056: A Hero is a Person Who Blunders into an Open Cave

It's been 2 years since I started this Substack and the weekly practice has brought some of the deepest truths home. Plus, a poem by Stephen Dunn, a cover reveal and Doodle Dispatches

Through a process of imagining, trying and building, artists create experiences that connect us to our own agency and power. We are in a moment when we urgently need these artists, culture bearers and creative workers who can help us envision and build a future of justice, health and wholeness.

—“How Artists Can Lead a Pandemic Recovery,” Bloomberg

It’s a pretty good sign of the times if even Bloomberg News knows that only art can save us.

The impulse to kill and destroy is roaring into the ascendant. The absence of heroes to lead us out of the wilderness is conspicuous. The truth of our mortality, which we can usually coax into a quiet corner, is striding around in broad daylight. It’s not the first time our world has fallen into a comprehensive darkness— T.S. Eliot wrote that “human kind cannot bear very much reality” in the time between the first and second world wars just a bit under a hundred years ago—but this doesn’t make it any less terrifying.

So what does that leave us?

You know the answer.

It leaves us with art.

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I started writing this newsletter two years ago this week from out of the deep silence and fear of sheltering in place, and it saved me. It saved me because it gave me something to do during those long, quiet weekends. It saved me because it gave me a way to be seen even though I was alone at home. It saved me because it reconnected me to important sources of strength and joy. It’s still saving me two years later.

So, on the occasion of Survival by Book’s second birthday, I wanted to share some of the things I’ve learned.

I think that these will apply to the pursuit of just about anything that is important to you. Just swap out the word “write” and replace it with the word “live” or “create” or “love” or even simply, “breathe.”

1. Write For the Joy of It

From about 2010 to 2020, I was pretty much miserable about everything to do with writing.

Working full time and also trying to carve out time to write was an endless exercise in failure. It made me angry at work culture for taking all of my best hours and angry at myself for not setting better boundaries.

Then, even if I did find a bit of time, I would promptly drown in CSS, Wordpress plug-ins and SEO. Getting something I wrote to look right and be optimized for distribution was painful. I am a trained poet and beauty-loving human, and it matters to me what my writing looks like; typography, spacing, color, and sometimes even images are part of the meaning I make. Having to tweak the design and user interface of various content management systems was a huge time suck. Having to peg what I wrote to the ever accelerating, ever more disposable world of online media also sucked, in a different way.

Then, Covid happened, and for the first time in my entire professional career, I was one of the lucky ones. Around the same time, I found Substack which offered me a lightweight, good-looking interface and a way to connect with an audience directly. Covid wreaked havoc on a lot of things, including for me, but this particular convergence was nothing less than magical. I will never, ever forget what it felt like to be free of so many kinds of noise, all at once, and to have a way to publish my writing.

It felt so good that all I wanted to do was roll around in that goodness. For the first year of Survival by Book, I was like my family’s dog when he found a fresh cowpie to roll around in on the mountain in Wyoming. I’m so sorry, but it really was like that—it was a pig in shit situation. I had about a day and a half a week that I could give to writing anything I wanted and hoo boy, did I ever take full advantage of this.

In a very early Substack I wrote about a poem I was obsessed with; made a connection between a Balkan tennis player and a brilliant but esoteric book by J.G. Farrell, which I framed with a screenshot of a text with my friend who lives in Pune, India; and also opined about the hot literary topic of that week. All in one newsletter. Is this what my brain is like on a Sunday? Yes. Was it an exercise in literary madness? Also, yes. Do I regret this? Nope. I love seeing patterns and making connections. It was super fun to mix everything in.

Another example is the monster two-parter that I wrote in January 2021 called “Exiles, Outsiders, Runaways and Castaways” about freedom of speech and the corporatization of speech. It ranges from Trump getting banned on Twitter, to Douglas Stuart’s Booker-prize winning, Shuggie Bain, to the global publishing industry, to the Sundance Film Festival, to the loss of Google Reader—and that’s just part one. Part two talks about the disruptive power of Substack, and a random ‘establishment’ writer in Chicago that pissed me off. Also, there is a very badly conceived infographic that I used twice. It’s the writing equivalent of eating an entire box of Captain Crunch in one sitting.

It was a lot, even for me. It was after I wrote “Exiles” that I realized that things had gotten out of control. A bit.

I am so glad I went so far down the path of pure, unadulterated enjoyment. It stretched my creative writing muscles, which I needed after so many years of writing strategic plans and white papers. I got reacquainted with a lot of old interests and developed new ones. I started reading more and looking things up. I didn’t worry about typos and perfection and focused on ‘shipping early and often.’

Because I defined success as simply doing something for the love of it, I looked forward to writing every week, which meant that I kept doing it. Now, I feel weird if I don’t spend several hours writing on a weekend. I tried for years to get that kind of habit through self-denial and self-discipline and never succeeded. Writing for the pure joy of it built the habit, not that tired old ‘suffer for your art’ canard.

2. Write For—and Listen to—Your Audience

Paradoxically, you also do need to care about your audience. The way this worked for me was being able to connect directly with my human, breathing, thinking, audience. This was significantly more interesting than ‘knowing your audience’ in the SEO, marketing, target demographic context.

