Freedom is Just Another Word

A writer friend of mine pointed me to an NPR interview with NYT writer David Carr about the benefits of writing free content, which he has done in addition to his paid work for NYT. (The catalyst for the NPR story was the recent sale of HP to AOL for a ridiculous sum). In the piece, they also mention Carr's piece in NYT on the same topic.

In the summer of 2009, I wrote a very long blog post called Why It Sucks to Be a Writer. In that rant, I decried how people were offering me, in exchange for my writing not for money but for a CHANCE FOR EXPOSURE! And I further noted that the next time I want exposure, I'll hop up on the bar and take my shirt off. In fact, I actually do write for free for the Austinist -- a weekly column that is often in the Top Ten most read list, which is to say I drive traffic to the site for free. So you could say I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. Like many double speakers, I rationalize-- in this case, my rationalization goes like this: While Austinist is based on a site that started as Gothamist, it is very much locally run, lovingly put together by a group of passionate Austinites. I liken my contribution to being on par with hosting a KOOP radio show, an effort made out of a combination of my love for the medium as well as my love for this city.

But it's not all selflessness. Hardly. I also use my column as a chance to cross market. In my tagline I often mention upcoming workshops and camps, both of which generate a decent portion of my annual income. In that sense, I suppose I could argue that each column is one very long advertisement for myself.

When other sites have asked me to write for free, I have mostly balked. But Carr makes the point that Facebook is packed with what is, in essence, free content which draws in bazillions of readers who are then exposed to all the advertising.

As free content grows, the price I can get for my work drops, another point Carr examines. One guy he quotes likens this model to feudalism and I think that's a good analogy. Why should the people who own and profit off these sites buy the cow when the milk is free, right?

I find, in my own work, things continue to shift. Recently I was hired to write for a major website that pays-- compared to most-- outrageously well. I could, if they would give me just four assignments per month (posts of just 500 words) make enough to live on comfortable. On the other hand, I just created a document of about 6000 words that netted me $1000. Yes, that's fucking insane. But I tried to ignore the word count-- and the pennies per word it amounted to-- and look at my bottom line, which is a massive monthly mortgage. You know, you do what you have to.

In my writing classes, I try to help my students consider ways to get their work published for pay. But I always always emphasize how increasingly difficult this has become. So, in a sense, this is also me talking out both sides of my mouth. I do encourage them to start (or continue) blogging to at least have the satisfaction of putting their words out there. And/but is anyone reading blogs? I hardly read blogs and I write about six of them (for self, for others). Partly, I am so busy producing content that I have little time to consume it. More to the point, a combination of too many choices and way way way too much crap writing finds me avoiding blog reading more often than not. And lately, I've gone practically Luddite, at long last attacking the teetering stack of-- gasp-- BOOKS by my bedside. (I augment with lots of audiobooks but that's a comparison to examine at another time).

So, is writing for pay going away for good? Well, of course not. There will always be the mega bestsellers who make millions. And there will be some websites-- at least I hope-- that continue to pay some money. But this whole constant shifting has left me confused about "being a writer for a living." At a dinner party not long ago, a writer friend of mine, contemplating whether or not to write another book, voiced hesitation simply because, "Why bother just adding more to the existing heap?" I argued the point that his thoughts, words, and stories contained a unique element that makes them as important as everyone else's writing (more important than some, in fact). But at the same time, I totally understood what he was saying. After having six books published and four rejected, I find myself at an odd crossroads: Writing books is what I DO. To simply stop writing isn't an option. But then, how often do I find myself trying to come up with a book idea based on marketability vs. "just" a topic for which I feel passion?

It's almost unavoidable. Last week in this space I tore apart the book Poser for being, to my mind, totally contrived. That bugged the shit out of me. But maybe it's because I have my own fears around doing the same. Is pure writing for writing's sake a thing of the past?

Ah, that's where we circle back around. The answer to that is NO. Blogs, which in so many ways have destroyed the ability to make a living writing, also do allow us the ultimate freedom to write what we wish. They call to mind my favorite Dolly Parton quote, "I had to get rich before I could sing like I was poor again." This, I believe, a reference to the gorgeous, stripped down bluegrass records she has released in the past decade or so. She couldn't do things her own way, once her Big Persona was established, until she reached the point that money didn't matter any more--she has enough of it. Now she can do what she wants.

This no-more-pay-for-words thing that's going around is a perverted echo of that quote. I never did get rich enough to write like I did when I was young-- with abandon (and, I humbly admit, unintentional pretension-- wait, can pretension be unintentional?) But since I'm not getting paid much anymore, well, what the hell, I no longer have to come up with clever pitches for women's magazines.

