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Anis Shivani
Writer, anisshivani.com
Posted: January 16, 2011 12:37 AM
New Rules For Writers: Ignore Publicity, Shun Crowds, Refuse Recognition And More
These "rules" totally go against every prescription for writing success you'll hear as a young writer from all quarters: the conformity-driven MFA system, the publishing industry's hype-machine, successful writers who act either like prima donnas or untouchable mystics, the marketing experts who seek to impose advertising rules on the writing product. Overpaid editors, illiterate agents, arrogant gatekeepers, and stupid reviewers want you to bargain away your soul for a pittance -- the bids in the market escalate downward, a reverse auction where you compete with the lowest of the low to be acknowledged as an entity that counts.
Why take part in the game at all? Who has ever come out of it alive, able to set up tent and build followers on the other side? Why not accept the reality that writers aren't forged in social harmony and peer input and obedient fellowship, but in a region where madmen and insomniacs find no comfort? To get you started on a regimen designed to pull you away from the mother-teat of the writing industry, here are the ten commandments:
1. Disobey the System. The system--from the MFA program to that fat-ass editor sitting in glorious judgment over your manuscript--will never reward originality. So fuck it! The more you humiliate yourself before it, shape your writing, your lifestyle, your public persona, your habits of endearment and hostility, according to what you think "they" want, the more it'll ruthlessly crush you. The system is for the benefit of insiders--and you don't get to be an insider by being an original. It's your choice: do you want to be one of the Stepford writers, whatever your genre, or do you want to issue a thunderous note of warning to all the establishment gatekeepers, a resounding Fuck You, that will get you in no one's good books? Once you're on everyone's shit list, then your mind will open up--visions you never thought possible, leaps of imagination, idle curiosity revving up into high gear--knowing that no one will ever be pleased by anything you write.
The "system"--in all its manifestations--is in utter disrepair, decadence rather. The only way to conquer it is to humiliate it. This goes against everything you've heard, all the advice to play nice. But that gets you nowhere. Or it gets you to a place where you do their bidding and become a non-entity--precisely where they want you. This is the meaning of their saccharine praise, when you've got to a point where they think they have a handle on you. Confound them. Bewilder them. Disrespect them. Mock them.[...]
2. Ignore Publicity. Ah, publicity, you've been told you need it at any cost, in whatever shape or form you can get it. Publicity is great, it puts you in the public eye, it's how people get to know your work, it's why they buy your book, it's why they want to follow you. Don't you need fans, don't you need groupies? [...]you can get forever enmeshed in the publicity machine, and publicize yourself to extinction. Publicity, that elusive bitch, keeping her own hours, never around when you call, raising hell if you so much as dare to assert a trace of your lost manhood.
Bullshit, I say, to all the claims made for publicity. The book will find its readers. Your aim should be supreme indifference to making claims on behalf of it. Do you want fans or do you want readers? Do you want to join the canon, or do you want cannonballs shot in your praise? Publicity lasts for a moment, leaves a bad taste in the mouth, or no taste at all.[...]. What you need to chase is--nothing! Let the book's mystique, its unique indifference to reception and value, chase you into immortality. Let the book speak for you. Shut up on its behalf.[...]
3. Shun Crowds. They're everywhere. You can't get away from them. They want to tell you how to think for yourself. They're there to hold your hand when your book founders, telling you it's happened to them too, it happens to the best of them. They're there to watch that you don't deviate too far from central headquarters, where assignments about fame and fortune were made long before you came up (you didn't know that, did you?), where quotas are allocated and supply orders dutifully filled and excess inventory banished. [...]
You must get out of the crowd. It's the hardest thing to do. It's the easiest thing to recreate, even in the midst of utter squalor and depravity. The crowd searches you out no matter how hard you try to hide. It comes to your door, dressed in beautiful holiday clothes, cameras around its necks, high-fiving, jive-talking, wondering why you're sitting by yourself, alone in your quarters, what's up with that? Can we just take a look at your novel? Your poetry book? Hmmm. If you changed your plot to make it a little less obscure? If you changed your poetry book to make it a little more coherent? We can help get it published--faster, much easier than you can on your own[...]
4. Seek Unemployment. This goes back to our Franklinian endowment, our desperate impulse to occupy ourselves with practical stuff, feeling useful, needed, employed like everyone else. This is the death of writing. Find ways to be unemployed, doing nothing, finding enough time on your hands, after you've met your basic needs, to wander into unknown realms of thought and imagination. You can't do it when you're busy working like everyone else, collecting a paycheck, keeping regular hours, depending on the goodwill and collegiality of customers, coworkers, bosses--[...]. Avoid this gentle poison by figuring out ways you can mock the system by taking from it what it needs to give you to maintain your writing, and give it nothing back in return.