It reminds me of something that Madeline L’engle said after A Wrinkle in Time was published. I can’t find the reference, but it was something along the lines of her publisher said “good job, now write it in red and then in blue,” meaning that they wanted her to do the exact same book again because that is what had sold the first time. It must be the reason we keep getting remakes of old movies instead of cool new films. It’s some kind of tyranny of market research that causes this, and it’s the death of art, in my opinion. The whole point of art is the pleasure of surprise. Like Pound said, make it new. And, you aren’t going to know if it’s new and interesting if you don’t test it out on your audience.

It’s a varsity form of conversation, if you think about it. You get to pull together ideas, shape them, share them with people, and see how they land. People’s responses are almost always different than you expect, which is fun. The sentences that people quoted back to me were never the ones I thought would land. The comments that readers made almost always took what I had written in a new direction.

At some point during the first year of Survival by Book my friend Belinda told me that she skipped the book stuff and just read the personal narrative. This, coming from a woman with several big name degrees who’s written her own very smart book, was very interesting feedback. After that, I did a readers’ poll, and got more or less the same inputs from nearly every respondent. I’d done a whole brand identity concept for Survival by Book about writing a books-focused newsletter and it turned out that what was interesting to people was the “survival” part not the “book” part.

It’s pretty nuanced, right? Because who I am is pretty inextricable from what I read—that’s the whole point of the newsletter. But, getting some very specific feedback in this area helped me make important adjustments. I started looking at my personal anecdotes as stories instead of interest catchers and worked on using them to shape each newsletter instead of just leaping from one book connection to another. I also switched up the newsletter’s tagline and put my name in the URL (which was better for SEO anyway). This, in turn led me to dusting off my memoir, which engendered other good things that I’ll talk about in the coming weeks.

I started to get the hang of this with “Mirage,” which centered on my time in Australia. A few months later, I almost got it right with “Working Girl,” except that I put my story at the end instead of using it to create some rising tension around the discussion of Muriel Spark’s book.

I completely whiffed it with “Plucky Governesses.” I actually have a great story about why I relate to governesses, which I didn’t tell and should have, because the hook that I did use was the dumbest, most interest-killing hook in the history of essay writing. Which makes me sad because Miss Mole is a delightful book and deserved better.

3. Write to a Form

Back in the day, I often worked in restrictive poem forms like sestinas and sonnets for the way that they force a series of marvelous choices.

Then, I think I over-corrected for awhile because I was tired of the formal requirements of writing websites and press releases. So, I just didn’t even try to give my newsletters things like regular sections with stable headings and stories that had a recognizable beginning, middle, and end.

But two things happened. First, as I began to try to promote the Substack on social media, I found that it was challenging to find pull quotes—which is a big tell for a writer. It means you aren’t refining your sentences enough and that your paragraphs aren’t tightly constructed.

Second, I only had a few hours a week and reinventing how many sections there would be and what I would put in them, rewriting the headings, deciding whether or not to use images, and what style of story I would write took a long time. I was already just writing to please myself and then without a pre-set structure I would spend hours just meandering around in words. Then, I would run out of time for revision. Hence, all the typos.

The thing is, form is intrinsically pleasing. We love rhyme from the day we are born—it’s why we sing silly rhyming songs to children. Repetition in the right measure is immensely satisfying—think of how we all recognize the ‘cold open’ at the start of a sit/com or enjoy a Twitter feed that continuously reinvents a familiar joke or meme (see New York Times Pitchbot). Proper magazines and newspapers have regular sections that create a familiar experience for their readers. For example, the London Review of Books has its Short Cuts and Diary sections, which I often read first.

Finally, you can’t tell a good story without some kind of rising tension and resolution, and suspense is a great way to get people to read to the end. So, I have started to try to figure out what these kinds of forms could look like for Survival by Book.

It’s a work in progress, to be sure, but I’ve got close a few times, I think. “Topologies” is an essay that has a shape I’m genuinely proud of. Looking back to the first year, “Poetry for the Rest of Us” and “Love Your Neighbor” are both decent at this, too. I would rewrite both of them, if I could, but I think I got closer to what I’m looking for.

4. Kill All Your Darlings

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about libraries as a profound source of solace and freedom. I had a great doodle from Judith Solberg (as always), a new book I was reading, and wanted to recommend a few other writers. I also really, really wanted to write about the tv show, “Yellowstone,” including putting in a meme about it. I just really like that show, and I wanted to put in all the things.

But the library-themed newsletter did not need a meme from the show “Yellowstone.” It especially did not need this as really all I wanted to say about the show was that it’s hilarious that they hide all the dead bodies in Wyoming.

I knew it really didn’t belong in the newsletter, and yet I had to wrestle with myself about it. I do make a point of juxtaposing “high” and “low” culture, so for awhile that was my excuse. I toyed with the idea of using a mention of the show to tease writing about Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces (which I might still do, but why not just do it—why tease it first?) I had it all rationalized. And, then I thought, nope. This does not advance the cause of this essay. Take it out. Kill all your darlings.

