(St)Ill Writing

If a writer writes a book and no one reads it, was anything written at all?

This has been my predicament for years. Decades, even.

And I can say with all the clarity of maturity and experience that I have no idea why.

I have tried. You can check out my ‘Published Works’ page and see a litany of publications. Minor successes, which may have racked up dozens of reads. I appreciate each and every one of those readers. I can literally send each one a bouquet of roses. That’s some intimate service you will never find with whoever is topping the Bestsellers lists.

But I have more to say. More stories to birth, more characters to consecrate. My lack of connection with an audience has not stopped my writing, but it has certainly made me deeply question the value and necessity of publishing.

This month, we enter the dreaded NaNoWriMo. I say dreaded, because this is the season of amateurs entering the ring with the vision of knocking out a heavyweight. Seasoned writers know this is fantasy. But I am no heavyweight. I have nothing to contest, nothing to lose. Really, I am no farther along than the Boomer who checks into Facebook, reads about NaNoWriMo and thinks, O boy, move over Dan Patterson, this bookshelf is about to me more crowded! As someone who has spent far more than the alleged 10,000 hours to feel comfortable with something, that is incredibly frustrating. That person takes up space and clutters the queues of agents and publishers and cheapens the more-than-month-long dedication it requires to do good work.

To put it into metaphor, this is the equivalent of the ‘health expert’ explosion that proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, we have platforms that allow half-baked ideas to flourish. Yes, everyone has the right to do their thing. But that means we end up with a lot of shitty bread.

In 2019, I completed Stanford’s Online Writing Course for Novel Writing. The course levelled up my writing, but it also pushed me beyond the pan flash successes of short stories and into the long slog of novel writing. It is absolutely true, what Alain de Botton said:

Writing a book is like telling a joke and having to wait two years to know whether or not it was funny.

But I can’t help but turn back to my very first post on this blog. I contemplated how Buddhist caves along the Silk Road were discovered, sealed off to the world for centuries yet packed with endless scrolls of writing. Someone spent a hell of a lot of time and effort to capture those words on those papers. The papers never left the caves. But they kept writing.

Unfortunately for myself–and anyone close to me–I have the stubborn audacity of those monks.

Except…I do not live monastically. I have a wife, I have children, I have all of Maslow’s needs x5. As much as I would love to fuck the world and do my own thing, I live intertwined with the world. And really, this is how a writer should be.

Our words are not idle entertainment, or filler between beach naps. We bring perspective, we foster empathy, we build knowledge. The sanctity of writing has been lost to commercial purposes. On one hand, that’s okay, because like I said, writers should be involved with the world. That means we have to play the economic game like everyone else. That sharpens our perspective on the realities of today. The great works of Charles Dickens, George Orwell, or someone more contemporary like Roxanne Gay, could not have been written by someone isolated in a cave. On the other hand, how well a book will sell–i.e. how homogenized it is with Today’s Popular Thing–has become the measuring stick as to whether a book makes it to your local book shop’s shelves (or more realistically, has any chance of surviving Amazon’s algorithmic hell).

So what am I saying?

I am saying there may be a literary agent or publisher who might follow-up on this page from one of my novel submissions. And they may see that there has been a lapse. They may perceive that gap as inactivity. But I have been far from inactive. I am hungrier than ever to connect with readers. I may still be rooted in my cave monk mentality, but do not expect to see the cave sealed off.

Come on in. I got some good stuff to show you.