What it wants from you is your time--your only irreplaceable commodity, the only thing you can't ever get back. Every minute spent teaching a student or hiring out your talents in any other way is an insult to your writing potential, and each such moment degrades you so that you can never attain greatness. [...]
5. Converse Only with the Classics. Be swayed by no contemporary reputations. Behind most of them are hype and deceit, the desperate machinations of a system in need of validation of its own greatness. Treat every contemporary with dire suspicion, until they stand they test of time--and most of them won't, you'll see. Read no one living with attention and gratitude, unless they've proven themselves in relation to your eternal touchstones. Keep digging up the mocked and silenced and de-canonized, for it is here you'll find most of the true gold to mine--divergent veins that were too uncommon for their times, different perspectives than the consensus outlook on a given period, experiments that petered out because they were far ahead of the trends, unfinished trains of thought that you can leap onto and claim as your own. And remember that no contemporary will ever let you do that.[...]
This is how vicious your contemporaries are. They're not dead yet. They don't believe in death. They give off the aura of charlatans denying the existence of death, which taints their writing with platitude and cliché, and makes them constantly run into dead-ends. Most of them are at the same dead-end they found themselves at when they were twenty-five or thirty, and not even the smartest ones realize where they are. You will learn nothing from them. Your job as a writer is to discover something no one else has yet laid claim on. [...]Read all your contemporaries. Take none of them seriously.
6. Refuse Recognition. At first they'll shun you--you'll know then that there's a glimmer of a chance there's something good about you. (If you find acceptance easily and quickly, without much resistance, there's nothing in these commandments for you--you're beyond help.) They'll try to burn you, destroy you, invalidate you, discredit you, call you a son of a bitch within your hearing, pin a donkey's tail on you as soon as you turn your back, and they'll pretend it's all in the service of literature, they'll feel good about [...]
[four more, see original at]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/new-rules-for-writers_b_808558.html
a book by shivani
http://www.amazon.com/Anatolia-Othe...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295376985&sr=1-1
Writer, anisshivani.com
Posted: January 16, 2011 12:37 AM
New Rules For Writers: Ignore Publicity, Shun Crowds, Refuse Recognition And More
These "rules" totally go against every prescription for writing success you'll hear as a young writer from all quarters: the conformity-driven MFA system, the publishing industry's hype-machine, successful writers who act either like prima donnas or untouchable mystics, the marketing experts who seek to impose advertising rules on the writing product. Overpaid editors, illiterate agents, arrogant gatekeepers, and stupid reviewers want you to bargain away your soul for a pittance -- the bids in the market escalate downward, a reverse auction where you compete with the lowest of the low to be acknowledged as an entity that counts.
Why take part in the game at all? Who has ever come out of it alive, able to set up tent and build followers on the other side? Why not accept the reality that writers aren't forged in social harmony and peer input and obedient fellowship, but in a region where madmen and insomniacs find no comfort? To get you started on a regimen designed to pull you away from the mother-teat of the writing industry, here are the ten commandments:
1. Disobey the System. The system--from the MFA program to that fat-ass editor sitting in glorious judgment over your manuscript--will never reward originality. So fuck it! The more you humiliate yourself before it, shape your writing, your lifestyle, your public persona, your habits of endearment and hostility, according to what you think "they" want, the more it'll ruthlessly crush you. The system is for the benefit of insiders--and you don't get to be an insider by being an original. It's your choice: do you want to be one of the Stepford writers, whatever your genre, or do you want to issue a thunderous note of warning to all the establishment gatekeepers, a resounding Fuck You, that will get you in no one's good books? Once you're on everyone's shit list, then your mind will open up--visions you never thought possible, leaps of imagination, idle curiosity revving up into high gear--knowing that no one will ever be pleased by anything you write.
The "system"--in all its manifestations--is in utter disrepair, decadence rather. The only way to conquer it is to humiliate it. This goes against everything you've heard, all the advice to play nice. But that gets you nowhere. Or it gets you to a place where you do their bidding and become a non-entity--precisely where they want you. This is the meaning of their saccharine praise, when you've got to a point where they think they have a handle on you. Confound them. Bewilder them. Disrespect them. Mock them.[...]
