This object lesson in tempus fugitting from Harlan Ellison is brought to you courtesy of the A.V.Club:
Harlan Ellison: ... I mean, good God, does the name Clarence Budington Kelland mean anything to you?
A.V. Club: Sorry, no.
Harlan Ellison: Nor do 10 out of every nine people that you'll meet. Clarence Budington Kelland was, during the '20s, '30s, '40s, and on into the '50s, the most popular writer in America. He had a serial—the height of success in America in those days for a freelance writer was to get a serial in Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post. Well, Clarence Budington Kelland just wrote—everything that was picked up by Collier's, The Post, they made into movies. He wrote Westerns, he wrote children's books. He wrote everything, and he made more money than the President of the United States. Today, you go to a library, you cannot find a Clarence Budington Kelland book! He was a pretty good writer. He was not William Faulkner, he was not Colette, but he certainly was a very good, decent writer. With the exception of one or two people whose names are common coin—Shakespeare, perhaps Faulkner—being well-known and being remembered is a mugg's game. There's no way of knowing whether you're going to wind up being Geoffrey Chaucer or Clarence Budington Kelland.
Every time I hear about another wingnut welfare queen hauling a sack of book-deal money back to his club-house, or see David Gregory hold out the "Meet the Press" chair for David Brooks one more time, or feel the self-referential circle of privileged A-list blogosphere traffic patterns cinch up a little tighter, or smell the flames of burning career ladders licking up a little higher I take some real comfort in knowing that in 20 years no one will remember any of us.
A phrase maybe. A potsherd of wisdom. But other than that, the fate 99.999% of every word we write or speak is:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:And since those patient, memoryless sands close up any furrow our pens may open fastfastfast, if you want to succeed before the dunes bury you completely, unless you are already assured of a place at the table by virtue of your personal connections, you must relentlessly self-promote.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
If I have failed as a blogger in one, substantial way, it is in this area.
Talent is simply not enough. Writing every day is not enough. Adding mad graphic skillz to the mix is not enough.
You must bang on every door. Blogwhore in every comment thread. Email everybody whose attention you believe you deserve every day until they capitulate. Think "stalking" and then wind that back about 20%.
Is all of that indelicate? Indecorous? Rude? Really? Says who? And are they willing to put a roof over your head? Pay your bills? Furnish your table? No? Then who the fuck cares what they say?
You must move to where the action is and set up camp there. You must break into conversations where you are not wanted. You must elbow you way into magazines.
Being a very good writer is a fine thing, but if you want people to read your writing you must jump up and down and up and down and up and down and yell "Hey! Look over here!"
The minute you stop you vanish.
14 comments:
Do. Not. Vanish.
The book will live on after you.
Ask Saul Alinsky.
Book?
"20 years"...? 5, if we're lucky.
:)
A dialog that might bear fruit of varied tastes for you and I (and perhaps others) bears upon the motivations and expectations that one brings to their craft.
It is quite true in the modern bloggity era that to cease one's creative drive forward for whatever reason - fear of encroaching self-aggrandizement, creeping ennui, conflicting personal circumstances, abandonment of the muse, etc. - is to court a swift and merciless unpersonhood. A question - Is this, or can it be a good thing?
I have always been uncomfortable with the theoretical concept of profiteering, even in a meager way, from the works that I generate under this nom du guerre, feeling that to do so would reduce their noxiously minor 'purity' - Of course, I never labored under the misapprehension that I would become notorious for the digital equivalent of scribbling moustaches on Mona Lisas, either - and look how that turned out.
My preference was to arrive at a point in time where such trifles were unnecessary, perhaps even unseemly - putting myself 'out of business', and gladly returning to a private life with a chapter permanently closed.
There was a fleeting moment almost 4 years ago where that point in time could have arrived, but like many such moments it existed solely in my perception and not in the fractured reality that we all share. And so it goes.
;>)
You are a light in the darkness - please don't quit.
For the record, I have no intention of fading away.
But for budding writers out there, it is important to have somewhere in your toolbox a hard-headed understanding that the task of writing (clean hands + composure) is roughly 1/4 of the business of being a writer.
Advice I got early on about just being plucky and persistent turned out to be terrible: it might have been true 40 years ago, but today it borders on criminal negligence to tell a writer that talent alone will out. If as a writer, you are egomaniac enough to believe that what you say is worthy of the undivided attention of others (and the act of writing and publish suggests that you are :-) but at the same time you are not egomaniac enough to promote your "brand", you are stacking the deck heavily against yourself and ceding the field to people who will gladly wear the biggest "Look at me!" sandwich board their legs can carry.
If it makes you feel any better, I namedrop this blog all over the place! In fact, that's how I found you.
Whenever you comment on another blog, or anywhere for that matter, just drop a link at the end without a bunch of fanfare. If people like your comment, they'll stop by and see whats going on.
Poof!
(Shades of Ellison and Faulkner and Hemingway!)
But . . . but . . . I thought you had to wind it forward.
Every Sunday morning and most weeknights around 6:30, we are being stalked.
By predators.
They call themselves reporters.
We know where the real ones live.
Never say nothing.
Love ya, baby!
S
Thank the gods (I'm looking achew Steve Guillard)you're here Drifty. If 'tweren't for you, I might find myself reading (gasp!) D. F. Brooks occasionally.
I kind of expect to fade away faster than blue in jeans. Also pixels won't survive the apocalypse.
Meanwhile I enjoy reading your prose, linking to your more trenchant observations, and fighting the good fight at my outpost.
So there.
I sent out two of your wonderfull pieces this morning , and listen to your web cast every Friday and hope that when I get Steady work this summer I can send some money. You do great work!
Please continue to be our Diogenes... We couldn't do without you!
I'll never forget- you're still my sig line at the GOS, as well as a way to remind myself that happiness must be seized when it happens.
So this guy was basically the Stephen King or James Petterson of his day and is now forgotten although being responsible for "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" is a pretty good legacy.
Having looked at a few biographies and a few stories, I wonder if, given his outspoken opposition to the new deal, he wasn't part of the model for Heinlein" Jubal Harshaw.
A colleague of mine named her little pug dog Puck. I laughed when I heard it and told her that was a cute name for a playful little dog. She told me I was the only person she knew who didn't think the dog's name was a reference to hockey.
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