The Publishing Fairy Godmother

As a teacher, I try to find poetry and prose that will really resonate with students. It’s a skill not unlike writing, in which you have to know your audience, use cultural references to persuade them and connect with them. I often turn to the poet Anne Sexton to help me do this, since her life story is sad and gripping—she killed herself in 1974 after years of battling depression—but also because her poetry has a tendency to slice through the mundane and instead elevate what’s raw and juicy and real. The poem my high school girls tended to like the most was “Cinderella,” a transformation of the classic Grimm’s fairytale. We hear it all the time, Sexton explains: the ordinary person who gets lucky, makes a bunch of money, never has to work or struggle again. That story.

I never put a lot of stock in fairytales, especially the Disney versions. I don’t remember ever pretending to be a princess myself (I much preferred short skirts and shiny, black heels), and when I played princess figurines with my much younger cousin, I kept trying to alter the story of the prince coming along to save everyone. Maybe the mother wasn’t so bad, I suggested. Maybe the princess can make it on her own. My doe-eyed cousin stared at me blankly, confused.

But we are inundated by Cinderella stories in popular culture, particularly in the form of reality TV, and I realize that the hope of making it big through no real effort is quite contagious. American Idol, Survivor, Toddlers and Tiaras, John and Kate Plus Eight, Jersey Shore are all stories of ordinary people who get the spotlight for a while, make money and a career off of being, well, ordinary. And then look at Antoine Dodson, the friendly, cross-dressing guy from southside Chicago who warned viewers that a rapist was on the loose in his neighborhood: “Hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husbands, ’cause they’re raping everybody out here.” The Gregory Brothers, a group of fairy frat boys, created a hit song based on this warning, and Dodson made enough money from it that he was able to move his family to a better neighborhood. (The Grimm brothers are kicking themselves for not being alive to tell this haunting tale.)

So it wasn’t so surprising to find that at the BlogHer Writer’s Conference last week, I found women eager for a Cinderella ending of their own, a happily ever after in the publishing world. We all have blogs, we all want to be discovered. We’d rather not have to do the work of writing the book. It’s such a messy process. We just want to direct agents and publishers to our sites, hope they’ll fall in love with our words and ideas and offer us six figures (we’ll settle for five). And then we’ll never have to do anything mundane or ordinary for the rest of our lives, like wiping pee off of toilets, strategically placing ant traps in our kitchen, folding laundry. All those things are for the unpublished writers.

While the BlogHer team does an amazing job of providing contacts and information to readers, of lifting the veil on the publishing industry and empowering women writers, they can’t actually write the books for us. We, the hopefuls, have to sit down every day and plug away with our pencils and pads or laptops. The writing is the thing, you see. Not the publishing.

In Anne Lamott’s memoir, Bird by Bird, she talks a lot in the early chapters about her students’ eagerness to be published, of their interest in the final product rather than the process of being a writer:

“The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people want to be published. they kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them. There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.”

Lamott’s students listen intently. And then they ask how they can find an agent.

When I read Lamott’s words months ago, I was exactly like her students. I knew that what she said was true and important. But I wanted to be published. It wasn’t until I started reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and seeing the connection of the spiritual self to the writerly self that I began to understand the obvious. It’s about the writing! It’s about doing it all the time, yearning to do it, allowing time for it, and making it, above all, true.

It’s not that I don’t immediately start wondering where I’ll want to publish an essay I’m working on, or what I’ll say in answer to the questions Terry Gross poses when I’m a guest on Fresh Air, but I’ve learned to more effectively quiet that voice, my ego. Instead, I feel invigorated after writing something I like, not just because I hope others will read it and give me affirmation (which is nice), but because it might really be good. It might teach me something about the world and help me reflect on it at the same time. It might do what good writing is supposed to do.

For a long time, I thought it was easy for some people, because they got invited to balls and had fairy godmothers (or trust funds, whichever). But now, as I try to make my writing a top priority, and I listen and surround myself with inspiration, I realize over and over that there is no happily ever after when it comes to writing. There is always just more writing, editing, revising, crafting, art. There is self-discovery and confidence, a sense of adventure and pride. There are people to share my passion with, and those who will offer solid advice. In the end, it is just me, the page, and my willingness to take a risk, to be honest, to open my heart into tiny, text-size pieces on a page, and then sculpt it so it looks effortless.

The best thing I did for my writing during the BlogHer conference was sneak out during the lunch discussion and buy a ticket to New York’s Modern Museum of Art. The photography exhibit was wonderful. I gazed for a long time at a sepia-toned image of Booker T. Washington, at pictures of war and despair, but also ones of happiness, of people smiling and laughing. In one, it is summer. A man in a bathing suit pulls his lover close and kisses her on the cheek while the sun shines on their bare arms. She giggles. Below, in a shaky hand on the picture’s margin, someone had written the words, “An Amateur.”

I can relate. In writing, we are always amateurs. And that’s the way we need to approach every new moment in life, every blank page. The best we can do, as writers, is capture it.

Image: “Fairy” by Dart Botxy via Flickr.

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Tagged as: Anne Lamott, Anne Sexton, Bird by Bird, BlogHer, blogher writers conference, Cinderella, Modern Museum of Art, New York City, Transformations