by www. clarkesworldmagazine. com; Mike Resnick; Lezli Robyn; Simon DeDeo; Catherynne M. Valente
I would like the equation to be simple. Want made manifest in glorious books = success. Straight-to-RPG Tolkien knock offs = failure. But we all know otherwise. There is no equation, unless it’s spin around three times, sacrifice a chicken, shut your eyes real tight, throw your book into the air and hope it was the right chicken. In the face of that kind of chance, that kind of future, where every book is an act of voodoo and faith with no hope but a fool’s hope?
You spin around three times. You sacrifice a chicken. You close your eyes and write your book. There’s nothing else. Nothing else possible. And there is a zen to be found in embracing that, even if what you were put on this earth to write isn’t a bestseller that engulfs you in praise every day. Life is a lot like a publishing contract: a thing full of promise, a cauldron into which we throw all our best ideas and acts, and out of which comes utterly unpredictable results. Children with eight arms, Chinese gymnastic teams, even recursive books about folklore and griffins. Yes, and bestsellers, too, but you can never be sure if it was the onion or the eye of newt that did the trick.
Every book is an act of voodoo, gorgeous voodoo, sympathetic magic, of stupid, blind faith. Our job is to maintain that faith just long enough to produce about a hundred thousand words. And that’s as it should be. Faith is not always answered. That is also as it should be. We are wicked fairies, all of us. We must pay our tithes to hell, and some of those tithes come in the form of failed books, rejected manuscripts, bad reviews.
When I got my first acceptance — not a short story, not a poem, but a full-blown (and largely forgotten) novel called The Labyrinth back in 2004, I sat very delicately on my couch and closed my laptop. I realized something in that moment that I am trying very hard to remember right now, when I fear for my ability to keep working in the steel town I have chosen: publication was never the point. The point was the work, the book, the voodoo, the faith. The point was the sheer joy of creating something out of nothing, crystal out of gross matter. They will never really want what I have to give. My job, insofar as I have one, is to make what I have to give glow so brightly that they cannot turn away from it.
And that’s your job, too.
That’s it, right there. That’s the serenity that this life will offer, and not too much more. There is never a time when you are not scared for your next contract, never a time when you do not fear for your future, when you stop praying to the motley gods of union-workers and Ohio steel towns to let you keep working, please, just a few more years. Even J.K. Rowling, she of the blessings and grace you hope for, worries about what she’ll do next. It’s a serenity that is hard to hold on to, it requires steadfastness and a world-champion grip.
I talked to a few of my friends about all of this, trying to wrestle my conscience with regards to writing what I believed in as opposed to what I believed would sell. And they talked to me about not caring about anything but what you love — Hal Duncan used the word “fuck” a lot. It’s a golden thread, maybe even a cliché, but back when I was unpublished, I still thought a byline would fix everything. Nobody told me that every couple of months someone would ask you to sell your soul and you’d have to seriously check the bank account before saying no.
Hal told me: “If it sells, it sells; if it doesn’t, fuck it. It’s worth trying, at least. I like Joyce, Borges, Pinter, Davenport. I’ve bought their books. Lots of people have bought their books. Fuck, look at Heller’s CATCH-22 and you find this totally non-linear absurdist narrative that’s probably garnered as much cash as it has kudos. So why the fuck not just go for it and hope for the best?”
“As a writer, there’s so much that I don’t have control over!” said Theodora Goss. “How my work is packaged, marketed, distributed. There’s really only one thing I do have control over: the quality of my writing. I can’t always make it great, but I can always do my absolute best. I can hold myself to what I consider a high standard. The things that we can’t control can bother us so much. It sounds like a cliché, but sometimes it is genuinely comforting to say, when things spin out of control, that what I could do, I did…remember Dickinson and Van Gogh. I think in the end all you can do is write to the standard that you’ve set for yourself, write the way you think you should, and hope that the work will be meaningful. The rest is up to whatever fate controls writers.”
And fate, all three of them, are stone cold bitches. They laugh at awards and ash their cigarettes on them, they gobble up all your fervent hopes and ask for more, always more, without giving a damn thing back. It’s their nature. And it is ours to be fodder for them. The only other option is death.
And you know what? Even if you don’t feel it, even if you’ve had your baby chucked out of the big city this very week, especially if you have, you say these things anyway. When someone asks you silly questions for an online article. When your spouse is tired of your lack of income. At night, when you’re sure you’ll never sell another book. You say it anyway. Everything true bears reminding. It’s a mantra, it is specifically designed to heal the broken soul. And it becomes true again in less time than you think.
About the Author
Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of Palimpsest and the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and five books of poetry. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated nine times for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Spectrum Award was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2007. She currently lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs. Her crowdfunded novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, can be found at http://catherynnemvalente.com/fairyland
