The New York Society Library, affectionately known as ‘the writers library’ because of its impressive roster of accomplished author/members, has a wonderfully supportive assistant head librarian in Carolyn Waters, who makes us all feel appreciated and cherished with her Writing Life series of lectures. Bending over backwards to supply us with the tools we need to learn the skills and apply them to the craft, Carolyn amassed a revelatory group of speakers this year, including the one I heard this week. As is often the case, I found a surprise hidden in the recesses of the presentation.
The speaker, Sarah Pinneo, has a new book out (her second) called Julia’s Child, and her blog Blurb is a Verb! is an enormous success. Her talk at the library was about publicity and how to run your own campaign, whether you have a traditional publisher or go the Epublishing route. Ordinarily I have to grit my teeth to get through a talk on the nuts and bolts of self-promotion in the digital age. I go just to expose myself as often as possible in hopes I’ll be less overwhelmed when the time comes to face the task; but that strategy is about as successful as young boys exposing themselves to the horrors of war in literature or film. Going into battle is no less appalling for the vicarious familiarity, and I know the full-time job of promoting my own books will produce the same effect on me.
I couldn’t help looking at the naturally pink cheeked young woman describing the necessity for blogging, tweeting, befriending and linking-in with a vengeance, and thinking there would have been a time…a time I’d have embraced the challenge of self-marketing and promoting my writing with delight. But this is no longer that time for me. All my energy goes into relearning and practicing a skill I’d only just begun in my youth, and as much as I love technology, I shrivel at the thought of putting aside my writing to live entirely in the promotional world for as long as it would be necessary. I know how quickly my enthusiasm will wane. But that said, I always come away with something unexpected when I attend these lectures. This time it was a reminder that within the paradoxes of life the true discoveries of actuality lie. It was Sarah Pinneo’s unknowing reference to the topic of my last blog post, ‘For Whom We Write’ that triggered this unforeseen spark for me; her discussion about her personal discomfort with self-promotion and the irony of finding oneself forced to describe a target audience in order to procure the interest of agents, publishers, booksellers and even readers themselves.
She acknowledged the incongruity between knowing that authors must avoid writing to an audience in order to avoid falling into the yawning abyss of hypocrisy, only to learn that upon completing their work they must articulate the specific reader targeted in order to sell the book. I thought immediately about the many conversations my last post sparked and what a seduction the fame and money can be if writing is one’s only means of support at the start of a career. Can we still be true to our core beliefs about the art form? That brought my mind to similar paradoxes and the people who’ve struggled with them.
One of those was my son just after his graduation from college; he was agonizing over satisfying his first boss in a bank in New York. He’d been strongly chastised for making a decision on his own when he was “not being paid to think”, as his superior so eloquently put it. My son saw the disparity immediately between training he’d had from his earliest days to learn to be responsible and “think for yourself” and his boss’ reprimand. What was the difference in the situations that brought on such a paradox?