I’ve been in a prose rut for a while now, with multiple half-finished projects on the slow burn.
Popular music in the US has a release valve of sorts for outsider art. Sun Ra, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson — there’s a legacy of work that is beyond the mainstream and public awareness both that somehow finds its way into corners of the popular consciousness. Which in my view, is a good thing, and the wider an impact it has, the better. This gives me both a confidence boost, and a sense that I’m standing on the shoulders of musicians that preceded me in terms of their ongoing careers.
Mainstream literary publishing, though? Not so much. It’s like the idea of pushing boundaries got both sidelined and patently dismissed over time, especially by those who deem themselves arbiters of career-defining success, with the very occasional “groundbreaking genius” (always white, always cishet, always male, sometimes experimental — but not too experimental) enlisted to reset the clock, in order to send whatever possibly deviant trends are lying around back to the obedient acolytes of Joseph Campbell worship, neoclassicism, and so on.
If you’re a writer such as myself — queer, trans, a woman, biracial, experimental, sometimes body horror leaning, both anarchist and communist — the closest things get to a way out is “write speculative fiction, science fiction or, yes, horror,” and even that has rules (including good ones, like “don’t think your tropes are original if you’re new to this” or “don’t confuse experimental fiction with science fiction”), and a lot of that has to do with money, as well as capitalism, period. It’s a way of shoving writers like us off to the sidelines, rather than run the risk of turning us into literary martyrs, with ensuing organizing, demands and revolt to follow.
(Before you dismiss this as sour grapes or “dangerous talk,” writers of a more widely tolerated or accepted bent, or that aspire to be such, consider: when was the last time you had actual traction with your work, solely on the basis of it being published via traditional means and widely embraced as a result? Did it pay your rent or your mortgage?)
So what to do about that?
For music, what I’m coming to is figuring out my own way forward, and hoping for the best. At the least, I’ll still be making work and putting it out there. This means regular Bandcamp releases for multiple projects, as well as figuring out performing and touring again, for said projects. This is going well — my audience may be small at present, but people do appreciate and get the work, and increasingly, support it by whatever means they have at their disposal.
Writing fiction is harder, because the gatekeeping can be fierce, especially if you’re not writing genre fiction. (In pop music, the gatekeeping is about money; in classical music, the gatekeeping is about power, and money.) What I’m coming to — slowly and not that enthusiastically — is “poet’s rules”: in other words, do the work, fuck the money, keep going. I’m not happy about this, but it beats banging my head against the wall, so to speak. This means at least publishing my own work via a blog, but it may (or may not) also include chapbooks, self-published eBooks via Smashwords, local featured writer gigs, and wherever else. What it likely does not mean is going the traditional publishing route; I know how to do all of that, and have for decades, it’s just that my options weren’t that great looking before, and from the looks of things, in the era of media consolidation and buyouts, promise to be even worse now.
I don’t live in NYC. I have degrees, including a grad writing degree, but they’re not ivy league degrees, either. I don’t do that particular dance not just because it’s not an open door, I refuse to do it because both practically and creatively, it makes no sense. I don’t write to the kinds of mainstream markets that get reviewed by the likes of the New York Times Book Review and so on, both by choice and because that’s not what my work is about. I know my creative voice very well, and sometimes frustrations aside, I have for decades. You?
That all said, this somewhat bleak assessment of my available present day options as a writer may not in fact turn out to be true, thankfully. For example, it’s a lot easier for me to write at least semi-conventional movie scripts than either fiction or poetry. Does that mean I’m going to get signed by an agent in that regard, and move to LA? Likely not, but at least the shoe fits, yeah?
I may not at first glance “write what sells,” but I’m slowly accepting that when I either finish my more recent long-form fiction projects, or pick up new ones and finish those, it’ll be because I’ve embraced a cross-media approach, including but not limited to films and graphic novels — or because I’ve leaned even harder into experimentalism and gone on from there. All the better to chase down any emerging AI-like trends, beat them off with a knobby stick, and get back to work, off in the woods somewhere, largely free from the ravages of both flood and famine. (Hopefully.)