for openness, and I pretty well only synthesize the ideas of others (and I do my damnedest to cite and give credit where its due; I am self-conscious about it to a fault), but I’ve seen this happen so many times: One person spends years developing idea X and then one of The Chosen mentions X in a TED Talk™, and then it’s their idea. That is a problem.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution. If I did, this would be a very different piece. I have chosen to do what I do and hope for the best. I know many others who’ve resolved to do the same. None of this is to shit on those who do academic publishing or hope to do so, but we need to realize that the system is broken and that the alternatives are not much better. Here’s hoping we all find ways to get our ideas out there.
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Apologies to Doug Rushkoff for my bastardization of his book title for the name of this piece, and many thanks to Steven Shaviro, Alex Burns, Ian Bogost, and Alex Reid for sharing their thoughts.
I have a real hatred of false headlines, titles of articles that lie about their contents. The latest one to catch my ire was James Altucher’s “Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card.” Mainly because, well, it isn’t. As much as we may try with apps and QR-codes, as well as traditional things like stickers and postcards, there still isn’t a token of identity that works like a business card. I don’t wholly disagree with Altucher’s article, just the parts where he claims his headline. The article is actually about why you should self-publish as opposed to seeking a publisher, and, as a publisher of my own first book, I can safely say that it isn’t my new business card, but that I do support the practice.
I listen to the vapid resignation coming from capital-P publishing and to the stories of corporate awfulness my friends endure, and I think if we landed half the punches we’re pulling now out of misplaced deference and outdated political instincts, we would bury them. — Erin Kissane via Twitter, October 10, 2011
I published my first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear), five years ago, and I learned the process as I went through it. The tools for doing so have gotten much better, faster, and easier to use. I did Follow for Now largely “the hard way” at the time because I wanted control over every aspect of the book. I didn’t want it to look self-published. Due to advancements in the available technology, those concerns have lessened quite a lot, and I probably wouldn’t do things the same way now. Here are some of the things I’ve learned in the process, in the hopes that you can avoid some of the same issues now.
Design: As I said, I didn’t want my book to look self-published, so I hired a designer. I am also fortunate to have designer friends, some of whom have book design in their repertoires. I tapped Patrick David Barber and his partner Holly McGuire to do mine. I was originally going to hire Patrick to do the cover, but they took on the whole project, and I am very, very thankful that they did. It’s difficult to put a price on great design, and I didn’t pay them near what the job was worth, but I can confidently say — thanks to Patrick and Holly — that Follow for Nowlooks at home with any book on the shelves at the various bookstores, libraries, and homes that carry it.
Editing:Follow for Now consists of the best interviews from my old website frontwheeldrive.com. I spent a year and a half choosing, categorizing, and arranging the interviews into a form suitable for publication as a book. Once I got it pretty close to what I thought the final version would look like, I’d read those interviews so many times that I didn’t feel comfortable doing the final copyediting. I was simply too close to the content. I hired another old friend, Adem Tepedelen, to help me get the words all together. This was a step I didn’t anticipate when I started this journey, but again, I’m glad I did it. Adem found so many inconsistencies, misspellings, awkward sentences, and other holes that I’d never seen — even in all the years some of this stuff had been online. Get a skilled third party to help you get your copy tight.
Indexing: I cannot express how frustrating it is as a researcher to pick up a book, flip to the back to look up something that you know is in it, and find that there’s no index to help you locate it. Since Follow for Now contains so many people, ideas, books, records, and so on inside, I thought it was imperative that one be able to find the information in as many ways as possible. I was advised not to do the indexing myself (and I felt the same way I felt about the copyediting), so I hired Steve Connell (from the awesome Verse Chorus Press) to do mine. It was well worth it. There are rare cases when an index might be superfluous, but most nonfiction books should have one. Don’t skimp on the index. Your readers will thank you.
