Yes, Virginia, Revisited
I have over the last several Christmases reposted an essay I wrote about the most reproduced newspaper editorial in the history of the English language: Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. You can find that annual post here.
As I end another year as a writer of no particular fame or influence, I think even more deeply about the piece than usual.
Everything I opined in my previous piece stands up in my mind today. Mr. Church, the long-anonymous writer of the famed response to little Virginia O’Hanlon is no less a hero to either Christmas or the power of language merely because he was paid for his now immortal prose.
Yet the more words I commit to the paper/screen, the more I feel I am committing to the ether itself.
Marketing, marketing, marketing. The only three ways, aside from dumb viral luck or powerful connections that a writer can attain notoriety. Try as I may, I have not cracked the marketing code. Nor have I discovered the proverbial horseshoe of the internet age. I’ll not write merely to market, unless I am being paid for a specific purpose. But to write so much of what I believe should exist, and to have little to none of it achieve positive recognition does exact a toll upon my soul.
The first draft of I novel I at last finished this fall was years, not months in the making. False starts, long pauses, and for a while plain inertia of non-writing prolonged a process which, earlier in my life, took perhaps a third of the total time this cycle will require when all is said and done.
The reason is no singular for this sluggishness, but “not getting anywhere” is on the list near the top.
Which means I have come to think of Church and his editorial from an even newer angle. For the time being I, and the rest of us wordsmiths that struggle in obscurity must, if thee is any hope of accomplishing anything, embrace the very oblivion we scratch and claw to avoid.
By embrace, I don’t mean celebrate. You’ll find no toxic positivity from me, encouraging you or myself to feel ecstatic over failure and failure to achieve a goal. Rather, I am telling you, (in a circuitous fashion myself as well) that like a black hole pulling everything including light into itself, the matter of which everything is built is not destroyed. Matter indeed cannot be created or destroyed, as per physics.
Nor, in the end, can the words we put out there into the black hole or our own lack of success and recognition. Just as we still have no clue about what lies inside a black hole and in what forms, we may never know, probably in fact will never be blessed to know what vibrational change we set into motion by birthing out words into reality. For the medium of their record could in fact be lost to eternity someday.
But just as we can conjecture a more appealing alternative to the inside of a black hole than pure cosmic nihilism, so too can we entertain ourselves with the notion that out words may live on, without our knowledge, and beyond our earthly timeline just as those of Church did more than a century and a half ago.
To be sure, it stinks. It is often not sufficient to sustain me. I won’t lie to you, dear reader. And the second-to-last thing I want out of my writing if for it to obtain significance only once I have obtained the grave.
But of course, the true last thing I want would be for the words I have written to be entirely for nothing. Forgotten by people and the weird, heaven and horror of the cold black universe beyond today.
National Poetry Month ’22
Welcome to April, and to National Poetry Month. First established in 1996, it is a time to both read and write more poetry as an overall appreciation of the craft.
I want to take this chance to mention two things. One is to ask that you head over to the “My Books” section of this website and download yourself a cop of Lodestone Crossing. It’s the poetry book I released last summer, but this is a great month to mention it again. I talk about it in more detail in this post from the launch date, but as a quick reminder, it’s a collection of black out poetry; I took several sources, crossed out most of the words, and made poems out of the words that remained.
It was experimental for me, but highly satisfying. It’s a free download in ebook form, but I hope to make a paper form available sometimes this spring as well.
In addition to this, I plan to write some more poetry this month, some of which I may share here, so stay tuned for that.
Finally, I wanted to mention that I now have an author presence on TikTok. (Screen name, AuthorTyUnglebower.) There I make both serious and comic videos about the art and craft of writing, reading, and general thoughts on authorship. If you are on that platform, or plan to be, I’d appreciate a follow there as well!
Less Than Medium
I have written several essays over on Medium over the last year or two. None of them have gone viral. Disappointing, but the price one pays sometimes for not being well connected already.
I was, however, willing to accept the possibility of the right person reading my work on the site, and guiding it to some form of popularity, which in turn would lead to maybe a few peanuts in payment here and there.
That will not longer be happening, in any way I can conceive, thanks to new Medium policies that have removed me from the paying part of the system.
That is to say, I could tonight write an article that went viral enough to be quoted on MSNBC or the like, and I wouldn’t make a dime from it. That’s because I’ve not convinced 100 people to “follow” me. It’s quite the letdown as a writer to find quality-of-writing taking a back seat to networking and popularity contests on yet another platform. And while one could argue that the potential viral post could in its turn earn me those 100 followers, my success and online popularity and “connecting” online up to this point does not bode well for it happening.