But then, I do have to find other ways to support myself. I perform a LOT of weddings toward this end. And I teach writing-- is that ironic? Fraudulent? Am I perpetuating the myth, in these writing classes, that my students can fulfill that dream to have a book published? I worried about that a lot when I decided to start offering workshops on a regular basis. Now I don't worry about it. I make it clear, even before the first class begins, that we're not primarily in the room to learn how to write for publication/pay. We're in the room to learn how to put our stories down in words, and to polish those stories. Some show up to put their stories down in an effort to heal from wounded pasts-- and that, I know from personal experience, is a real and priceless thing. Beyond all that, I remind myself that no one is being forced to sign up, and anyone who wants can leave at anytime.

I also teach kids' camps, and these might be the "purest" jobs I take. There is no agenda beyond having fun. There is no wondering, as I sometimes do when contemplating being a wedding officiant, how I can reconcile myself to being opposed to marriage in my own life and yet be perfectly okay with marrying others. (Aside: I don't really worry about that a whole lot-- I am hired to perform a function, and it's something I'm good at, so okay then, makes sense to me in that context.)

One thing I have been thinking about lately, regarding words for money, is simply asking readers to give me some. I have friends who start KickStarter campaigns to raise money to put out their CDs. I'm happy to support such efforts. I have been toying with starting a KickStarter page of my own, and saying, flat out: Look, I have an idea for a book, and another one for a screenplay. I have no idea if these things will come to pass and be "marketable" but I really want a chance to try, and my current work-forty-jobs schedule isn't allowing that. Therefore, if you enjoy reading my Austinist column, which I write for free, would you consider making a $5 donation? If I can get 1,000 of you to make a donation, that will afford me two months where I can put down all my hustling and job taking and just fully focus on my writing. So, what do you say?

I haven't been able to do this yet-- it feels oddly like passing the hat, begging for people to indulge my little pastime. I haven't ruled out the request yet either, and even had a sign from the universe that maybe it's the way to go-- just last week, out of the blue, a reader from Chicago sent me $50 just because she could. Another time, a reader sent a few bucks, noting that's what she'd pay for a newspaper. When I want to feel NOT like a beggar, I remember this excellent blogpost by Amanda Fucking Palmer saying why she has NO QUALMS about asking for money.

No big conclusions here. Just mulling this whole money thing, which has always been befuddling whether you're connecting it to writing, pyramid schemes, panhandlers, or the question "is it tacky to give money as a gift?" I often long for a society in which we can trade rocks and shells for the things we need-- I have an abundance of both, just as I have an abundance of words. But alas, rocks and shells-- and increasingly written words-- won't get you too far with the taxman and other wolves at the door.

So-- your thoughts on this? Do you provide free content-- either in the form of your own blog, or blogging for others? And if so, what's your rationale. And if not-- if you refuse to write for free but have been making a living off of writing, what are you doing now to support yourself?

Poser: Sadly, The Joke Inferred by Its Title Isn't Really a Joke, It's Painfully Accurate

Note from Spike: It's not my intent to review a lot of books here. I do hope to run plenty of Q&A's with writers. And when I read really good books, I do want to mention them. But today I am posting a really negative review and part of me feels bad about it. One reason I'll never make it as a professional critic is because I prefer, overwhelmingly, to direct readers and theatergoers to stuff I LIKE. Why waste time bashing the bad stuff when there is so much good stuff out there-- that's the motto I try to mostly stick with. But I just finished listening to Poser, the audiobook version of a memoir that's getting a ton of press, and I am so fucking annoyed by it that it's haunting me. And so here I am, trying to capture my thoughts. I sort of want to apologize to the author because I want to think that she really put her best into it, and it pains me to strike out against that. Still, in the interest of complaining about larger awful trends-- which this book symbolizes-- I present my thoughts.

It’s been days since I finished listening to the audio version of Claire Dederer’s memoir, Poser, and I am still so fucking annoyed with the book that as I woke up this morning, as I came to the surface, I found myself continuing to waste time dissecting it, trying to get to the root of why it chaps me so.

First, in the interest of fairness, let’s address a major problem for which Dederer cannot be held totally accountable. I understand that whenever I choose the audio version of a book, I am quite possibly signing up for a very different experience than the author intended. Sometimes this works out great. I recently listened to Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and Under the Dome by Stephen King. Both were astonishingly great books and, on top that, each was read by an extremely talented actor that took the tales to new heights. But sometimes a reader totally (or partially) fails an author. For example, while I eventually developed a tolerance for the narrator of Jennifer Egan’s excellent A Visit from the Goon Squad—I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed the book better if I’d read it from the page.

