The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (36 page)

I’ll also try Konrath’s technique of publishing articles in magazines.

Fulfillment.
Lightning Source, as mentioned earlier, does not do fulfillment. That means that shortly after Chris submits the final galleys I will be receiving several boxes of books at my home. As orders for the paperback come in, I’ll pay a neighbor to stick each book in an envelope and mail or UPS it. (Keep the money in the family...)

The ebook orders will be fulfilled automatically via Smashwords.

Time will tell how my strategy will play out. Hopefully this book will sell well enough to merit future editions in which I can discuss the results I obtained.

Regardless of sales, though, I can tell you that the effort of self-publishing was totally worth it. It was an intellectually and emotionally rewarding experience that allowed me to work with, and learn from, amazing people.

One thing is also for sure: that evolving digital technologies, and the resultant new business models, are firmly on the side of the self-publisher. I’m particularly looking forward to ubiquitous “tip jars,” which will allow someone to read one of my blog posts anywhere on the Web and, if they like it, to easily (with a single click) send me a buck or two. And I’m sure there will be other technologies that will be even more profitable, exciting, and empowering to writers and readers alike.

To be continued...

Epilogue

T
he Greek writer Longinus said that the creator must be ready when the “arrow of inspiration” strikes. What the prolific know is that there aren’t just a few arrows out there: it’s arrows all the time. You just have to eliminate the barriers to your receiving and working with them.

If you’ve started the work in this book, you are well on your way. Keep going, and always strive to remain within the light and warmth of compassionate objectivity. Also, resource yourself abundantly, manage your time, optimize your writing process, eliminate ambivalence and internalized oppression, avoid (and heal from) traumatic rejections, and create an empowered career. The results, for both your work and your life, should be amazing.

Writers sometimes talk about a book “taking” time out of their lives. This book, which took three years to write, was a gift that immeasurably added to my life by deepening my understanding of myself and the world. Your challenges and needs were a very big part of my thinking during that time, and so I thank you for being with me on my path, and for letting me be with you on yours.

Appendix

Why an appendix on academic writers?

And why should non-academics read it?

One answer to the first question is that grad students and non-tenured faculty are among the most oppressed and exploited writers out there—which is really saying something. Another is that academia has elevated perfectionism to an art form: it’s academia, after all, that insists that its denizens either “publish or perish.”

The answer to the second question is that the plight of academics can illuminate that of other writers.

In my discussion, I focus mainly on graduate students in the liberal arts; however, much of what I say also pertains to postdoctoral fellows, untenured faculty, and even undergraduates in the liberal arts and beyond. In Sections A.8, A.9, and A.10 I deal with problems specific to MFA (Master of Fine Arts) and other graduate writing programs.

I expect this section to be controversial, and even to offend some people, but I didn’t set out to offend: in fact, I tried hard to be fair. Many thesis advisors (and other committee members, of course) have good hearts and motives, but are undermined by the system they work in; as for the rest—the uncommitted or incompetent ones—well, at least they’re not out there building bombs or growing tobacco. I’m also aware that by the nature of my work I’m going to disproportionately see the stuck and unhappy grad students, and so my sample is skewed.

But I can’t ignore what I constantly see in my workshops, coaching, and elsewhere: that many academics are very poorly treated, with consequences detrimental to them
and
society. Scholarship is precious, after all, and the more we undermine our scholars, the more wisdom and perspective we lose.

Graduate school presents itself as a classic apprenticeship opportunity in which you work long hours over many years for a poverty salary, receiving in exchange instruction, mentorship, and an entree to the field. I believe that that contract, as played out in academia, is fundamentally unfair, because a graduate student’s teaching and research often yield his university tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition and research funding, while he only receives a small fraction of that in compensation. Still, students willingly enter into these contracts, so the situation might not be so bad if the universities actually lived up to their half of the bargain. The trouble is they often don’t. Many graduate students are given minimal mentorship, and many are “mentored” destructively—with the student himself being blamed, of course, if he underperforms as a result.

Moreover, the career payoff is, in many cases, illusory. In her April 2010
New York Times
article, “The Long-Haul Degree,”
1
Patricia Cohen cites a study that found that more than a third of 2008 humanities Ph.D. students remained unemployed a full year after getting their degree. Of course, academia is happy to continue exploiting those unemployed Ph.D.s with poorly paid, part-time, no-benefit, no-advancement “adjunct” and “instructor” gigs.

Obviously, not all grad experiences are awful or exploitative, and some are wonderful. But the bad stories I hear are truly awful...

1
Patricia Cohen, “The Long-Haul Degree,”
The New York Times
, April 16, 2010 (www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18phd-t.html).

Consider the below, said to graduate student by her thesis advisor:

“Graduate school is not about babysitting, and I’m not going to be your mother hen. If you want that, go to a community college.”

It is:

1. Insulting and demeaning.

2. Snobbish (and ignorant), with the dig at community colleges.

3. Possibly sexist, directed as it was to a female student (by a female advisor, by the way). I doubt the professor would have used the term “mother hen” to a male student, although she might have. And, above all,

4. Controlling and intimidating. “Don’t bother me,” is what this advisor is really saying. “Just do great work, get it published, and let me share in the glory and collect the grants. But if you run into any problems, solve them yourself.”