Distribution: I ordered a thousand copies of Follow for Now. They arrived on my doorstep in Seattle on a wooden palette. A thousand books is over forty boxes of twenty-four books each. It’s about half a standard palette. As a physical presence, it’s no joke. I’ve moved three times since then. Maintaining one’s own inventory at this point is absolutely ludicrous. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless you happen to have your own warehouse and aren’t planning on moving anytime soon. The print-on-demand services have gotten much better, and if I were doing a book myself right now, I’d certainly be looking hard in their direction.
I moved just a few months for a new job after that palette of books arrived, so I missed out on shopping the book to a lot of independent distributors. If you go this route, look into distribution before your inventory comes knocking.
Digital: Given the current battles over digital distribution, I am loathe to mention Amazon, but there’s no denying their power. If you have an ISBN (and you shouldn’t have a book out without one), then you can get your book listed on their site. I make no money from Amazon sales of my print book, but having it on their site has raised its profile. If you choose to use one of their services for digital and print-on-demand publishing, you get their distribution platform automatically. This is powerful stuff, but be sure check out all of the terms of service in full: You can certainly use their strength without signing over your soul. I hired Josh Tallent at eBook Architects to convert my book’s raw files to Kindle-readable ones. Google Books and other digital distributors have their own sets of legalese to sift through. Don’t sell yourself short.
Local: Check with all of your extant local independent bookstores. Most have consignment deals and many will buy books from you outright. See what they have as far as local events as well. A reading or talk from your book can sell a few copies and raise your profile in your own area, which, if done well, can lead to more exposure online as people post and Tweet about you and your new book.
Web: I am fortunate enough to have a background in web design, so can build my own websites. If I didn’t, I know several people who could help in that area. Again, in the five years since Follow for Now, the technology has advanced enough that free sites can do the trick. Having a website to highlight elements from the book and press about it is invaluable, but at least a landing page with all the pertinent details about your book is imperative.
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There are many other things you can do to get your book out and raise awareness about it, but these are the basics. “Self-publishing” is a misnomer if there ever was one. It still takes a team of people to do it successfully. You should be prepared to do most of the work yourself, but chances are you have friends who can help where you fall short. I have told many classes that if you have a book written, you can have it out tomorrow. Just make sure you’re ready for the challenge: Be prepared for years of work. Having a completed volume in hand is only about half the job; it’s the end of one phase and the beginning of another. I’m still learning as I go.
I started writing poems and comics, and making fake newspapers at the age of six. Having grown up with an artist mom and always drawing, painting, or making something, I thought I’d end up an artist. I started making photocopied zines in my teens and taught myself how to turn events and interviews into pages with staples, but my driving interest (aside from the BMX, skateboarding, and music content that inspired those zines in the first place) was originally in the layouts. Balancing words and images on the page excited me. I thought I might end up being an artist of some sort after all. In fact, I was an Art major for my first three years of undergraduate study. As I’ve written elsewhere,
If I were forced to pick a single answer to the question “What do you do?” I would probably say I’m a writer, though I never did well on writing assignments in school. In spite of my placement in advanced classes, I scored poorly throughout high school on writing-related projects. Hell, I made C’s in both English Composition 101 and 102, but In my second-to-last semester of undergrad, one of my instructors complimented my writing. We had done several in-class essays in her Abnormal Psychology class, and one day she pulled me aside and told me what a good writer I was. This came as a surprise, given my previous track record and the fact that I’d been an Art major for my first three years of college. Regardless, it stuck with me. I took a class on writing for social science research the next semester, and though I barely made a B, I felt more at home researching and writing than I ever had trying to do traditional art.
Typical me. (photo by Lily Brewer)
Since then, I’ve moved on to just about every type of writing, and the process intrigues me to no end. I find that writing in different formats and styles (e.g., academic, journalistic, poetry, online, etc.) breaks up any creeping monotony and keeps me writing. As such, I try to be a writer at all times. As Johannes Milner (1814) put it, “Poetry is not something to be activated and deactivated. It is a part of a process, a byproduct of simply being poetic” (p. 43). So, at its best, writing is not an activity unto itself, but a byproduct of being a writer. Here are a few tips for becoming and being the writer you want to be (which we will explore in-depth below):
Find Make Time to Write: Unscheduled time is lost time. You have to give yourself breaks and let yourself enjoy them, but making time to write is essential. This is first and foremost.