2. Ignore Publicity. Ah, publicity, you've been told you need it at any cost, in whatever shape or form you can get it. Publicity is great, it puts you in the public eye, it's how people get to know your work, it's why they buy your book, it's why they want to follow you. Don't you need fans, don't you need groupies? [...]you can get forever enmeshed in the publicity machine, and publicize yourself to extinction. Publicity, that elusive bitch, keeping her own hours, never around when you call, raising hell if you so much as dare to assert a trace of your lost manhood.
Bullshit, I say, to all the claims made for publicity. The book will find its readers. Your aim should be supreme indifference to making claims on behalf of it. Do you want fans or do you want readers? Do you want to join the canon, or do you want cannonballs shot in your praise? Publicity lasts for a moment, leaves a bad taste in the mouth, or no taste at all.[...]. What you need to chase is--nothing! Let the book's mystique, its unique indifference to reception and value, chase you into immortality. Let the book speak for you. Shut up on its behalf.[...]
3. Shun Crowds. They're everywhere. You can't get away from them. They want to tell you how to think for yourself. They're there to hold your hand when your book founders, telling you it's happened to them too, it happens to the best of them. They're there to watch that you don't deviate too far from central headquarters, where assignments about fame and fortune were made long before you came up (you didn't know that, did you?), where quotas are allocated and supply orders dutifully filled and excess inventory banished. [...]
You must get out of the crowd. It's the hardest thing to do. It's the easiest thing to recreate, even in the midst of utter squalor and depravity. The crowd searches you out no matter how hard you try to hide. It comes to your door, dressed in beautiful holiday clothes, cameras around its necks, high-fiving, jive-talking, wondering why you're sitting by yourself, alone in your quarters, what's up with that? Can we just take a look at your novel? Your poetry book? Hmmm. If you changed your plot to make it a little less obscure? If you changed your poetry book to make it a little more coherent? We can help get it published--faster, much easier than you can on your own[...]
4. Seek Unemployment. This goes back to our Franklinian endowment, our desperate impulse to occupy ourselves with practical stuff, feeling useful, needed, employed like everyone else. This is the death of writing. Find ways to be unemployed, doing nothing, finding enough time on your hands, after you've met your basic needs, to wander into unknown realms of thought and imagination. You can't do it when you're busy working like everyone else, collecting a paycheck, keeping regular hours, depending on the goodwill and collegiality of customers, coworkers, bosses--[...]. Avoid this gentle poison by figuring out ways you can mock the system by taking from it what it needs to give you to maintain your writing, and give it nothing back in return.
What it wants from you is your time--your only irreplaceable commodity, the only thing you can't ever get back. Every minute spent teaching a student or hiring out your talents in any other way is an insult to your writing potential, and each such moment degrades you so that you can never attain greatness. [...]
5. Converse Only with the Classics. Be swayed by no contemporary reputations. Behind most of them are hype and deceit, the desperate machinations of a system in need of validation of its own greatness. Treat every contemporary with dire suspicion, until they stand they test of time--and most of them won't, you'll see. Read no one living with attention and gratitude, unless they've proven themselves in relation to your eternal touchstones. Keep digging up the mocked and silenced and de-canonized, for it is here you'll find most of the true gold to mine--divergent veins that were too uncommon for their times, different perspectives than the consensus outlook on a given period, experiments that petered out because they were far ahead of the trends, unfinished trains of thought that you can leap onto and claim as your own. And remember that no contemporary will ever let you do that.[...]
This is how vicious your contemporaries are. They're not dead yet. They don't believe in death. They give off the aura of charlatans denying the existence of death, which taints their writing with platitude and cliché, and makes them constantly run into dead-ends. Most of them are at the same dead-end they found themselves at when they were twenty-five or thirty, and not even the smartest ones realize where they are. You will learn nothing from them. Your job as a writer is to discover something no one else has yet laid claim on. [...]Read all your contemporaries. Take none of them seriously.
6. Refuse Recognition. At first they'll shun you--you'll know then that there's a glimmer of a chance there's something good about you. (If you find acceptance easily and quickly, without much resistance, there's nothing in these commandments for you--you're beyond help.) They'll try to burn you, destroy you, invalidate you, discredit you, call you a son of a bitch within your hearing, pin a donkey's tail on you as soon as you turn your back, and they'll pretend it's all in the service of literature, they'll feel good about [...]
[four more, see original at]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/new-rules-for-writers_b_808558.html
a book by shivani
http://www.amazon.com/Anatolia-Othe...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295376985&sr=1-1
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