I’ve got three of
those a-ha moments, just from the last year:
• I was watching that commencement speech
Neil Gaiman gave (“Make Good Art”), hoping like everybody that he
was going to accidentally let slip the secret to writing, but then of course I
got to just listening, and it turned out maybe he did. It’s that part where he
says, at a certain point in these proceedings—being successful, everybody
pulling you a different direction at all hours—he became aware that he’d ceased
being a writer, had become more of a professional e-mail answerer. That’s a
real danger, I think, and maybe’s even especially dangerous, seeing as how,
when you’re sculpting your perfect and apt reply, you’re typing, you’re sitting
here, you’re probably even lying . . . it feels like writing, doesn’t it? But it’s not.
I think of that a lot, lately. Every time I look at my inbox.
• Not unrelated, I was browsing some list
of writer’s rules—writers’ rules, really, those lists that circulate, from
Vonnegut, from Elmore Leonard, and on and on until there’s so many rules you
can’t even do anything, especially as they all make such obvious and perfect
and timeless sense. But Sherman Alexie had one that got to me. He said that
every word you put on-line, that’s a word that’s not going into your novel. You
can cheat yourself out of publication, a hundred and forty characters at a
time. And of course you argue ‘exposure,’ and your publisher wants a
‘platform,’ all that. But, at the end of the day, you might just have to
realize that you’re hiding in text-entry fields, instead of really facing that
blank page.
• I was in the back of the room for a panel
led by first-time novelists. Or first time books. Ones that had made a good
splash, gotten some notice. And, at the end, when people were stabbing their
hands up, asking questions, one of those questions was What’s the one piece of
advice you’d give any first-time novelist, or publishee, if that can be a word;
I’m paraphrasing here. At the time of this panel, I think I had twelve or
thirteen books out, so I was on autopilot for this answer, thinking my jaded
thoughts over on the cool side of the room. And that collective answer, from
all three panelists using a single word-balloon, it was never look yourself up
on Goodreads. Or Amazon. Which I of course took as a challenge: I went right
there, to see what the fuss was about. And I so wished I hadn’t. Not because I
didn’t agree with the positive-reviews-probably-not-from-my-mom, but because the
other reviews, of which there’s always plenty, they kind of banded together
into a chorus, specifically to haunt me as I write. I mean, the experience
faded, and it didn’t slow me down, but it did make me aware in a new way.
Specifically, in the way a woman at my very first reading, down at BookPeople
in Austin, essentially changed me: she kept asking why all the vomiting in my
stories? I remember kind of shrugging, giving some joke of an answer, and
moving on. But her hand went up again: Why the vomiting? I apologized, moved
on—she was soon to be removed from the room, as I recall—and she kept on asking
it, even when I quit calling on her. So, of course I thought, ‘crazy lady,
wow,’ and went about my super-important business. But that crazy lady, she still
lives in my head. Each time one of my characters starts to gag, or dry heave,
her hand goes up in the back of the room, and I reconsider. For better or for
worse. And, as I’m starting to realize, I only have so much room in my head. I
shouldn’t be inviting people in, should I?
Bio: Stephen Graham Jones has eleven novels and three collections
published. Up soon are The Least of My Scars and Flushboy and Zombie
Sharks with Metal Teeth. And The Gospel of Z and States of Grace and Not
for Nothing. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU
Boulder and UCR—Palm Desert. More at Demontheory.com.
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