Anyone who’s been in an MFA program or a creative writing class has heard this phrase, and TBH I have always hated it. I think it makes writers, who are already often really hard on themselves, into even worse self-haters. Also, the phrase is way too often invoked, piously, by some armchair editor/quarterback who throws it out there with a shrug and a bunch of un-earned authority.

Yet, it is true that to write is to edit and to edit is to, indeed, delete many things that you wrote and like and want everyone to see and love. If you don’t do this, the first thing to go is the control over your voice and the second thing to go is the control of your story. From there it’s just a quick descent into word salad. Even if your audience loves you, you’re going to leave them feeling exhausted instead of inspired and satisfied.

It makes editing easier if you’re coming from a strong, joyful foundation, though. Culling the bad stuff feels a bit more like refining than self-abnegation.

5. Write with a Plan

To say I have ‘learned’ this one is getting a head of myself. This is my aspirational learning for 2022 because I really don’t like sticking to plans.

I really like starting things. I love to begin a course or a book or a notebook. I love to plan an outfit. I love to launch a project. I love writing beautiful strategies that someone else can implement. Honestly, the only reason that I have kept my (more or less) weekly newsletter commitment is that once I got a few, paid, annual subscribers, my sense of responsibility kicked in—an internal driver that is even stronger than my addiction to shiny new plans.

(Which creates an opportunity that I’m going to go with: when you become a paid, annual subscriber to Survival by Book you provide very powerful motivation for this writer to do her job well and consistently. Think of the power in that!)

So, anyway, I did manage to stick to it. Amongst the many who helped me get here, I have my sister’s steady, business-building example to thank—you can check out her new podcast here—and the Substack community team.

In my second year of the newsletter, the Substack Grow program gave me a boost by offering a battery of interesting tools, the most significant of which were the ones that helped me operationalize my approach. They showcased writers who had figured out interesting mechanisms for promoting their work, building an audience, structuring headings and calls to action, sourcing graphics and art, and building good writing habits. They also regularly send emails and host events that keep this practical, motivating, energy flowing.

There’s accountability here, and inspiration. Feeling like I am part of a community gets me through the days of doing the publishing hygiene; sharing links, coming up with hashtags, looking at analytics, proofreading, and other chore stuff. It’s good for my soul to be part of an interesting, growing community of creative people.

This is true for life, not just Substack, of course. We do better at all the meaningful things when we do them in community with each other.

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I started by quoting Bloomberg on the role of artists in civilization. Here’s the American poet Stephen Dunn’s version

Emergings

Let’s say men and women begin
as slime, and some of us crawl
out of the sea, and fall into circumstance
fraught with danger, and cannot survive,
but do, slithering into a cave
where the stories evolve, first as pictures
on the walls, then as grunts that turn
into something like words. For years,
though, biology reigns. Our bodies go
this way or that. Our culinary wisdom
is to eat more than get eaten.
Our good sense is to follow a guess.
Let’s say sometimes the accidental
is the beginning of possibility.
We discover that when we’re most afraid,
when catastrophe looms, opportunities abound.
We learn the power of slings and stones.
And the best storyteller emerges
from all of those wishing to explain.
Let’s say he knows we need someone
to admire, and says a hero is a person
who blunders into an open cave,
and that it takes courage to blunder.
Let’s say he also says something about
the beauty of slime. His story lives
for a while because of its memorable turns,
its strange moral fervor, while the others’—
merely accurate and true—disappear.

I love the idea of the accidental being the beginning of possibility—how Dunn casts the emergence of humanity out of a mixture of coincidence, instinct, and storytelling.

Making a hero’s journey out of the terror of survival is how artists turn mere existence into something more like living. It’s priceless when you think about how important this is, though it doesn’t have to be expensive. Art is not, actually, scarce. It does not rely on supply chains. It cannot be politicized. (When people try, it just stops being art.) It always heals. It has a proven track record of surviving bombs and gunfire and plagues. It makes connections and builds common interests.

And all art needs to exist and thrive is a bit of light and water.

To quote Bloomberg (which is quoting this paper by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), “we need to make life as an artist more sustainable and more equitable.” My version of this is that we need to make a place for artists to make and share their work, and we need to pay them.

So here we are.

I was not the only person who started making art two years ago from out of the deep silence of the pandemic. Judith Solberg, who creates the marvelous Doodle Dispatches for this newsletter, started drawing again during that time. Sarah Miller, who writes about children’s books and encouraging children to read also hit her two year milestone this week. Elizabeth Held who offers you the expertly curated “What to Read If” also started around this time in 2020. I have a friend who started painting again, and another who began to write songs. I could go on and on with the examples, but I am out of room.

Art can’t cure the certainty of death nor prevent evil from happening—nothing can—but it can make our lives worth living. All we need is a bit of light and water.

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Happy Birthday, Survival by Book!

You can find more from Doodle Dispatches on Twitter and Instagram. Or, better, order some unique, witty, carefully curated prints and gifts at DoodleDispatches.com

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College, a Love Story

As promised, here’s the cover of the memoir.

I will be excerpting from the book behind the paywall on a regular cadence for the rest of the year. (Thank you, Clay Dingman and Barking Cat Designs! )

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