The solutions are obvious. Stop making excuses. Stop saying women run publishing. Stop justifying the lack of parity in prominent publications that have the resources to address gender inequity. Stop parroting the weak notion that you’re simply publishing the best writing, regardless. There is ample evidence of the excellence of women writers. Publish more women writers. If women aren’t submitting to your publication or press, ask yourself why, deal with the answers even if those answers make you uncomfortable, and then reach out to women writers. If women don’t respond to your solicitations, go find other women. Keep doing that, issue after issue after issue. Read more widely. Create more inclusive measures of excellence. Ensure that books by men and women are being reviewed in equal numbers. Nominate more deserving women for the important awards. Deal with your resentment. Deal with your biases. Vigorously resist the urge to dismiss the gender problem. Make the effort and make the effort and make the effort until you no longer need to, until we don’t need to keep having this conversation.
—Roxane Gay,
from “Beyond the Measure of Men”
in Bad Feminist (171-172)
Did I mention TC’s new issue? Probably not. I’ve been a flake lately. I wrote another SZ for it: Speak Your Truth. Need to poke one of the other editors to write something next issue; it’s turning into Beaver’s soapbox.
I discovered that, by spending a long time on a short story, I could make it pretty good. But all around me, people were turning in truly terrific short stories and saying, “Oh, I wrote it the night before I turned it in.”
There was so little talk of process back then, I really thought that I was the only writer there whose work went through an ugly stage. For years, I thought with deep shame that I was a fraud, up against the truly talented.
It took me about twenty years to realize they were lying, and just armoring themselves for the criticism to come, and pretending not to be as invested in the work as they were.
I love Twitter. It doesn’t keep me from writing and I think it’s a really convenient scapegoat when the truth is that the real issue is self-control. I am totally fine admitting i have none. I’m not going to blame Twitter for affecting my writing. And also, Twitter doesn’t affect my writing.
What’s in your head is seemingly infinitely richer than what you finally get down on the page. I think that’s why some people never actually get the writing done. They have a dream of a book in their head, and every attempt to write it down feels impoverished. The difference used to bother me until I thought about what the tradeoff was. The book in your head may be the platonically ideal book you could write, while the book you do write may seem a poor beast indeed, Caliban to your ideal book’s Prospero. But the book you write is real. And when you finish, you can hold it in your hands.
If you learn to write, learn to write well, learn to make people and events come alive in words whether fictionally or veritably. You will always have work, and it will be the best kind of work, work that uses, work that demands everything you’ve got. Who could ask for more?
“Well, here’s the thing,” [a travel magazine editor] told me. “Many of our readers don’t actually want to travel. They just want to think of themselves as travelers.”
Wow. They don’t want to travel… they just want to pretend.
I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. Many people say they want to write a book, but most of them don’t follow through. Maybe some of them don’t want to write—they just want to call themselves a writer. They want to have written a book.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Might as well dream a little!
But if you really want to do something—not just dream about it—then you have to go beyond reading travel magazines or thinking about the book you’re not writing. You can’t be an impostor traveler. You can’t live your life through the lens of aspiration.
Many of the successful published writers I hear talk on panels at conferences make it sound as if they are writing machines, as if they haven’t taken a day off from writing in years. Part of my success as a writer was not writing. If I hadn’t spent all those years teaching and reading and editing the work of other writers, I am certain I wouldn’t be the writer, and person, I am today. There are infinite ways to be a writer with a capital W, just as there are infinite ways to tell a story.
I don’t think you can expect to keep up your writing routine, whatever that is, when you’re on vacation with other people who are not writers. If you’re on vacation with family or friends, you’re probably crammed into a car or a room with them much of the time, and the times when you’re not they’re going to want you to “do something” with them not “sit and stare at your laptop.” Writing! It’s totally the same as putzing about the interwebs!
When I was a kid, I always used to take my binder of writing projects (mentioned here; all fortunately long-ago destroyed) with me on family vacations—and bring it back untouched. When did I think I was going to write? In the backseat of the car, with my brother poking me? In a motel room with my parents and brother and the TV competing for my attention? In line at an amusement park? It was wildly unrealistic.
You’d think I’d have learned from my youthful experiences, but no. In subsequent years, I kept doing the same thing in whatever its current incarnation was, printing out my current project “to work on” in desktop days, hauling along my laptop in more recent years. Actual writing done on communal vacations: not much.
Back in the day I had the aforementioned binder containing works-in-progress, a journal (my secret book), and my commonplace book. What I didn’t have was what I really needed for those trips: a writer’s notebook.
For a long time, I carried notebooks around with me, but they weren’t writer’s notebooks, they were journals. Journals can be wonderful, but inherent in the format are certain expectations, chiefly, that you will update them on a somewhat regular basis with semi-coherent, narrative entries. Such expectations (even if self-imposed) meant that writing in my journal often felt like a chore at the end of a long day, rather than a respite from excesses of sun and socializing.
I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to discover the beauty of a writer’s notebook. A writer’s notebook contains no expectations, implicit or explicit. You write in it when you want. You write in it what you want. It’s not your work-in-progress, your journal, or your commonplace book—but it might be a bit of all of these, plus your reading log, your to-do list, your address book, and anything else you want to throw in there. It’s a mutt, a messy hybrid. The perfect thing to take on vacation when you know you’re not going to have a lot of time to yourself.
With my writer’s notebook, I never feel stressed about not writing enough on vacation—whatever I end up writing, even if it’s just one word, is just the right amount. After all, you never know where that one word might lead…
Of course, there’s another kind of vacation. The kind you go on alone (or maybe with other writers). It might be a formal writing retreat, or perhaps a solo adventure of another kind, but either way, you get to set the schedule. Which means you can write as much as you want without ever getting the “you’re still on that computer?!” look from anyone.
When I finally finish the dissertation I’m taking a real vacation. Alone. Perhaps I will bring along a story or essay to work on—then again, maybe not. But I will definitely scribble in my writer’s notebook.
Vacation
All I ever wanted
Vacation
Had to get away
Vacation
Meant to be spent alone
(I love how this—the official video—sounds exactly like a crappy old cassette. I mean, how else would you expect it to sound?! 😉 )
The Remainder Table 