Why You Still Shouldn't Be a Writer

April 03, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

It's hard to pick just one when I consider which one of my screeds is the most hated, but "Why You Shouldn't Be a Writer" is the likely winner. ("Trigger Warning: This Blog Post May Freak You the Fuck Out" is a close second.)

I wrote WYSBAW in 2012 on my Forbes blog. To date, it has close to 300,000 views and 356 comments. (My guess is that it's the most-commented-on post I wrote at Forbes, but I no longer have access to the back end data that I think would clear that up for me.)

The post is only 626 words, and my guess is I spent less than an hour writing it. It consists of an introduction ("I’m going to be a writer, you decide one day, sitting on the crapper," a paragraph begins) and three "tips" ("You're Not Good at It" is the first).

"But here’s the question you should be asking yourself: Can I write? Not literally. Not physically. Not technically. Anyone can do that. Can you make the words sing? Does your prose have that certain something? Are you gifted at showing not telling, or telling not showing, or creating an entire world that didn’t exist before that is born again when someone else reads your work?"

I get hate email from the post on a regular basis -- perhaps a couple a week. These aspiring writers/WYSBAW haters find me standing in line at the grocery store, having just woken up, in the middle of writing. Mostly, they are the same: poorly written, illiterately defiant, stridently outraged. I'm going to show you! they squawk in jumbled prose riddled with spelling errors. I'm going to be a writer anyway! Good luck on that, I think, and then click delete.

There is no saving the self-deluded.

The post resurfaced in my mind lately because of Ryan Boudinot's "Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One." In it, he lines up writers, MFA programs, and shitty writing and smashes them all off the table with one fell swoop of his arm. "Writers Are Born with Talent," he dares to assert. And for confessing this truth, he is pilloried.

In a response piece on Electric Literature, written by someone who was so cowardly they couldn't even share their name, gets at the why behind the outrage:

"For some reason it has become taboo to suggest that people might not be able to do whatever it is they set their mind to. A diet of inspirational narratives in which all it takes is a dream and a montage to reach your loftiest ambitions has clouded common sense. We’ve managed to confuse the fact that a good writer could be anyone with the idea that anyone could be a good writer."

And, indeed, in all likelihood, you are not a good writer. Because most of us aren't. I've started going to the gym several times a week. This doesn't make me an Olympic athlete. Next week, I'm starting an improv class, and I'm not very good at improv because I'm physically stiff and in a book that was written about a TV show that I used to be on I am classified as "awkward," which is basically objective proof of how not good at physical "acting" I am. I take care of the dog, but I feel that something is lacking in my canine caretaking because I am not a dog person, I am a cat person. There is no shame in not being good at something. The shame is when you think you are good at something, and you are not. Like writing.

There is nothing to be gained by encouraging poor writers to consider themselves writers. It is far more charitable to suggest they look around themselves and pick up something else. Like needlepoint, golf, the tango. Let's face it, you want to tell them, you were not born to be a writer. It is highly unlikely that you will become a writer. So admit that, get on with it, and figure out what you do well, because that will be the gift that you give the world. Not your poorly written prose.

I'll close with a recent comment that went up on WYSBAW:

"This post is delicious; and as someone who gave up his other career only to write (been writing a novel for two years, working every single day on it), I believe this piece only means to caution. Writing is a difficult and lonely job, which, unlike heart-surgery, a lot of people tend to think is easy, primarily because, unlike heart-surgeons, everyone who ever went to a school was taught elementary writing in some language. Advising caution in a world where publishing has been ‘democratised’ and a large percentage of literate people think they can write something of true value to the reader (in such a way that there may soon be more writers than readers) is the sole point of this piece. That, it seems to make well. The opinion that this piece may demoralise the person who would otherwise go on to write the next Hundred years of Solitude or Tin Drum (substitute your favourite books here) has little merit; Márquez or Grass wouldn’t give up writing if they had read this when young."

Buy THE TUMOR: "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."

tags / WRITING, BLOGGING, LITERATURE

Documenting Creating

March 26, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

Yesterday I read Austin Kleon's Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered. Like his Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative it's a quick read and very visual.

The line that stuck in my head was: "Become a documentarian of what you do." I like this idea because it refocuses your attention away from end result = product to current result = process/progress.

He also suggests you share something small every day.

Here's my current status:

Buy THE TUMOR: "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."

tags / WRITING, SHOP, BOOKS, REVIEWS, FICTION

What I Learned from Guest Blogging

March 24, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

Last week, I had the opportunity to guest blog on Kottke.org. Here are my takeaways.

Keep it lean. Flay the fat.

There are intelligent readers online. Stop pandering to the idiots.

Seek out that which delights. Or terrifies.

A beautiful post is a work of art. Like the sea.

There's great content out there, waiting to be found. Find it.

