Ariel Gore is famous. I know this because she’s highly googlable, can get the likes of Susie Bright and Dave Eggers on the phone, gets fan mail, and most recently wrote How to Become A Famous Writer Before You’re Dead. I read Ariel’s book for some sort of Red Bull style booster in advance of National Novel Writing Month. Yeah, scads of people are reading No Plot No Problem, and I heartily recommend this NaNoWriMo Bible as well, but I don’t just want to finish a novel, I want to publish a novel and be cradled in the voluptuous arms of pop-lit 5-minute stardom at least once, and hopefully the feeling becomes infectious enough to repeat it.
Ariel’s book does more than other writing-on-writing books do. It’s not just tackling the artistic side of writing, though much of the book does this. It goes after the reason we write, which is to illuminate and stir response. We want to either be loved or hated. We don’t want ot be ignored.
Ariel tackles the the prickly subjects about writing that writers who think of themselves as serious tend to sneer at. Publicity, design, self-publishing, critical feedback, audience appreciation, networking and humility. though personal experience and a number of interviews with “made” authors, she shows a pattern of what people do to become writers, what writers do to become published authors and what published authors do to become read authors.
What I like about Ariel, whose credits include a small shelf of single-mom tomes, is that she doesn’t take the excuses that run through a person’s brain while they are reading books like this. You think to yourself “I’m a parent” just as she gets to the parts about how she’s published as a single mom. You think about your commitments to family and friends as she gets to the part about how you need to hide from them. you fret about not being published by some serious house and she comes back with the inherent betterness of ‘zine culture and self publishing, citing authors that you’ve liked that either did self-publish or hit it big through chap-books. She cites others, but I’ll mention the dubious fame of Ayn Rand, a self-published author who at least in that one respect lives up to the ideals she spouted. James Joyce released Ulysses in segments in a newspaper. Among Ariel’s greatest hit list, Anäis Nin self published. Susie Bright and Dave Eggers self publish. And it does have a certain logic. If you aren’t willing to bet on yourself, why should someone else?
I always felt somewhat uneasy about the notion of “vanity” presses, but I think she makes the decent point when she says this term makes no sense. you want to be published. Sorry, but a certain amount of vanity is already established in that one desire. Not many books get published each year for all sorts of reasons ranging from your quality as a writer, to market demands, to the desire of a published to gamble on a new writer to who you know or don’t know and what kind of paper stock you send your manuscript in.
Mostly what I get from Ariel, aside form that published, often known authors still don’t rake in lots of dough and that they have to do a lot of hustling and networking, is that it is a matter of moxy. It’s deciding that you’re going to muscle you’re way to publishing because you’ve got something worth telling and not publishing is to deny the world of this brilliance. You’re mean if you don’t share it.
This leads to some thoughts on the dubious qualities of journaling as actual writing practice, which I enjoyed since I’m crap at keeping any sort of private journal. Most have ended up being used as notebooks for this or that project or places to write down shopping lists. I actually enjoyed seeing that the writers that she interviewed, many of whom I admire, can’t maintain a private journal either. If it’s not going to be released, I don’t know what the point is, I guess. If it’s so secret, I could just think it and be done with it.
In the end, Ariel is not that famous. My mom didn’t know who she was. Stephen King is famous in that sort of scale. But Ariel is in this sphere of authors that I can appreciate. Working, creating and bringing new ideas and thoughts into being and not hording them and not waiting until some company says she can publish them and loving people who pick up her work. I’ve got a small collection of writing-on-wiring books that deal with the task of producing quality work, of getting it submitted in the right format to prospective agents and publishers, and how to pick these people to submit to. Most of these end with the idea of getting used to rejection as part of the long, arduous process. Ariel Gore doesn’t leave that part out, but she takes it one more step: With or without these people, one way or another, you’re going to publish if that’s what you want to do.
I’m going to be too busy for National Novel Writing Month this November. Moving to another country. Working part time at one job and looking for a job. Preparing with Maryam to be parents. But yet again, I’m going to make the mad dash to November 30, but with the idea that one way or another, what gets produced is heading for publication of some sort somewhere.
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