Dear Asshole: That Way Madness Lies
Lit Salon addresses the question of blogging, self-publishing, and "real writing," and the tendency to "covet" the pain of the writing life + the literal experience of laboring for love & art
Friends, it’s looking to be an amazing week ahead for so many reasons! And I have a few announcements before we dive into this week’s Lit Salon, in which I answer a question from “Asshole,” who wants to know how to tell a friend she’s not a “real” writer because she only blogs and self-publishes. Yes, this is a hot one, but I very much doubt that “Asshole” is actually an asshole. Instead, she seems quite thoughtful and committed to engaging with life’s tormenting complexities, and that’s also how I tried to approach this question.
More on that shortly.
Meanwhile, a few things.
First, I am THRILLED by the response to our upcoming Essay in 12 Steps Challenge. The more I hear from you all, the more excited I am to unfold this curriculum and see where it takes us! We start on August 2 and the full experience is available (and will be archived permanently in order) for all paid subscribers. You can upgrade anytime to participate! And if you missed the full announcement, you can find it here.
Second, I am overjoyed to have been invited to teach in the Magic of Memoir’s Craft Essentials series, along with Janet Fitch, Rebecca Carroll, Linda Jo Meyers, and Brooke Warner! I am over the moon to be collaborating with these heavy hitters, and teaching a topic near and dear to me, which is voice and narration in memoir. Maybe I will see some of you there. You can read about the whole series here.
Third, I’ll also be announcing a fall session of my Writing in the Dark workshop soon (start date will be late August or early September and the workshop meets Thursdays from 6-8 PM). Because Writing in the Dark fills really, really fast, we’ve created a waitlist for early announcement the day registration opens, and you can put your name on the list here (it’s free). We’ll notify waitlist participants (in order, 20 at a time) who will then be able to register on a first-come, first-served basis before the general public announcement.
Fourth, we have some other beautiful offerings coming up through Elephant Rock this summer and fall, including from veteran (and very talented) teacher Jill Swenson, of Swenson Book Development, whose Summer Morning Writing Sprints workshop runs July 26 – August 30. This generative workshop will use literary constraints to inspire your best, most inventive work: “Although each guided, constrained exercise will explore a precise new form— Pantoum, Anaphora, Epistolary, Playlist, Ephemera, Snapshot.—this course is for all genres. The idea is not to learn or adhere to these forms, but to see what secrets they unlock in our work. Rich, lively group discussion of these inventive new forms will give writers myriad new ways to use them in their own writing practice. Come play with words to create something new, crack open something old, and discover something deep and true.” Other delicious classes—including on “re-wilding” your writing, climate fiction, sensory writing, and more—start in September. Have a look!
And now, for this week’s edition of Lit Salon, where we explore some potential assholery around the question of what, exactly, it means to be a real writer, and whether blogging and self-publishing “count.”
Lit Salon
That Way Madness Lies
Dear Jeannine,
I’m ashamed, really, to even ask this question. It makes me sound like an asshole. And maybe I am an asshole. In fact, I am for sure at least a little bit of an asshole. But since this is anonymous, I figure, why not just get this off my chest and see what you think about it, since I’ve been appreciating your answers to other letter writers. So, here goes nothing… please, tell me how can I explain to my friend that journaling and blogging and self-publishing aren’t the same thing as … real writing? See, I told you I was going to sound like an asshole.
Sigh.
And I feel like an asshole, too, because this is a very good friend I’m talking about, someone who was in my wedding, someone I see at least once a week, someone I met in college, where I majored English and she majored in, let’s say “accounting.” I went on for my MFA, have published one book (a literary memoir) with a small press, and have a fairly large body of fiction and creative nonfiction in lit journals. I also have a side hustle as an editor, and, while I struggle financially, I love my work and am proud to have made a life out of writing. My friend, on the other hand, is now quite lucratively employed, but hates her job and copes by pursuing purpose outside of work through competitive cycling and through writing. Mostly she’s just journaled—you know those journals with all the guiding questions and inspirational quotes and so forth. More recently she started blogging and now she’s working on a memoir she plans to self-publish because, as she puts it, she can afford to, so why wouldn’t she? She says she has no reason to stuff her work through some “inefficient pipeline” when she can so easily just “publish her work herself, retain total artistic control, and put her work directly into readers’ hands.”
All of this would be more than fine except that since the blog and the memoir, she’s started commenting on how great it is that “we’re both writers,” how fun it is that we “share the writer life in common,” how meaningful it is to her that we’re “walking this path together.” Etcetera. And I’m about to lose my mind. I’ve paid for my paltry literary success in blood, sweat, tears, plus fairly massive student loans. Not to mention about a million rejections in my Submittable account. I can’t tell you how it makes me bristle when my friend speaks as if we’re doing the same thing now. We’re not.
I’m giving my whole life to writing, and, like I said, I’m really proud to have cobbled together a sustainable income with my words. Maybe this is why I don’t feel like I can even talk to my friend about what my writing life is actually like. How could she ever understand? She’s bypassing most of it. My friend is entitled to her hobby—anyone can write for a hobby. But it’s not the same thing as a writing life.
Is it?
Signed,
Asshole
Dear Asshole,
Goodness. You’ve really jumped head-first into the deep end of the ocean with this one, haven’t you? I mean, can I even answer this question without being an asshole myself? I’m not sure, to tell you the truth.
But let me give it a try.
I’ll start by saying what I hope will be obvious: all writing is real writing. It’s not all equally effective or engaging, but it’s all real. And some of the best writing I’ve encountered has come from children who aren’t even “trying” to “really write.” Instead, they’re putting their words down, one after the other, in a way that feels as true and real as a fist.
For example, this incredible poem by Annie White, who was in seventh grade when she wrote it, and who had, by that time, struggled for years through learning differences as she sought to keep pace with her peers. I’m fairly confident this poem of Annie’s was one of the best pieces of writing that came out of that class that year:
Words
I wish words would spill out of me
perfectly formed like a bouquet of spring flowers
I wish my sentences would weave
webs of wonder
I wish my paragraphs would grow into stories
complete and full of wisdom.
Instead,
the words fall out of me
in burps
sloppy and unpredictable
I put them on the page anyway
an offering
for you
And that’s the really funny thing about this question and this topic. Are we talking about real writing, or good writing, and, either way, who gets to decide? Not me, not in this case. Not just because I’ve never read your friend’s writing, but because writing is both subjective and objective, and the components that contribute to writing that affects me, that devastates me (which is what I most want from good writing—to be devastated, to be, as Merriam-Webster defines that word, “reduced to chaos, disorder, helplessness”), are too complex to discuss in one Lit Salon post.
So instead, I want to talk about the specifics of your situation, which sounds not unlike my own, except you sound younger than I am (not sure why, except you don’t