Always Be Writing/Write Everything Down: This does not always seem possible for the busy among us, but allowing for the opportunity is imperative. Collecting your most fleeting thoughts — on the bus, in the car, while trying to fall asleep, during any downtime whatsoever — is an important practice. Don’t assume you’ll remember them. You won’t. Write them down.
Don’t Let the Blank Page Stop You: Being intimidated by the emptiness of a white page and a blinking cursor can be debilitating. Just type what you’re thinking. If you’ve jotted down notes, type them up. You can — and will — edit later. This will get you past the blankness. It has been said that writing is re-writing, so take advantage of the impermanence of your initial words.
Release Your Darlings: I’ve posted about this one before, but it bears repeating. Don’t sit on your ideas. Get them out there. You’ll get invaluable feedback from blog posts, Tweets, and exchanging emails that you won’t get from a Word file withering away in the foldered hierarchy of your hard drive.
Collaborate: The fruits we bare are inevitably due to the roots we share. Collaboration makes each one of us bigger. Read widely and exchange ideas with many. Even if it’s just having someone to bounce your ideas around with, the importance of sharing them cannot be overstated.
Stay Positive: This stuff isn’t easy, but inspiration is all around you. I find it in books, discussions, stand-up comedy, Hip-hop, my fiancée, animals, staying up late, reading magazines, listening to music, etc. Don’t look for reasons to be discouraged. The world is full of inspiring things if you look for them.
From the page I feel a lot of pressure
I treat it like it’s too precious
Like there’s an audience saying, ‘Impress us!’
But it’s just my impression
— Roy Christopher, June 19, 2007
In his book On Writing(Pocket, 2001), Stephen King urges aspiring writers to turn off their televisions, writing, “Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find that they enjoy the time they spend reading. I’d like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life and the quality of your writing” (p. 148). Director Michel Gondry adds, “I stopped my son from playing videogames, and he began to develop all kinds of creative skills. It’s human to seek out the quickest reward, but if you get the reward immediately, you don’t go anywhere else. You learn that the delayed reward is more rewarding” (quoted in Thill,2006, p. 56). These two quotations get at the issue of distraction. Having time away from writing is also important, as is having a head-clearing activity. I have colleagues who can’t write at home due to things like dishes, television, roommates, spouses, etc. I know others who have their own “writing space”: a nice, secluded spot with a comfortable chair, and good tea. Still others are binge writers: They need large chunks of time to write anything of substance. I am sympathetic to all of these conditions, but I have found it important to cultivate the ability to write at any time, in any circumstance — even if it’s just collecting thoughts about something. I keep a pen and paper in my pocket at all times, pen and pad by my bed, notebook(s) in my backpack and all over the house. I do find that I need large chunks of uninterrupted time to surmount larger writing tasks, but the ubiquity of computers, portable or otherwise, makes writing anywhere a much more viable option.
