Monday Motivation! With Meatballs!
Get your week rolling with some fun
Welcome to our first installment of Monday motivation! This is a one-month interlude of motivational fun, as I’m doing some traveling and unable to write the regular bi-weekly news column. Enjoy! Regular Lit Mag News news roundups will resume in August.
We talk a lot here about things gone awry in the world of indie lit publishing. I consider this work vital. There are so many questions writers have, so many ways people with power take advantage, so many hidden rules and capriciously guarded gates. There are dozens of reasons for writers to be frustrated and to feel overwhelmed.
What we don’t talk about here is the craft of writing. I don’t cover that too much because so many others do. Everywhere you look there are newsletters, websites, books, e-books, classes, workshops, and so on, to help you improve your craft.
I trust that all of you are taking care of the craft component on your own.
But that component is, of course, huge. It’s everything. We question and kvetch about the publishing process because there is something at the core of it that we desperately want to nurture and protect—our writing, our words.
Though we come to this newsletter to talk all about lit mag publishing—the good, the bad, the messy—in our own lives we are all working on some other plane entirely, the powerful and mysterious realm in which we commune with something quite hard to really describe. At those times, we give voice to ghostly people dwelling inside of us; we shape abstractions into concrete and recognizable form; we feel the music of words in our inner ears; we struggle endlessly because we understand that if we don’t get it exactly right then we have failed the inner dreamscape that calls us, knowing full well that in fact we will never get it exactly right, and so we must continue on.
What I believe is that if you love writing, if you are committed to the work of writing, you are a writer. End of story.
I also believe that if you are committed to this work and you are committed to reaching an audience, then your words will find their way into the world. They just will.
It may not be in The New Yorker, as you used to fantasize about when you were first starting out. It may not be the best-selling book you thought you would publish at age 25, launching you into the stratosphere of fame and eternal glory. It may not be in every “top-tier” lit mag, or even any lit mags at all. It may look completely different than what you once thought.
But you will write. You will keep writing. And you will find your way to be heard.
This is obviously true when everything goes exactly your way, but it is also true when the deck is stacked against you. It is true when the system opposes you, in all the ways this system can. It is true when yet another award you hoped to win has gone to that hotshot from your MFA program. It is true when the rejection letters pile up for weeks on end. It is true when you know your work is good and no one will give it a chance. It is true when the fancy people are all sipping fancy martinis in their fancy places and discussing the exciting new writing by all the fancy someones, who are not you.
When the business of publishing frankly sucks, or breaks your heart, or feels unfair because it often is unfair…No matter.
You will write. You will keep writing. And you will find a way to be heard.
Perhaps even more importantly: You will find your way to be heard, a new way, a better way, a more interesting way than you ever even imagined.
This is not just a motivational speech. I mean, it is. It is also simply fact.
For those of you who love to write, who need to write, who must communicate, whether in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or any other form the creative pulse inside you chooses to beat itself into, you will do it. There’s no secret trick. No magic potion.
You just go on, and you do it.
And maybe sometimes, you have a little bit of fun in the process.
Win or lose, up or down, forward or backward, my friends, you got this. The field is all yours.
Go forth and write your beautiful hearts out.
It is sad truth of human nature, as the nightly news attests, that we seldom applaud the good people do in this world, while giving endless publicity to the evil-doers. So may I here and now on behalf of all the folks who share and learn at Lit Mag news, give out to Becky A GREAT BIG THANK YOU! You have created an unique forum, part confessional, part inspirational. And most of all, Becky, it's always interesting!
And for my fellow writers, let me share what has (sadly) taken me a lifetime to see-- when we create words that magically [not hyperbole] enter another person's mind, their soul actually [yes, not hyperbole] be it now or in the future. that is a miracle [ again, not hyperbole]. The tricky part, as I've learned the long and hard way, is to differentiate between ego, which is delusional, and soul, which like truth is eternal. Earning an MFA, winning a contest, getting your writing published, or even better a book, all can feed the ego--but then what? We know our egos are never, never satisfied--they always want more. But what we can forget, as Becky alludes to so well when she writes about the 'mystery' that is creativity, is what is truly important, the only thing really that is important: when your words somehow make that wondrous transition between 2 souls. There is only one greater miracle in the Universe: the love that mysteriously, magically, wondrously binds 2 disparate beings for a lifetime.
I've been writing stories since second grade and two of those little efforts, with illustrations, are in Special Collections at Michigan State University's Library. I did dream of being in The New Yorker (who doesn't growing up in NYC?), but I also dreamed that my work would make enough of a mark to be collected, and that did happen. MSU *bought* my current and future literary papers some time ago and updates the archive at least once a year. This is a blog post for when it first happened: https://www.levraphael.com/papers.html