Essentially, there are two kinds of writing one can do in this lifetime: writing that’s destined for publication, and writing that may wind up in limbo. These days, the former is becoming less and less probable for most of us. It is harder than ever to get published in magazines, because there are so few of them left, and it’s harder than ever to get a book deal, because publishers don’t want to touch anything that doesn’t have some sort of commercial appeal. And thus if you have an idea, you can write it, but there’s no guarantee anyone will ever read the damn thing.

This is not an earthshaking revelation, I know. But it does make me get up some days and wonder what the hell I’m doing, what the point of the hours spent researching and learning and drafting something really is. Envy is inevitable when you’re writing into a publication void: if you’re like me, you can see books by people you know prominently displayed in local bookstores, people you like and admire, who are good writers who work hard and change the world, and still experience the kind of teeth-gnashing jealousy you thought you last felt in junior high. And the jealously is about the same bottom line: why can’t I come up with a commercial idea like that? The junior high version: why am I not popular? Rejection these days is not about the quality of the work, but about the saleability of the concept. Publishers say things like “there’s no sales angle” instead of commenting that your writing just sucks. It’s not about the writing: it’s about how to pitch it. And that’s bleak, bleak, bleak.

I know, many of you are thinking, shit, lady, just put the damn thing on Lulu and self publish. Which is not a concept I reject; in fact, given the fact that commercial publishing seems to be flailing as hard as some of those oil-slicked Gulf dolphins, self publishing may be the only way for most of us. But you still have to pimp it harder than a motherfucker if you go that route, and the idea of that is so objectionable to me for so many reasons that I can’t handle it. Seriously, I have to deep breathe into a paper bag to read from my work to twenty drunk people in a bar; do you know how hard it is to beg people to buy my books? If I had the money, I would hire a publicist, but I don’t have the money. Are there grants for that?

This is the thing: for decades (I’m that old now) I wrote reams and reams never knowing if they were going to be published, and that was fine. And then there was a book, and another one, and I began to think, oh, maybe I am good enough. But then it comes down to numbers. And then the message is no, you are not good enough. And that’s a lot of pressure to contend with, the numbers pressure, the pressure to have a marketable idea. It’s rather antithetical to the creative process, isn’t it? Rather than thinking, this is a great idea, one has to think, this is a book a lot of people will pay for.  And there isn’t any such thing as a middle ground between those two, most of the time.

It’s a gray day in Oakland; please excuse the self pity. I will always write; I don’t have a choice about that. I’m just no longer sure whether anyone will get to read any of it beyond this blog. And that’s kind of scary.

After a long and demoralizing end-of-term* meeting yesterday (at which we were reminded that due to budget cuts, none of our excellent part-time faculty will be back in the spring semester), I came home and lumped out on the sofa for many hours, and caught most of Julie and Julia on the pay-per-view. I’ll spare you the same comments most people probably made about this film (blah blah Meryl Streep is awesome Jane Lynch! etcetera), but it did make me want to say something about the end of the film, in which both Julia Child and Julie, the contemporary blogger who whines a lot, both get book deals. In Child’s case, her cookbook arguably did change a lot about the way Americans cook, but in Julie’s case, she keeps repeating (and repeating) throughout the film that “if no one publishes you, you’re not a writer.” The end result in her case, as far as I can tell, has been a couple of whiny memoirs, the latest of which is taking a critical drubbing. Near the end of the film, there’s this kind of perverse sequence where she gets a zillion book offers because her blog was written up in the New York Times, and (it’s implied) lives happily ever after.

This bothered me and is still bothering me this morning.  The message I try to send my students — knowing that the vast majority of them have no desire to be full-time or even part-time writers — is that anyone can write, and that you do not need to publish a book, or even an essay, poem, whatever, to be a writer. Also, speaking from personal experience, while publishing a book is a cool thing to do, it does not necessarily change your life. I’m guessing that the vast majority of authors are still working at the same jobs they had before publication. Also, in these lean times in the publishing industry, we have to shoulder almost all of our own publicity, which is a nightmare for introverts, and since many writers are introverts, the end result is some halfhearted Twittering and Facebooking and some lame stabs at querying Slate and The Daily Beast (who, ahem, might never get back to you). Sure, it’s an awesome moment when your galleys and ARCs come in the mail, and for the couple of months that your book is interesting to bookstores, it’s equally cool to see it displayed on tables, but — and this is what bugged me about the film — your daily life is most likely not going to change that drastically. I joked when my first book came out (after nearly two years of delays) that I was hoping to wake up with clear skin, straight teeth, and lustrous hair, which obviously did not happen, because I still have to use acne medication and my teeth are still jacked up. Nor have I been able to generate any additional income from freelancing, since I published my second book around the same time that the newspaper and magazine industries went into their current death spiral. Nor have any job offers “floated down”, as Mary Karr says in her new memoir (which a friend just loaned me) about landing a tenured gig , because academia is also gasping for oxygen.**

I fear this may sound just as whiny as poor Julie in the film, but I was reading some blog comments about it and one poster said that sequence with all the book deal offers made her cry because she wanted that to happen for her so badly. I hope it does — I’m not such a hard -hearted cynic that I would want to deny anyone their dream — but I do wish people understood that unless you are very, very, very lucky or have extremely good timing to pick a subject that really hits the zeitgeist, publishing is a brutal, cutthroat business and an uphill battle for any kind of attention. Someone told me recently that less that 10% of books sell more than 5000 copies, and while 5000 sounds like a lot to someone like me who comes from a small press background, that means that 90% of books are considered to be commercial failures.

The bottom line message here is that you do not have to get a zillion messages on your answering machine all promising to CHANGE YOUR LIFE via publication to be a writer. The thing about landing a book deal is that it opens your eyes to the fact that writing is now your job. You are being paid for it, and that changes your relationship to the process — it’s no longer just about you and the work, because an army of other people are now involved, and they are working for a living too. If you’re lucky, like I’ve been, many of those people will become your friends and will really care about you and your writing. But you’re just as much of a writer if this never happens, and there are so many other ways to be published.  And you’re still a writer if you never publish a damn thing. When my father died, I found sheaves of poems he’d written over the years, many of which were brilliant and heartbreaking, but he never expressed any interest in publishing them, and never whined or complained that he wasn’t a writer because that didn’t happen for him. Like a lot of people — myself included — he wrote because that’s what felt right in the moment. All of the other stuff is just a bonus. It’s writing in the moment, because that moment counts, that matters, and lasts.

*End-of-term, though I am not yet done grading, which is another story entirely.

** Though, I should add, I would not resist such an offer.