It’s not always about making a fist, sometimes it’s about opening your hand. — Tom Waits
In Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews (Zer0 Books, 2010), Paul J. Ennis interviews seven scholars all working in and around new Continental Philosophy (e.g., Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost, et al.). There’s a lot of solid writing advice in each of these. In his interview, Stuart Elden states:
The key thing is that there is no correct way to write, but ways that work for individuals. The problem is that people seem to try to write in ways that are not right for them, that are just not working. Personally I try to write everyday, even if it’s just typing up notes or work on references. I try not to get hung up over particular words or formulations; because I go over things so many times that I never think anything I write is the final version. For me that’s helpful in not getting blocked. I write a lot of “stage directions” into the text — “this link doesn’t work”; “need better examples”; “develop” etc. — and I move on. (p. 43)
He goes on to talk about reading a lot and how it inspires him to write, as well as writing cumulatively as opposed to on deadline, adding, “I do know people who claim to work that way, and they can ‘turn on’ the writing at that late point. It just doesn’t work for me — writing is more of a slow accumulation. I’ve written some shorter pieces quite quickly, but most pieces are built up very slowly, accretion over a long period of time. The other thing to note is that I work on several things — not quite at once — but in parallel” (p. 43). Billy Wimsatt once said that the first rule of writing is reading a lot, and I concur with that. Also, reading widely is helpful. Venture outside of your area of interest. Treat your mind like an ecology and diversify its literary flora and fauna. I also agree with Elden’s working on several pieces in parallel. When work on one project stalls, switching to another can jostle new ideas loose. The process is less about balance and more about tension.
In his interview with Ennis, Levi Bryant adds, “Too many of us labor over projects in isolation, never revealing them to anyone else until finally, at long last, they are masterpieces ready for publication. I think this is a tremendous mistake both in terms of prospects for professional success and intellectually. Attending conferences, talking to other academics, participating on discussion lists, and blogging all create countless opportunities and assist in your intellectual development. Nor should this engagement be restricted to established academics” (p. 79).
Waiting until the “right” time to write and toiling away at it alone might be our two biggest mistakes. One of my main correspondents with regard to writing is my friend Alex Burns. In a recent email exchange, he introduced me to the idea of “hot space.” That is, a quick snapshot of an idea that often resonates with an audience more so than something fully formed. The concept’s namesake being Queen’s 1982 album Hot Space, which was apparently recorded in very quick bursts of studio time. Again, sharing cannot be overstated. Don’t deprive the world of your ideas. Get them out there and see if they float or sink. This practice will also help you build a platform.
When she wrote about things, her sense of them changed, and with it, her sense of herself. — William Gibson, Spook Country.
A friend of mine recently lamented on Facebook, “I miss being able to write creatively. I feel like academia has ruined me. What can I do to jump start my imagination and start writing again? 🙁 It makes me really sad.” This has been a fear of mine as well, and I find that constantly working on different kinds of projects helps keep my writing limber.
More to her question, there are many, many books on breaking out of these ruts and finding new grooves. In spite of its New-Agey style, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Unleashing the Writer Within (Shambhala, 2005) is one I return to regularly. Goldberg outlines a total plan for writing as a practice, which can be overwhelming if taken wholesale, but the book is rife with reminders of how to write through the fits and starts of any project. Daniel Pink‘s A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2006) has some great exercises for getting the creative process started as well. Ultimately, as Stuart Elden stated above, each of us has to find what works for our writing needs, but trying out the methods of successful writers is one tactic to finding your own way.
The best way of getting into something is to think of it as mischief.
― Steve Aylett, The Crime Studio
Being a writer is not an easy path to take, but it’s navigable. Don’t be afraid to test an idea, ask for help, or bounce ideas off someone. The more difficult it is, the more likely you will find it rewarding when you finish a project. Some people write all the time, and others are able to plow through when something is due. Experiment and find what works for you. Ultimately, if you want it, you have to find a way to make it happen.
References:
Aylett, Steve. (2001). The Crime Studio. New York: Thunder’s Mouth.
Ennis, Paul J. (2010). Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews. London: Zer0 Books.
Gibson, William. (2007). Spook Country: A Novel. New York: Putnam, p. 171.
Goldberg, Natalie. (2005). Writing Down the Bones: Unleashing the Writer Within. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Shambhala.
King, Steven. (2001). On Writing. New York: Pocket Books.
Milner, Johannes. (1814). This Quotation is From a Dream I Had: Pull Inspiration from Everything. My Head: Dream Time.
Pink, Daniel H. (2006). A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead.
Thill, Scott. (2006, March). Keeping it Reel: Michel Gondry’s Block Party. WIRED, 14.03, p. 56.