Of course, the advisor never bothered to delineate which requests for help she considered reasonable and which she didn’t: vagueness is a tool of oppressive systems. If the advisor had really stopped to think it over she would see that (a) the vast majority of her students’ needs are reasonable, and (b) it’s also her job to cope with those students who are basically competent but require more support than average. She would also see that her strategy of setting up a straw-person in the form of an over-needy student and using that straw-person to control her actual students is not only dishonorable but an abdication of professional responsibility.

I can’t entirely blame the professor, however, because her quote reflects the pervasive macho propaganda about how tough graduate school is supposed to be: how it separates the “wheat” from the “chaff,” the “serious scholars” from the “dilettantes,” etc. Graduate school is “sink or swim,” students are told, and anyone asking for more than the bare minimum of help (or any help at all, in some cases) is looking to be “babysat,” “handheld,” or “coddled.” (All of the terms in quotes were actually said to graduate students I know by their advisors—and note the grandiosity, dichotomization, labeling and other perfectionist symptoms.)

Oh, and “let’s face it: not everyone can handle intellectual work, and if we open the field up to everyone it will simply devalue it.” (The straw person argument again.) Oh—and I almost forgot!—if you’ve got significant personal responsibilities or problems that you need to balance with your scholastic activities, too bad, and the fact that you’re even asking indicates your lack of seriousness.

Of course, it’s particularly grating when you hear those kinds of messages from advisors in fields related to social justice.

In
Mentors, Muses & Monsters:
(Elizabeth Benedict, ed.), my Grub Street Writers colleague Christopher Castellani wrote that his MFA program “had a sink-or-swim philosophy. You were a writer with innate talent, or you weren’t. The program’s goal was to anoint the real writers and spare the ‘nonreal’ ones from years of heartbreak.” (See the section on “unfairness” in Section 7.2.) Fortunately, Castellani subsequently attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where some of the perfectionist damage was healed:

By the end of my stint ... I don’t feel “real” or “not real,” and I begin to understand that such a distinction is meaningless, that the questions should be: Am I working hard? Am I learning? Am I digging deeper, embracing complications? Am I “failing better”?

Do I think the “mother hen” professor is a monster? Of course not: she’s probably a decent person who is trying to juggle multiple responsibilities with inadequate support from her own superiors. The “mother hen” comment might have even been an effort to help her student by clarifying the rules for their interaction, which is more than many advisors do. Still, her comment was, at the very least, inept; and whether or not she meant to manipulate her student into not feeling comfortable asking for help, that was the result she got.

And I’ve heard worse stories, much worse—like the one from the graduate student whose advisor told her, “Graduate school is about wrestling with your demons, and I hope I don’t wind up to be one of them, but if I do, so be it.” And (surprise, surprise) the advisor did indeed prove himself to be a demon by stealing his student’s work and publishing it himself. His justification was that of oppressors everywhere: that the victim drove him to it (in this case, because she was supposedly too slow to publish). And, not surprisingly, he also committed other egregious sins, including neglect, cruelty, and sexism.

This student actually had nightmares in which her advisor raped her. Is it any wonder she had trouble writing?

It’s not just advisors who are abusive, by the way. Another awful story I was told was of a graduate student at an Ivy League college (which I’ll call College X) who, after learning that her brother was diagnosed with cancer, went to the departmental administrator to do the paperwork for a leave of absence to be with him, and was told, “This is College X, and we don’t take leaves.”

(1) My most important advice for graduate students is to
never work for anyone who is cruel, exploitative, or negligent
. I don’t care how brilliant or charismatic they are—and charisma, by the way, often masks narcissism. I also don’t care how amazing their CV is, or how many doors they can open. Also, don’t work for someone who is flaky, irresponsible, or a tantrum thrower. Without a foundation of honesty, integrity, compassion, and basic fairness in your relationship with your advisor, you are very vulnerable. (Hopefully you’ll get this advice before you’ve chosen an advisor, but if you’ve already done so it applies throughout your career, and life.)

(2)
Delineate boundaries and expectations with your advisor.
Honestly, it’s really her job to do this, but she might not know how, or even that she should. So you should. Ask how she prefers to work and communicate with her students, and accommodate those preferences as much as possible.

Set up a regular weekly or biweekly meeting, and save as many of your questions or concerns for that meeting as possible. (Obviously, in cases where you truly need fast input, you shouldn’t wait.) This is true even if you see your advisor all the time casually, since casual conversations are not a substitute for formal meetings.

(3)
Be a good colleague.
Show up for seminars, and participate. If you’re shy or otherwise inhibited, seek professional help, since that can hinder your career.

Join a committee. Forge ties with other faculty members, as well as postdocs, other grad students, and administrators. Don’t isolate yourself, even if (especially if!) you’re behind on deadlines. Building a broad base of support in and beyond your department is not only a good career move but gives you protection in case your advisor becomes problematic. There are few people more professionally vulnerable than a graduate student locked in tight orbit around a dysfunctional thesis advisor.