Listicles and how-tos seem most likely to go viral and gain followers for new people, on Medium and elsewhere. But even more than this is the “scratch my back and I will scratch yours” mentality. The work beyond the hard work is in fact the hardest work for someone Autistic and introverted like myself, whose true strength is actual writing.
I am not Plimpton, or even Eugene Robinson, but I like to think my Medium material is intelligent. Well written. One or two of them I count among my best work. But sadly not among my “greatest hits” because a writer must be a schmoozer in such circles. In fact, a schmoozer alone will now get someone paid on the platform, even with mediocre content.
I will continue posting on Medium, here and there, when no other platform seems appropriate. But as I said, composing quality work is difficult. Laborsome.
And to think, if I knew a few hundred people willing to click a button for me, it wouldn’t have to be half as difficult.
But it is quality or nothing. Or in this case, quality and nothing, barring a bit of luck.
Believe in Your Bravery
Believe in your bravery in all tenses. You won’t merely be brave, you have already been so. Yes, you’ve cut corners or embellished your story here and there–so have we all.
Yet you know that life at times has lacerated you, fattened your lip, broken your nose, chipped your teeth: all in ways the world delegitimizes.
You’ve taken bullets and fallen on swords that society refuses to see. It may have been out of reflex. It may have been in service to what you felt was the greater good. Or it may have been what you thought was expected of you.
You chose to suffer in silence, or others implicitly and explicitly silenced you. This might have numbed you to the pain of your own invisible wounds and travails–so much so you internalize the toxic positivity of the statement, “You are not a victim.” Well, you have permission to define victim however you need to, and to identify as such, if only to yourself.
You are not weak just because society has ignored your strengths. You are not always fine merely because your pain confuses others. You are not selfish because somebody on this planet has it worse than you do.
You are you, and you’re still here, reading this, thinking over what it might mean. So you haven’t lost yet, and you won’t lose by accepting your own boundaries of peace and safety.
It takes courage to do all of this, day in and day out. You don’t have to wonder about becoming brave; you are, and have been already. Proceed accordingly. Believe in your own bravery.
It’s nobody else’s damned business.
The Writer’s Traffic Circle
The blogging portion of this website perfectly illustrates the title concept of this post.
We all know how the driving circle works. (Hopefully, so nobody gets hurt out there.) When clear, one enters the circle, and drives around it, until reaching the road they need, at which point they exit and continue on their way.
There is nothing to prevent someone from remaining in the circle indefinitely, however. One could, without any physical impediment continue driving legally in a circle for as long as one could. Just ask Clark Griswold from the European Vacation movie.
Doing so would be pointless in real life, despite being worth a chuckle in a movie. But in the writing world, it’s no laughing matter.
Discipline is of course vital to completing any writing project. The work won’t write itself. But life happens, and sometimes we lose the time, the energy, the motivation to write. We should allow ourselves that on occasion.
Yet at some point as we navigate that creative roundabout we must determine why we haven’t exited and continued working. Are we truly unable to write, or are we simply unwilling to write today, this week, this month?
Several things can keep a writer in that traffic circle with poor Clark. A big one for me is readership, especially when it comes to this blog. The cold truth is, few people read this. A few do, and I always appreciate that, but by the metric of a “successful” blog, I do not now, nor have I ever had one. It is what it is.
With a large readership eagerly awaiting my next post, I would, I confess probably post more often. Reaching people who become inspired or educated by my content would represent one of the exits from the circle of not-writing. Without that following, it’s easy to just ease past the road, ease past the next, and be lulled into passivity by a nice circular road trip. Round and round I go.
The metaphor works with any writing. Novels, poetry, essays. It’s easier to write when someone’s reading.
There are other less-than-legit reasons I might stop writing for a while, to be sure. But whichever one we’re talking about, I have to be willing to take the exit into writing at some point. Any of the exits. Because even if the road I wanted is closed, I cannot stay in the circle forever. I can’t wait for the perfect opportunity. I have to “make left” and get the hell out of my own way eventually, and get to some kind of writing.
This blog has been one causality of letting myself get trapped in that circle of doing nothing as I wait for the road full of eager readers.
Yet here I am again. For now. Just as I have gotten off of the circle for a bit and posted my thoughts here today, I hope that you will drive away from whatever manageable obstacles you have that are keeping you in the traffic circle. At least for today.
We’ve all seen Big Ben enough for a while, haven’t we?
Ty Unglebower 