Sak · Maps

Bookliving

11.17.09 16:43
Section: Maps
Filed Under: Copyright - Sak, Reviews

I have to be honest: up until a couple weeks ago, I’d never heard of Jeff Vandermeer. Now, however, I’m glad to have. It’s surprising, too, given that Jeff is a science-fiction author, and I have something of an interest in that genre. While I’m not sure how much I’d get into a cop story in a land of mushroom people, after having experienced his other latest work, Booklife, I’m keen to give Finch a try now too.

Booklife’s subtitle is, Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer, which is what drew me to it when I ran into Cory Doctorow’s blurb on BoingBoing. Waiting for the few copies purchased by the library to be processed into the system and my hold to arrive at my branch I really didn’t have expectations either way. After getting into the book, though, I realized that it’s aptly named, and that it could very easily be a series; Nlife, or *life, or whatever you want to use as a variable for any conceivable profession. If you look a little past the context of the book being strictly for writers, the essence of the book is really applicable to anyone.

Jeff splits the book into two primary discussions: your public life and your private life. There are actually three separate parts to the book, where in the middle a deliberate merging took place that brought the other two sections into a whole; something hinted at even in the very first pages and then repeatedly, in various forms throughout, as a subconscious reminder.

Booklife starts out with some pretty common-sense thoughts on planning and organizing. I, of course, being one who is often lacking in common-sense, only recently began something of an organization strategy in the last five or six weeks, the results of which have become blatantly apparent to me and hopefully to others as I continue the practice. The assumption that I was good enough to remain always fluid, chaotic, and purely organic, and that my creativity would flow from me as though I were a conduit of the Universe didn’t really seem to be fulfilling my also nondescript ideas of what I really wanted to achieve as an artist, as a person. That romantic notion may work for others, and I commend those who have the greater discipline and clarity of thought to pull it off, but for me it was taking longer, and producing less, than I’d have liked. Even though I began my organization strategy, coincidentally, a few weeks before picking up Booklife, mention of the concept in the first chapters sparked my further resonating with Jeff’s other ideas.

As much as I’m brought to considerable discomfort at times by the populous and sometimes my interactions with others, I also struggle to recognize that as a human I live in a social atmosphere, and that living in that environment requires some sort of involvement with others. I’m still working out how I intend to do that, given my career choice and my personality, just as with my method for planning and organizing. For me, it’s beginning as a weekly tasks list which gives me enough freedom to still remain fluid throughout the week and yet adds enough structure for getting things done. Booklife suggests that the same is true for ones public life, and it’s up to the individual to decide how much they want to extend themselves into the public world, how transparent they want to be with their life, and so forth. A basic tenet that’s been around since Socrates first mentioned it: Know thyself. If you’re a more outgoing and sociable person, you’ll be inclined to include more public interaction in your work anyway.

Throughout a number of sections discussing such public interaction, Jeff constantly reminds us that this is also true for other people in the world, and that they have their own lives and struggles that they’re also dealing with. I was thoroughly entertained at how in each discussion on dealing with publicists, editors, or others encountered in the career of a 21st-century writer, one overarching argument that he continually came back to was, essentially, don’t be a dick. Again, a truth that can be applied to any career. There are all these things you’ll want to get done, that may not be feasible alone, or that you’ve weighed as tasks you don’t want to tackle so that you can focus on specializing in other creative aspects of your life—self-publishing and promotion, or specific things like the creation of a website or video related to your project, or even branching off into other creative projects outside your usual field. In those other areas, there are gatekeepers, or individuals who have different creative or professional talents that will help you accomplish what you want to get done. Oh yeah, you’ll run into people out there who are unsavory, and that old negative-reinforcement principle will super-glue them to the jackass category in your mind, but that doesn’t mean you have to be one too, and as moods and things change over time, it’s hard to tell that you might still end up decent acquaintances later on. (Vandermeer recounts a story of an interaction with another writer, a hero figure, that didn’t go over so well initially, but that later their interactions have become more amiable.)

Of course, this advice on interaction is interspersed among a myriad of ideas and suggestions for current writers. How and what you can expect from the different phases of a project, and your public involvement in the process, interplays perfectly with the ideas behind understanding yourself and your creative life. Jeff never condones the notion that some creators have, that upon sharing their work with a gatekeeper they’ll need to make a bunch of changes so that the work is more commercial. Throughout the text there are smatterings of real world examples offering how this just isn’t true, and the appendices reinforce it further with actual commentary from agents and editors regarding their interactions with artists. If, as an artist, you so decide to leverage current trends in order to sell more, that’s your choice. Granted, I have no specific experience in any of this, and another writer may have some horror story to recount, but I think what Vandermeer is trying to convey in Booklife is more that you should evaluate for yourself if someone that you’re interacting with is attempting to influence your creativity, and whether or not you are willing to agree to those terms.

