Off Topic

Putting on the Writer’s Hat

As my wife starts her own blog on the transition of being 40, I am reminded that I am in my own transition. Jenny’s transition involves returning to the world of adults after five years of raising our young daughter, Cerridwyn. My transition involves buying a hat.

I wouldn’t call this a midlife crisis. Thirty-six isn’t exactly midlife these days. I don’t think so, anyway. I’m still young, though teetering on the edge of Not-Young. Besides, I sold a sports car rather than buy one. And I replaced it with a hat.

This has only made sense to a few open-minded people, but then again I’ve only bothered to explain to a few. The lovely Japanese woman who runs one of the schools I work for didn’t get it.

“I sold my Mustang and bought this hat.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s hard to explain. It’s a way of letting go of my youth and reclaiming my sense of self.”

  “Nani? I don’t understand what you are saying.”

Yeah. I felt the need to explain it to Kumiko, not because she was entitled to explanation, and not because I burned with some self-conscious obligation to justify my new hatness. I wanted to explain it to myself in the simplest of terms—language barriers often force you into that.

It worked well enough for myself, if not for Kumi.

Okay, so, the hat: a cheap knockoff ofHerbert Johnson’s “The Poet.” That symbolism is clear. What other hat does the Writer wear? But this hat is famous. Harrison Ford wore it as Indiana Jones. It came with a little Indiana Jones pin sewn into the band. Jenny ripped that sucker off for me. It’s not his hat anymore, it’s mine.  

Indy was my first hero, and I wrote my first short story in the fourth grade. It was called “Indiana Jason and the Temple of Bananas.” It was four pages, front and back. Indiana Jason chased the bad guy into a cave, and, like young David against the giant, he slung a rock into the villain’s belly button—the belly button, because besides the butt or the nuts, which would have gotten me in trouble, that’s the funniest place to hit him—and the villain melted into a gelatinous ooze. Then, just as Indiana Jason was about to leave the cave, from the ooze on the cave floor arose Farrah Fawcett and Loni Anderson. In bikinis. They flanked the young hero, and off the three of them walked into the Great Whatever. The story was a hit amongst my 10-year-old peers.

I would forget about Indy during the prolonged identity crisis of my post-adolescence. I bounced back and forth between majors: history, pre-med, pre-law, political science, communication, journalism, education. It was during this time of being pulled apart by possibility that I got my first new car, a white 1998 Mustang. I made a symbol of it immediately, equating it with the white horse the hero rides into the sunset. Justine, what I named the car, was my steed, and ride off into the sunset we did, into every sunset we could find. One sunset found us at the banks of the Mississippi River, reading Poe and scrawling our own verses. This was about the time I decided I should become a writer. Clearly I was a romantic. And romantics write.

This identity would take a long time to set in. I’d never really envisioned myself in the role before. Perhaps it should have been obvious. Every English teacher I ever had pushed me in that direction. I’d won contests, achieved a “Distinguished” rating on my writing portfolio in high school.  Eventually, I was getting paid to write.

But here’s the thing: In the fifteen years since I had decided to become a writer, I had never really felt like a real writer. I felt like a wannabe who may be kidding himself. I enrolled in Spalding University’s MFA program only on the suggestion of a friend. I’d never heard of the school or the degree. The door opened and I went through it. I had no idea when I got there I’d be surrounded by people who already had master’s degrees, who already had books published, who knew what was meant by “story arc.” They told Moby Dick jokes. I’d never read it, just pretended I understood and laughed on cue. They were writers. I was in over my head.

Well, I graduated. I became a teacher of writing. I got a few things published. But even though I’d started calling myself one, I still did not feel like a writer. I wondered if ever would. I wondered at what point I would feel justified calling myself that. Would I feel like one if and when I published a book? Would the book actually have to sell? I still haven’t received any sort of check from a publisher. Could I call myself a writer when I finally get one?

So, this summer, at 36 years old, I reached a moment of truth for myself. I was measuring myself by the wrong criteria. Justine sat in the driveway rotting. I’d long stopped driving her. She wasn’t quite right for baby car seats. I came to view her as the last vehicle of indecisive youth in my life. I didn’t want to sell her. She was a part of me. We’d been through a lot. I’d put her through road warrior hell. Selling her felt like selling my youth. Selling her, in a way, was buying into an adult identity. I was a grownup. I should act like a grownup. I was a writer. I should act like a writer.

My mother used to say, “Dress for the job you want, not for the job you have.” Now, what she meant was suit and tie and spit-shined shoes. She did not mean an Indiana Jones hat. But after, I don’t know, 20 years of hearing her say that, I finally took her advice. I couldn’t have my white horse, but I could decide to step into a role I’d wanted to step into for a long time. I am a writer. I wear the poet’s hat. I wear the hat of my first hero. I become Indiana Jason, sans bimbos. Indiana Jason does not need bimbos, or white horses, or anybody telling him whether or not he is a writer. He is one.

In the end, the hat is not a fashion statement. It’s a life statement. It’s a statement of my identity as Writer. 

Professionals on the Cheap

A few years ago, sitting across from a former boss at a Chicago restaurant, I was informed by the Man he was thinking about hiring a large number of Filipinos to write for him.  He could get five of them for about $2000 a month. That’s what I was making. Just me.

When perusing so-called freelance writing websites, I discovered just how dime-a-dozen writers can be. I don’t want to call so many of them whores, but…$1.25 per article? That was the brokered price, so the writers actually took less. I wouldn’t take $1.25 per tweet.