As for Poser—which I should toss out there is allegedly a memoir about yoga—it was read with such a heightened and sustained sarcasm throughout that I wanted to scream. I have no idea why I didn’t just quit listening. Maybe my insistence on going through to the end was a combination of my admitted masochistic streak, and a hope that it would get better—that either the narrator would adjust her tone or that Dederer’s words, which I now think probably are just as sarcastic on the page, would adjust her story/attitude You know, the old formula—redemption at the end, the Grinch’s heart grows, Dorothy taps her red shoes together and has an epiphany, etc. But no, the sarcasm never lets up, and I don’t think it was just the narrator’s interpretation. Look, I know from sarcasm, I’m a Yankee and that is my native tongue. But there comes a point when enough is enough and any cleverness demonstrated by sarcasm is overcome by the pure stench of too much. Okay, so Dederer can be cleverly biting, we get it already, but did she ever really gain any insight? And do we gain any insight as a result of reading the book? I would say No and No.

Before I get to the nuts and bolts of problems in Poser, I want to cop to another thing for which Dederer cannot be held responsible: the professional jealousy I fully admit to suffering whenever another one of these flimsy memoirs comes out. I see how hard this book is being pushed by marketing forces—a huge ad inside the cover of NYT Book Review, not one but two articles dedicated to the book itself in NYT and another one that refers to it in NYT Mag. I recall my own first memoir getting orphaned when my editor left Simon and Schuster before it was published, and the editor who inherited it had less than no interest in seeing it through. There was no marketing budget for my book. So okay, let us include that factor when weighing my own criticism.

When I think about the massive marketing efforts put behind books like Poser , my mind jumps to the topic of Connections in the Book World. (Aside: If you are wondering if I’m actually going to review Poser here, the answer is maybe. I’m not sure yet.) I picked up Poser for a few reasons. First, I read the NYT Book Review review. Even though I winced a bit when I got to the part about Poser being a mommy-memoir—few words turn my stomach more than mommy as a modifier for writing, which I find so patronizing, well, even still the reviewer strongly suggested the book was worth a read. When am I going to learn to stop trusting reviewers? Once I got to the part in Poser where Dederer describes her work as a book reviewer, I could not help but suspect that anyone reviewing her book would—perhaps subconsciously—go easy on it. Fear of retribution in a future review? I’m sure I’ll catch flack for this conspiracy theory but Poser reminded me of another book that got a total NYT blowjob – I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti. That author (whose name I’ve forgotten and who I’m not even going to bother to look up) had some big connections at NYT and no one will ever convince me that this did not have a hand in the glowing story that ran about her, which duped me into buying the book. Her book, for which she got something like a quarter million dollar advance, read like an unsolicited 300 page email from a former high school friend you purposefully fell out of touch with but who tracked you down anyway via FB and insisted on telling you about her incredibly boring dating life with a few pasta recipes thrown in.

So with Poser, I want to know, does Janet Maslin really think the book is that good? Does Dani Shapiro really like it that much? Or is this all part of a bigger world of you stroke mine and I’ll stroke yours?

I mean, really, am I the only one who thought Poser was utterly contrived right down to the Elizabeth Gilbert blurb touting it as the next great thing? I’m pissed at NYT and I’m pissed at Elizabeth Gilbert (whose EPL, whether you loved it or hated it, at least had real substance) for misleading me like this.

Listening to Poser, I kept coming back to the nerd-rap song a friend told me about recently. It’s called First World Problems and there’s a line in it where the rapper bemoans not being able to find his Ambien. So, okay, Poser should be called First World Problems to the Nth Degree. Because Dederer whines about so many things that so many of us could never even dream of accessing in our lives. She bitches and moans about the “rules” imposed by being part of a hipster mom set in Seattle, by which she means, I think, white, well-off, living in a really nice place with far too much time on her hands. She pays lip service to wanting to be less judgmental but that set off my bullshit alarm. She’s judgmental throughout.

And now, as aside about feminism. Or maybe an aside about my personal life. You know, I fucking hate it—HATE IT—when supposedly intelligent women writers perpetuate the so-called Mommy Wars. I do buy into the theory that much of this “war” is a creation of the media to divide women, stir shit, and sell papers. It always gets broken down to the Stay at Homes vs. the Working Moms and who is “better” and whose kids will be less fucked up. I never read about the very real gray areas, or the people like me—a single mom who worked AND stayed at home. It’s an option, you know? If these women would spend less time advancing the myth, they’d have far more time to just kick back and enjoy their kids. 

