(Image by Beda Marek, via Unsplash)
I was just browsing my most recent (and likely final) copy of Poets & Writers magazine. (Aren’t poets writers?) And I was struck once again by the most central mission of the magazine: selling hope. Markets for your work! What agents want! Contest deadlines! A million ads for a million MFA programs taught by a million writers you’ve never heard of. All of it aimed at helping its subscribers imagine themselves as “real writers,” which is to say writers who are acclaimed by someone else. As John Berger wrote, advertising is intended to make you envious of the person you’ll be after you’ve bought the product. Poets & Writers is intended to help us imagine ourselves published, and to buy both the magazine and its advertised products as mechanisms toward that holy end.
Friends, I’m here today to offer you a different holy end, which is the joy of immersion. If we can’t take sufficient joy in the fact of creation, we won’t do it for long. Trying to monetize words into dollars is just stupid. Over the course of six years, my “big book” that was highly reviewed all over the place has made me half a year’s minimum-wage income. If we want to be spoken of in the same sentence as F. Scott Fitzgerald, it’d be good for us to remember that Gatsby gets taught now because it was sent overseas to soldiers and sailors, cheaply, as a consumable entertainment during WWII. Quality does not equal notoriety; you can have either without the other. (As a moment of heresy, I wasn’t all that impressed with Gatsby when I read it for the first time, at age 60. I’d take a novel by Walter Tevis or Rex Stout or Nevada Barr any day.)
I think it’s important for writers to understand that writing is exactly and only a hobby. And to recognize that all hobbies can be sacraments, a profane mechanism that sometimes attains sacred outcomes. Have a look at this video. It’s a thirty-minute recreation of three years of work. He gave care to carpentry and wiring, to painting (with brush, roller, spray can and airbrush) and to gluing (with epoxy, spray adhesive, hot glue and wood glue). He employed skills in plastering, papier-mâché, and microfiber flocking, He studied landscape forms, botany, traffic engineering… and the natural conditions of aging in each of those media. He needed to know SketchUp, 2D printing for decals, 3D printing for structural materials, and plaster mold making for natural materials. And then, of course, the “basics” of model railroading and model cars. He’s invested tens of thousands of dollars in tools and parts and components and equipment, probably discarded mockup cardboard and masking paper and tape and plywood offcuts equal in volume to the final product. And this isn’t his first endeavor, he’s done smaller ones before.
Although he’s posted his creation and skill-sharing videos on YouTube, he’s not doing this fundamentally to monetize his time. He’d do way better working the counter at 7-Eleven. He’s doing the work because it’s a sacrament.
The guitarist and teacher Robert Fripp once wrote this:
We have three rights:
the right to work;
the right to pay to work;
the right to suffer the consequences of our work.
We have three obligations:
the obligation to work;
the obligation to pay to work;
the obligation to suffer the consequences of our work.
I am a writer, and have been for decades. I’ve been a fiction writer seriously for twelve years. And as with any meaningful hobby, I’ve spent a lot of money with no intention to recoup. I’ve spent more than five thousand dollars on writers’ conferences, I’ve spent six thousand dollars to print my novels, another thousand to have them shipped from the printer to me, and another two thousand after that to mail them around to folks who request them. I’ve used up four computers, and thousands of hours. And I give all of that away to anyone who asks. Poets & Writers does not recognize that as vital work, given their location in the hope industry. I have no hope. I have only joy in the doing, and the provision of pleasure to my friends.
The new book is off at the printer as I write this, my love letter to the anonymous paperback writers of the 1950s and ’60s.
it cost me two years to write it, and about $265 to print and ship thirty copies that I’ll have in about two more weeks. I already have about fifteen that I know I’ll give away immediately, and the rest will find what homes they’ll find.
I have the right—and the obligation—to work; to pay to work; and to suffer the consequences of my work. That’s what sacraments are, and why they’re worth doing.
Herb Childress 