How Much do you Need?

One late night in what must have been my second year in college (so 1998), I was talking with someone about having friends, bemoaning my lack of them, and she asked me, “how many do you need?”

I remember that question because of the reframing, the paradigm shift it represented, although the implications of it didn’t sink in until much later. Popularity, I had assumed, was a competition for accolade and achievement, like everything else, with no upper limit. How many friends did I need? As many as possible. People wanting to be friends with me, like grades or theatrical performances, indicated something about my intrinsic value, and I wanted to be really, really good.

At some point, though, friendship inflation would logically occur. Time and energy, especially for introverts, are limited, and overextension would mean a lot of well-disposed acquaintances, but no close friends. Unless you are good at making and switching masks, the persona you shape and paint to project for large auditoriums will seem phony to those up front.

Socially awkward and insecure, I’d always ravenously scavenged for overtures at friendship, never thinking of a steady social diet as something I could intentionally prepare.

Local Knowledge

I’ve talked several times to @procionlotor walking the loop around the ecovillage about how the advantage of writing a narrative this way is that I know who I’m writing for. We’ve both taught writing classes before, and the most common and sensical advice to give writers is to consider their audience, to know who they are writing for and adjust their tone, syntax, or arguments accordingly.

Yet, I pointed out, in an academic setting this advice necessarily involves a hidden hypocrisy or misdirection: their intended audience doesn’t really exist. They aren’t writing for an audience, but for a grade. If you are their teacher, they aren’t really writing to you, but rather to some projected hypothetical, larger audience on whose behalf you are supposed to evaluate the effectiveness of their prose. Some abstracted societal standard, an ideal of a discerning reader, to whom in a presumed future they would have to appeal. A horizon of deferred, and always receding meaning. You never get to the point where you can look the final judge, the authority, in the eye. Even with my dissertation my committee made clear that they weren’t evaluating the pages in front of them on the basis of their truth or beauty, but if they would be able to get me a job. As it turned out, they wouldn’t.

In writers’ workshops we weren’t writing for each other, but to the nebulous editors of literary magazines or judges of contests, who in turn would evaluate the stories on behalf of readers who might one day, after heavy editing, possibly exist. The vast majority of fiction fails to reach the doors of the ghosts to whom it is addressed. Anyone who encounters potentially future-published works is hemming and hawing and looking nervously over their shoulders, trying to guess at the tastes and tendencies of some invisible, higher authority. It’s really good, I just don’t know if anyone would buy it.

I spent decades writing papers for teachers and professors, and stories for my peers, who couldn’t respond to them as acts of actual communication, but as tokens of what might someday be submitted to an omniscient, ivy-covered or award-laden committee of incarnate market forces, powerful enough to make everyone in the world prostrate and expurgate their prose into imitative gibberish in the hopes of one day laying those papers at their feet. Any meaning had to be thin enough to slip under those imposingly heavy gates, to the keepers of them on the other side.

There is a kind of pandering, superstitious fallacy baked into nearly all creative and academic endeavors (or so I thought, for a long, long time). The culprit, as always, is capitalism. Profitability subsumes all other criteria against which writing might be judged. The ideal audience size is infinitely large, always bigger than it is, the only sure sign of success exponential growth in all directions.

The implication of the works we hold up as objects of study is that real, serious artists don’t create narratives for the people around them, who they actually know and care about, but for strangers hundreds of years distant, across the globe, forced to read their work for academic credits, or because of a well-placed review, or blurb across the cover.

Relevant Ephemera

If I am against a celebrity-worshipping, profit-centered, industrialized approach to writing, then what am I for? The times when I felt most heard and understood, creatively, was when I was performing for a small group of friends. Notably, improv theater in college. Not only were those performances limited in terms of the size of the audience, but also in terms of time, or repeatability. There was never any question of trying to manufacture anything lasting or permanent, other, perhaps, than friendships.

My most intense musical experiences, as a listener, were when I knew the people playing, or the band was obscure enough, and the venue small enough, that I felt like I did.

Reading, admittedly, has been different, maybe because I’ve never known anyone who took writing, seriously, as their craft. I’ve known professors and friends who wrote books, but the arguments they presented, though impressive and persuasive, seemed to have little to do with their actual lives, and more with the giant, impersonal game-board of academic scholarship. Writing, in order to propagate in the medium of print, has to first strip itself of the first and second person. One becomes abstracted into the language they produce.

The books that shaped and shook me were written by powerful people I would never meet. Professionals, along with, I later would realize, teams of editors, agents, and proofreaders. I was taught, in classes, to worship ghosts, and I don’t think this was necessarily wrong. The main argument I would make in graduate school was that although canonical texts themselves may have been written, more or less, by an individual hand, the real work of a literary ecosystem, the heavy lifting, is done by the largely invisible forces of selection, by an environment that reads through and sorts the inconceivably large slush pile of submissions, finding the best to replicate and put on top.

Where I found personalized, and personally significant narratives, was in role playing games, or at least the idea of them. Maybe video games, as well. They may have been centrally, mass produced, but like the toys made to market movies, they could be used as props for original, internal creations. Before I had a concept of intellectual property, of copyright and derivative works, I could unproblematically invest all of my emotional energy into narratives that recombined the most evocative elements from the games I played. I was, or felt myself to be, an active participant rather than a passive consumer.

Another side-argument is this: a franchise or product of the entertainment industry, in order to be successful, has to tap into the creative enthusiasms of its fan-base, becoming a vampire on the unrewarded energies it claims responsibility for. I’ll leave that, though, for another time.

Time

Already, this essay is beginning to cease being self-illustrative. I had in mind, as possible readers, the small group of people in my Discord. In the act of drafting it I’ve fallen into my old habits of treating it as incipient notes for my future self, iterations of the same ideas I’ve been playing with for years.