Moving into the private life, Booklife takes on a more visceral turn; fewer bullet-points and lists, and even the narrative has a subtle change to it that speaks directly to the subconscious. I found this transition remarkable in this type of book, it really kept telling me that what Jeff was trying to do here was a lot more than just list a bunch of tips for a writer, but speak to a person. After-all, what you’re dealing with is your life, and that’s an important thing. Booklife offers that an individual, private life is different than a public one, and that balancing those and keeping them in perspective, taking into consideration issues dealing with health and emotion, is integral to it being the life you want to live, versus the life you’re living out of habit.

A creator in a challenging career choice, there are going to be deep, psychological issues to deal with. Vandermeer uses quotes from John Ruskin, Francis Bacon, and Seneca, as well as fantastic thoughts and ideas from a number of new and current writers, to deal with issues of distraction, envy, despair, addiction, creativity, inspiration, and success; extraordinarily important things for anyone considering a jump into an artistic career. At first, in the public Booklife sections, I kept wanting to see more of this type of discussion. As I read about dealing with editors, PR people, and so forth, I found myself frequently thinking about the difficult, internal, emotional and psychological side-effects of toeing up against uncontrollable situations. After getting through the book, though, I understand it more now as a chicken-and-egg scenario; the overall merging of the private and public Booklife doesn’t have any specific order. But I was coming at it from the perspective of a new writer, unpublished, still trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing. Jeff had to present it the only way he knew how, from 20 years of experience, having negotiated many of the emotional obstacles and transforming them into second nature.

Many of the discussions I found incredibly valuable, but there were some that didn’t apply to me. I mean, I know I suffer from distractions. I don’t lose hours in a day on Facebook games, or surfing the web and checking email and RSS feeds every ten minutes, requiring my roommate to hide the router from me and then call me later in the day to tell me where it is. I have different distractions, like losing a couple hours contemplating the concept behind a particular coffee stand a couple blocks from where I’m staying currently. (I really did spend over 2 hours sitting and pondering Knotty Bodies Coffee, and I still don’t have a position on it.) But that’s my creative process, and the reason I feel I don’t need a precise daily schedule in order to keep me in line. I can take a couple hours and ruminate on something like that, and know that in the future those thoughts may work their way into different material. The dangers of the 21st-century writer, though, can lead to other, non-productive distractions and addictions, and so there’s a good deal of advice on how to get a creative life in check and on track.

Booklife, in general, really spoke to me. Throughout the book the ideas and thoughts continued to resonate over and over again. In one specific instance, on page 166, where Jeff’s talking about receptivity, he says, “You must allow yourself to be a raw nerve end that internalizes whatever it experiences in life.” Upon reading that sentence, my heart skipped a beat as I reflected back on something a friend once said to me, that, “…you’re like this exposed nerve. That must be exhausting.”

Booklife reiterated, in a lot greater detail and with specific advice and examples, something that Dave Sim wrote in his Note from the President in Cerebus #170:

The work has to come first. Until you’ve produced a couple of hundred pages, you aren’t going to know if you have the aptitude, ability or inclination to do comics for a living. The work has to come first. Once you have produced a couple of hundred pages, you have to move to the next level, doing a number of things simultaneously; producing the work, reproducing it in some fashion (photo-copies, mini-comics, booklets), circulating it and promoting it. All of those things. Simultaneously. If you produce the work but fall behind on reproducing it; if you produce and reproduce it but fail to circulate it; if you produce it, reproduce it, circulate it but fail to promote it; nothing (I repeat, nothing) is going to happen.

I have this written out in a much simpler form, as it was originally presented to me by another cartoonist friend before I ever read Cerebus, and tacked to my wall.

• Produce
• Reproduce
• Circulate
• Promote

A simple list, but with so much to it. Getting that process down, and organized, and doing it amicably, means getting more done as a creator, and it’s something that I’ve been trying to figure out how to do for some time now. I still struggle with production, the creation, and how it is often at odds with the others. It’s not easy to figure out where one stands as an artist, so much of that has to come from inside, something probably just as difficult, if not more, to develop than the public life. Vandermeer came along and really galvanized all these previously acquired thoughts, ideas, and feelings in a single volume.

I can’t say that this is a book only for writers, or even any artist trying to produce their work and survive in today’s world by doing so. It should also be read by anyone who knows such an artist, and wants to understand the life of their friend or loved one. There’s an amazing section in the book on support from a partner. It’s too easy to look at an artist and think that they don’t do anything all day (as John Hodgman described it, “Mine is the typical life of the professional writer: one of quiet contemplation and knowledge-gathering and masturbation and the cashing of enormous checks.”), but in reality it’s insane and equally challenging work, as any other career, and that’s if one gets past the emotional trials that often come with being of a highly creative nature.