Recently I was informed of open positions at a ubiquitous online university. Sixty grand. Benefits. Work from home. Sounded like a dream and it was. Part-time internals considered first, later I was told they had 3100 applicants for 315 jobs.

The first time I heard something like that was 2005. I applied to a local TV news station for a low-level, low-paying news teaser writer spot. The man on the phone replied, “I don’t know why there are so many applicants for this job.”

Last fall, when inquiring about the status of my poetry manuscript, the publisher informed me my book was one of 916 being read and considered. I have not heard back again.

A state university in Indiana is offering professional teachers with advanced degrees a whopping $26,000 per year. Hey, plus benefits! Slightly more than the assistant manager at McDonalds, who doesn’t have crushing student loan debt.

Previously, in 1999, before the world changed, before dotcoms busted and hiring freezes hit, I was getting interviews and job offers at great places before I had even finished college. After that, they wanted 5-7 years experience at entry level.

Fourteen years later, it’s pretty much stayed that way: professionals fighting for entry-level positions. Severe competition is the new normal, and it’s sure hard to feel special when every pond in the world is now a great lake. I don’t want to get into a treatise on globalization. Not even sure how I feel about it other than so far not so good, “inevitable” as it is.

But it is concerning knowing how secretive the US government is being about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would pretty much complete the globalization process by applying free-trade principles to relationships with Pacific countries like Japan, Australia, Peru, etc. SuperNAFTA means ponds are about to get bigger. Given our experience of globalization over the past decade or so, it’s not surprising the highest levels are concerned enough about public opposition that they’ve classified the information. It’s huge news in Japan, I’m told from the Japanese nationals running Kentucky factories.

In terms of careers, there really were good old days. Now and in the future, it appears if you’re not at the absolute top of your game, you float to the bottom with the carp. There will be no middle.

Depressing post this turned out to be. Keep your head up.  

Kill Your Own Darlings, Jerk

Murder your darlings. – Sir Arthur Quiller-Crouch

It’s too bad such a great phrase has become such a writing cliché. The last time I heard it, the quote was attributed to Stephen King.  Before that I had heard it was Faulkner. Neither is true. It was a snooty old prof at Cambridge warning writers about the dangers of ornamentation. This was about the time the grumpy and irritatingly correct  William Strunk was leading his own rebellion against flowery Romantics across the Atlantic. They were sick of all that pretty and wanted writers to just get to the point. You think in a time of locomotives and world wars, people have time for your damnable puffery?

There seems, too, a divide over the meaning of the phrase. I had understood it to mean that one must have the guts and self awareness to acknowledge when a passage doesn’t work and then slash its pretty throat. It doesn’t matter if you love it. You are not objective enough to really make that determination until weeks or months later once the proverbial bloom comes off the rose. Once it does, kill it. Murder that beautiful piece. But that may be too rational an understanding of the phrase. Another interpretation is that you should kill your darlings precisely because you love them. If you, the author, are in love with a particular word coupling or tagline or paragraph or passage—kill it dead because you’ve probably dumped a whole bottle of literary maple syrup onto a pile of sugar-coated honey-glazed word donuts. So pick your favorite part and kill it because the audience will resent your self-indulgence. The audience, who may not be familiar with the phrase, at least share King’s actual and less eloquent opinion: Stop trying to be brilliant and tell the $@#!&! story.

There’s truth to it. And many writers, myself included, have to go through this phase of cheap ornamentation before learning to pare it down to its essential elements. Spare writing. Stark writing. No-hiding writing. Hemingway and Carver made it worse, inspiring a generation of writers following their lead. You see it in modern poetry, among the long lasting movement of what I call Zen poems about bees and flowers. Modern poetry doesn’t rhyme, doesn’t need structure, and for Pete’s sake don’t write about love unless you want to look like a kitschy poser. Perhaps part of the darling-killing movement is this (modern) desire to not be moved by fairy tales any longer. We consider ourselves mature, not subject to the whimsy we once were. We're serious creators and serious connoisseurs. Don't tease us. Show us real life. The modern world is sleek, fast, to the point. Modern literature is a knife. And it’s a kind of blasphemy to dislike Hemingway and Carver.

Well, consider me blasphemous. I’m not indicting them. Many have loved these authors and that’s okay. Love them. Write like them, if that’s possible. As for me and my house, we like a little sugar.

The Philosophy of Spare survived even the post-modernists, the too-smart-for-the-room Warhols, and is backed up by the proliferation of online literature. Blog posts should be short, theses obvious. Stories—cut them down to 500 words. Make whatever you write small enough to fit into a Twitter feed, tiny little chocolate morsels of truth as people go about their surfing, their realities fragmenting in real time.

But at the same time, back in the world of books, the kids everyone doubts the future of (don’t sweat that, kids, happens every generation) are buying books thick enough to use as booster seats. Yes, some have glittering eterna-teen vampires in them. But some of them have much better kinds of magic created by authors who set out to write something beautiful and perhaps ornate. And you know what? How else would the literate youth rebel against their forerunners? By reading the same stuff their parents read?

After 100 years or so of Modernism and Post-Modernism, someone told me we were entering a literary phase of neo-realism. Lord, I hope not. Nothing worse to me than realism in fiction. Please, please, please don’t spend three pages telling how a plow works. Actually, I think we’re going back farther than that. Perhaps the steampunk rage is a better indicator that fantasy and romance are en vogue—and I hope for a while.

And fantasy and romance require, well, darlings.