In addition to a who, writing needs a when. School spoiled me with the structure of deadlines, of classes and classifications, things I had to read, learn, and report on. Since I’ve been exiled out into the vast, indeterminate void of the actual world, the answer to when? has almost always been sometime in the future, after an undefined, indefinite process of editing or selection. Hard drives have been weighted down with drafts and rambling, sinking to the bottom of an unseen and irrecoverable sea. Sporadic efforts to publish, either stories, blogs, or newsletters, have failed to provide the connection, the completed circuit, to electrify an ongoing stream of content.

I can blame self doubt, or a lack of feedback or engagement, but now I see the expectation that if I write interesting things, I will automatically find avid readers, as a delusion of narcissistic entitlement, casting myself as the victim of a system that has poor taste and a reward structure skewed towards superficial pandering. The value of the cards in your hand is how much you bet on them, how long you go before you fold. I expected my readers to take my writing more seriously than I did, myself.

The trap is the false belief that the only real audience is to be found at the level of professional, verifiable, widely and wildly celebrated level success. That trap is laid by those who will profit from both your insecurities and ambitions. How many readers do I need? The answer is very few. As many as will read this. As many as might play a role-playing game, or, at most, fill a small theater. Where you can see each other’s faces, and talk at intermission.

Money

Money is hard to talk about. The assumption is, above a certain level, you should be getting paid. Something can be a hobby, but then should be shared with others only with the same humble abashedness with which you might show a close friend a sketchbook, or strum, in a boozy basement, an inexpert acoustic guitar. The subsidiary assumption is that you would also have another full-time job, to fund your extra-vocational indulgence.

So, am I writing seriously? Yes. Do I want to get paid? Eventually, yes. Maybe this is sleight-of-hand or rationalization, but I’ve entertained the notion that I could edit professionally, and write fiction as an indulgence, but one that reinforced and reflected my primary craft. My editing business, though, like my writing career, has failed to take off. Most of my meager income, for the past few years, has been from online lessons, unrelated even loosely to the written word.

I’ve had opportunities to reach a large audience. There are formula for doing so. Someone at the ecovillage is a marketing specialist, with over 50,000 twitter followers, and he could teach me how to grow my readership to much larger numbers. At what cost, though? I wouldn’t be writing something like this, certainly.

There’s a cryptocurrency app where, if I posted content every day, I could probably reach the phones and eyes of thousands of Indian would-be-investors, a node in a exponentially growing web of bad advice. When I post things on facebook, I’m shocked and rather terrified at how many people like the post, and I know enough about the algorithms, technological and social, that would allow me to get the hit of dopamine daily from the glancing approval of people I barely know. But what would be the point? It wouldn’t be a true expression of anything but my pre-shadowing of an empty capitulation to a desire for popularity or approval, conforming to low expectations. Some people find social media celebrity meaningful, but I would only end up resenting the effort of maintaining a superficial facade. How many friends do I need?

The lure of writing as a Web3 project, turning stories or their associated collectibles into NFTs, is that the people you bring in aren’t consumers who are paying you for a product of dubious value, but are early adopters (investors when regulatory bodies are looking the other way) who can be incentivized to help push the endeavor onward to greater levels of success, because they, too, will benefit. I’m not sure I believe that, honestly. I don’t think you should, either.

Maybe the digital artifacts associated with my writing will accrue value. Maybe there will be a royalty-sharing smart contract system worked out where we can all sail out to the open sea on this commercial ship together, but as the owner of a local comic book store used to say: buy them because you enjoy them, not because you think they will be worth something someday.

Locally Produced

One of the residents of the Dancing Rabbit ecovillage recently blogged about the importance and difficulty of selling locally produced food and dairy products. Regulatory environments are set up to favor large-scale agribusiness, and anything not certified and sanctioned by the top-down system is seen as suspect, despite evidence that small-scale, organic farming has less of an environmental impact and offers more varied and nutritious products, in addition to promoting resilience and self-reliance in small communities. The farther from the source something has to travel, the greater the carbon footprint and the less nutrition it will have.

I’ve often made the argument that the same thing could be said for literary production, or music. Locally produced songs or stories may not be sanctioned or certified at the scale of large industry, but ultimately they provide the equivalent of bio-diversity, and farm-to-table freshness.

Local culture doesn’t necessarily mean close geographical proximity, but rather how far removed the cultural producers are from you, socially, how many steps they would have to take to reach your life and experience.

I don’t want to advocate for provincialism, or cultural isolation. Books and music from around the world, and from distant history, have affected me profoundly, and I can’t imagine how deprived we would be if we turned our back on influences far-off in space and time. For a steady diet, though, the things you put on your plate every day, I don’t think we should always eat fruit from another hemisphere, vegetables from another coast, or wear clothes, if we can help it, made in sweat-shops somewhere else.

Stories and music are best, in my opinion, when they can pull from fields of shared reference. Popular culture creates a simulacra of social meanings, but it can only extend as deep as the skin of consumer goods, not the blood and heart of actual, directional intention.

Great albums or works of art rose from a certain in-group, an actual happening, and you can get a simulated whiff of what it would have been like to be there for the blooming of that moment, to have been in that tribe, but it isn’t real. It is hyper-real, and there are all kinds of technical and post-production tricks to punch up the feeling of personally meaningful language or symbols, but it’s like food injected with sugar, corn-syrup, and additives, that may enhance the flavor but contain no calories, no real fuel to process or remember our experience.

Everyone here, in this audience, shares with me other registers of reference to frame the things I write. Some of you I’ve talked to in real life, some are on this venture with me of an online business. Some of you have told me your own stories, or played with me in games. I just want you to know: I’m glad that you’re here, and I’m listening. These stories are for you.