When you’re between ideas, build the infrastructure you’ll need. Among the best Christmas presents I’ve ever gotten is a robust three-hole paper punch that can handle twenty-five or thirty pages at a time. My career started in the days of paper manuscripts, and I still prefer to send my first complete draft to my agent and editor in hardcopy. That means stocking printer ink and binders. You’ll eventually need mailing envelopes for contracts. A filing system for incomplete work.
No electronic storage system is foolproof. Chelsea Cain is the most tech-savvy writer I know, and she still lost a near-complete novel. It couldn’t be found in the cloud or in any of the emails she’d sent herself as backup. Eventually she sent her hard drive to a company that specializes in recovering lost data for the military and even they couldn’t save the lost book. My tech guy tells me that even flash drives often mysteriously scramble or lose information. So you’ll want a way to print and file your work.
You’ll want a system for organizing tax receipts. Like an engaged couple planning to get married, make a list of the tools and supplies you need. A sort of gift registry. And send it to friends and family. Better you should get a good-quality stapler and boxes of staples than some cologne you’ll be rushing to re-gift. Let people know what you’re doing, and allow them to help in this way.
Seriously, I cannot tell you how much I love my three-hole punch. And the four-drawer file cabinet I found used for five dollars. And the L-shaped 1960s “secretary’s desk” enameled avocado green I bought for fifty bucks. It’s so big that it filled half my apartment. A friend saw how it crowded my bed and remarked, “You have the only bedroom I’ve seen with a receptionist.”
Yes, this is all very pedestrian. But get good task lighting. Develop a system for organizing your books and supplies. You won’t dread handling paper correspondence if you have a stock of boxes, envelopes, a tape gun, and a designated table to work on. You won’t dread tax time if you regularly total and bundle your receipts.
Being a writer consists of more than writing. The next great inspiration will come along, but until it does…clean up your desk. Recycle the old paper stuff. Make room for the new arrival in your head. Process: Public Readings
Tom would arrange public readings. At coffeehouses, usually, one time at Common Grounds on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, a sold-out evening so well attended that the short-staffed barista gave Tom and me uniforms and we bused tables and washed dishes while the readings took place. Farther down Hawthorne Boulevard was Cafe Lena, which hosted an open-mike reading every Tuesday night.
Beware those long-established, come-one-come-all evenings, and be aware that the opposite of reading isn’t listening. Instead, it’s the drunken impatience and polite applause of a hundred poets each waiting his turn. There, people found their regular attention fix. Each week set a trap that caught the same writers. They never brought work to a larger market.
Of the readings Tom organized, one brutal night comes to mind. At a sports bar we took turns standing on the pool table to shout our stories against the noise of pinball machines and televised football games. The drinkers talked over us. One writer, Cory, sweet little Cory with her thick glasses, she shook while telling the story of her nephew dying of juvenile leukemia. Tears rolling down her freckled cheeks. The drunks shouted at the televisions, oblivious. These were video-poker-playing beer drinkers. No one gave a rat’s ass about the well-crafted emotional striptease we were doing on their pool table.
My turn came, and I read a short story about waiters pissing in food before serving it to wealthy guests, what would someday become chapter 10 in Fight Club. By the end someone had turned down the volume of the televisions. No one played pinball. What’s to say? A coarse story about piss and farts won them. They were listening, listening enough to laugh. Process: Piracy
A few years ago, the assistant to Todd Doughty, beloved Todd, the greatest living publicist, decided to return to college for a graduate degree in writing for television. The young man enrolled at Columbia, and on his first day of classes sent Todd a photograph of the program’s assigned textbook.
The title? Chuck Palahniuk’s Advice on Writing. The book contained essays I’d written for Dennis Widmyer’s site, The Cult. Years ago, the site’s focus on me was unnerving, and I’d hoped to provide content that would redirect visitors to the craft of writing itself. In all, I wrote some thirty-plus essays, and the site kept them behind a firewall for subscribers to read. Nobody was making any real money. Whatever the case, they’d been liberated. The university had downloaded, printed, and bound them, giving them a title and a cover I’d never intended, and charging students for the use of them.
This isn’t some Russian pirate site, this is Columbia University in NYC.
The discovery was flattering and frustrating and drove me to do what I always do in such no-win situations—I started crowd seeding. Introducing the topic into conversations with creative people who depend on the royalty income from their work.
In Mantova, Italy, I had dinner with Neil Gaiman, his daughter was just graduating from a college program there. He seemed resigned but hopeful on the topic: Gaiman proposed that if someone loves a writer’s work, really loves it, that person will eventually buy it. He speculated that in the countries where such piracy was rampant the economies were terrible. As those economies improved and people had more disposable income, they’d someday begin to buy the actual books they enjoyed. Gaiman likened a free, pirated book to the first no-cost shot of heroin that, with luck, will create a lifelong addiction. He advised patience. The loss to piracy was just a cost of