Buy THE TUMOR: "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."

tags / BLOGGING, WORK, WRITING

Bye, Baldy

March 17, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

I'm still guest blogging over at Kottke this week. Today's posts include: "Say Hello to Chemo and Goodbye to Bald."

I went wig shopping, but I never bought one. The American Cancer Society sent me a hideous free brunette wig that showed up one day in a brown envelope in the mail, and I stuck it in a drawer. I didn't wrap a scarf around my head like Elizabeth Taylor. Sometimes, I wore my husband's USMC baseball hat. More often than not, I walked around exposed: I was six-two, I was bald, and I was angry. I felt humiliated, but I did it anyway. I hated that I was sick, yet I was hellbent on refusing to hide the fact that I was. I startled people, and eventually it dawned on me that I wasn't me anymore, I was The Sick Person, and what everyone saw when they saw me was the looming specter of human frailty.

[Kottke]

Buy THE TUMOR: "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."

tags / CANCER, BLOGGING, WORK

The Numbers on Self-Publishing Digital Fiction

March 13, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

Considering a title for this post, I was reminded of a post I wrote back in 2010, "The Numbers on Self-Publishing Long-Form Journalism." In 2009, I'd self-published, "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?", a longform look at how the Great Recession impacted the adult movie industry. The piece was free for readers, so the numbers I wrote about in that follow up essay mostly focused on how many people had read it.

This week, I self-published "The Tumor," a beautifully designed, deeply horrifying digital short story about a husband, a wife, and the tumor that shows up to terrorize them. You can buy it directly from me on my website, and I'm charging $1.

Or am I?

Gumroad, the platform I'm using to process payments, has a payment option called Pay What You Want. You can read about how Gumroad does PWYW here. Of course, Gumroad didn't invent PWYW. Radiohead used the pricing strategy to sell In Rainbows. Stephen King used it to serialize The Plant. Panera Bread used it to hawk turkey chili.

According to Wikipedia:

"Pay what you want (or PWYW) is a pricing strategy where buyers pay any desired amount for a given commodity, sometimes including zero. In some cases, a minimum (floor) price may be set, and/or a suggested price may be indicated as guidance for the buyer. The buyer can also select an amount higher than the standard price for the commodity."

Gumroad enables you to utilize PWYW pricing by giving the seller (people like me) the option to add a "+" when setting the price for the product. I decided to charge $1 for "The Tumor," and I added the PWYW option. So the price for the buyer (people like you) appears as $1+. When you click to purchase, Gumroad's prompt next to the amount box reads: "Name a fair price." You can enter $1, or you can enter a bigger amount -- say, $3, or $5, or $1,000. It's up to you, the consumer. 

Why would you use PWYW? Well, for one, Gumroad asserts, "Pay-what-you-want products often make upwards of 20% more revenue." I'd already used PWYW with Gumroad because Clayton Cubitt is my friend, and a photographer, and people were emailing him with questions all the time -- you know, asking for advice -- so he created the InterroClayton. Basically, you can ask him a question, but you have to pay for the answer.

As Cubitt puts it:

"This $2 digital download entitles the purchaser to ask any single question of me and receive an honest answer to it in a timely fashion. It is a VIP ticket to my mind."

Way to monetize your brain power.

(Side note: You can also "sell" your stuff for free on Gumroad. One great thing about Gumroad is that you get to see who is buying your product. Unlike Amazon. Like I said before, Fuck Bezos. You won't be making money, per se, but, as Gumroad says, "It's a great way to get valuable data from your audience in exchange for giving them great content." Gumroad's got more on pricing and pay what you want here, and you can also check out their "Is Pay What You Want Pricing for You?" interview with author Tom Morkes, who wrote The Complete Guide to Pay What You Want Pricing. Also, Money has "A Brief History of Pay What You Want Businesses" and Louis C.K.'s role in it).

In any case, "The Tumor" is PWYW priced at $1+. So far, the average price people are paying for it is $2.77. The highest price paid thus far is $20, and $3 and $5 are popular amounts.

Interesting.

What's interesting to me here is not the money, or the pricing model, but the concept of value and who decides it. Is the black convertible Bentley that I see parked at the gym worth $226,000? Last year, Fiat started selling Maserati Ghiblis for $68,000, well below the rest of their $100,000-plus Maserati models, so what does that do to their brand and our perception of it, when randoms can afford a Maserati? Or, you know, why don't you just buy a Nissan Versa for $12,000 and call it a day because you don't need a car to tell the world your worth?   

Why would you pay $1 to read "The Tumor"? Why would you pay $20 to read "The Tumor"? What is "The Tumor" worth? What is its value? What service does it provide? What is the market value of a fiction?

Here's the first page of "The Tumor" (page design by Domini Dragoone):

Now, what would you pay to read the rest?

tags / FICTION, MONEY, PUBLISHING, THE TUMOR