Lisa Belkin has articles that seem to run like clockwork where she tracks down, say, a group of women with PhDs or who are CEOs who “give it all up for their kids!” Then the article is followed by an onslaught of letters to the editor where women defend their own choices and attack other women's choices. Fuck it. Fuck these Lisa Belkin backstabbing, war-perpetuating pieces of nonsense. And fuck this Dederer Poser crap, in which she tries to have things both ways, tries to pretend she’s somehow above the people she makes fun of for pretending to be above her while all of them seem to, at their most “difficult,” suffer from not being able to decide which private pre-K to choose for the children. Worse, these children, at least by Dederer’s description, seem at once to be overly coddled and somehow resented as a major imposition (before then being exploited as a writing topic).

She bashes attachment parenting, then eviscerates and exploits the life and choices of a so-called friend who adhered to attachment parenting until she changed her mind and then jumped ship and—the way Dederer describes it—bailed on her kids. As if this one woman’s behavior—or Dederer’s interpretation of her behavior—is “proof” that attachment parenting is “bad.” She makes fun of those of us who would breastfeed for more than a year or share our beds with our kids.

To each her own but must we continue to bash each other? Full disclosure: I breast fed my son for two years, let him sleep in my bed for three, but did not adhere to some rigid doctrine that required following specific rules at all times. You know, we also ate crap food, watched BH 90201, made a lot of mistakes along the way. Because we are HUMAN. Most importantly, there was not the kind of judgment among the mothers I knew about "how" to mother. Look, I'm not saying judgment is non-existent, I am saying it continues to be exaggerated to the extreme by these fucking "mommy writers" (BLECH) who know it's a hot button, and who keep setting up the false argument, keep backstabbing each other. When—I mean fucking WHEN—will these women just shut up and be grateful for their kids, and they joy they bring, and the fact that we have running water and houses and daily bread and paying work? It's a goddamn PRIVILEGE to have kids and a PRIVILEGE BEYOND COMPARE 

to have the luxury of having enough time to sit around and waste time wondering if one's parents' failed marriage is a reason that one prefers cafe au lait over double fucking frappucino.

I think this is where Poser begins to fall apart for me—which is to say at the very beginning. Dederer sets up this straw man: “Oh the pressures are too much to bear on me as I deal with my hip which is sore from carrying my baby and which I have to much time to worry about since my husband is the main breadwinner!” which she somehow uses as an excuse to write about going to yoga.

During the yoga parts of the book—which are vastly separated by the story (yawn) of her childhood and marriage (yawn yawn yawn)—she again makes fun of others: white people who dare have an interest in the Eastern side of yoga, fit women who hop from studio to studio. And yet she becomes the very things she criticizes, or at least pretends to become “enlightened” by allowing her lily-white ass to dip a toe into Eastern philosphy as she hops from studio to studio to studio.

You know what? Even as I sit here writing this, I’m thinking, “Jesus Christ, I wasted ten hours of my life listening to that audiobook and now I’m wasting another two critiquing it and you know what? My life is too fucking short. I do not want to let this woman or her work steal any more precious moments from me.”

But then, a small lament creeps in. The thing is, I wanted to like Poser. Like Dederer, I’ve been doing yoga for a dozen years, I’ve raised a kid and I’m a journalist. There should be so much that resonates, right? And there are spots where her writing sings—not like a virtuoso, but like somebody who is pretty good at karaoke. When that happens, I found myself thinking, “Cut her some slack, she’s a pretty good writer.”

But then, there she’d go again, screeching off on some tangent about how she just has to escape her mother who commits the ongoing sin of wanting to be involved in her grandkids’ lives.  

In the end any good writing and borderline keen observations are far outweighed by what never stops feeling like an utterly contrived work—one that uses yoga for a framework not out of sincerity but to continue to exploit this practice that Dederer makes fun of others for exploiting. And she tries to shape the story of her marriage into a magnificent arc of a tale when, in fact, the biggest obstacles they seem to face are an unpinpointable smell in a rental house, her husband’s depression (which she decides ultimately to dismiss—is this part of her enlightened attitude?) and perhaps an unspoken drinking problem: I lost count of how many scenes revolved around boozing it up.

We should all have such First World Problems of being financially supported by someone who will also babysit the kids while we fussily set out to find a yoga teacher that we deem worthy of our holier-than-thou selves.

But wait, that was sarcastic, wasn’t it? And didn’t I complain about too much sarcasm in Poser? Okay then, how about this, and I mean it sincerely: it will be a really awesome day when skilled women writers (and Dederer has the potential) quit bashing the shit out of each other’s mothering and quit lamenting the burden of marriages. If you hate mothering, don’t have kids. And if you’re worried about being trapped in a marriage, for fuck’s sake, don’t get married. But please, please spare us another fucking memoir about how everyone else is a fake for trying something like yoga but how you—you and your terminal uniqueness—are somehow the one single person in the universe who transcends.

Ugh.