What to do with a novel I can't publish?

Obviously, I'm not doing much with writing these days. I'm not blogging much, and it's not because I'm furiously writing my next batch of short stories. I've moved on.

But I still have this novel I wrote. I really like it. I pitched it to thirty-some agents and got only a few responses. They were all no responses, even if some claimed they really liked it.

A few weeks ago, I got a delayed response from someone else I sent it to. This would be another "no, but I like it" kind of response. Here it is:

I'm afraid this one isn't for me. But, I have to say, your writing is tight and very accomplished. And - most important of all for a writer who is trying to be funny -- the voice IS funny! When the narrator breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience, I think most writers make a mess of it. But you accomplished this task 100%. Congrats on that. So, so difficult to do.

I would suggest that you focus a bit more on leading the reader into the story. Right now, it feels like we're all over the place. There's a lot going on in the first few pages and, while the narrator does an excellent job at telling the story, it still feels like we're jumping around - one moment you're talking about the job, then your son, then (the country) and its history. Overwhelming the reader early on doesn't give the reader a chance to really sink into the story. I want to know the point early on, and then get hooked and dragged along to the end. 

It's difficult to know what to do with a response like this. The main reason he wrote it, probably, was just to be nice and let me down easy. He thought what I wrote was decent, but not what he was looking for, so he very kindly decided to add a little encouragement with the rejection. He also tried to give some reason for why he didn't pick it. But he probably spent very little time considering either the positives or the negatives of what he wrote. His main goal was to get the message out that he was saying no but to make me feel not too terrible about it.

Which is why the critique doesn't really make much sense. How can the writing be both "tight" and also "all over the place"? I think what he means is simply that each of the first three chapters have completely different settings, and I keep on rotating the setting of the chapters throughout, although not always with each new chapter. That is an intentional, conscious decision, one that hundreds of novels use each year. Rather than confusing the reader, I feel like it keeps the novel from seeming dull from right out of the starting line. If there is anything that leaves you confused, I'm hoping the humor and observations are enough for you to trust I'm taking you somewhere. It's possible I used that technique poorly, but this feedback seems to be criticizing the novel just for the technique itself. That's a strange response to a standard literary technique for a publisher that leans toward the literary-fiction side of things.

I'm in no way complaining. It was nice of him to write anything. The fact he tried at all means he might have thought it was better than most of what comes across his slush pile. But I've seen these kinds of explanations for a no answer all the time when working on the Baltimore Review--the editor feels the need to justify the no, but doesn't have a lot of time for it, so he relies on vague statements like "it didn't take me anywhere" or "the characters didn't come to life for me." It's meant to make the point that you tried to explain your response without really having to put too much work into really explaining it. It's what he had time for. I appreciate it, but it doesn't tell me anything about what to do with the novel.

What to do now

I'm out of patience with trying to get it published. At the same time, I like the novel, it's about an important subject, and I have more personal insight into that subject than most almost anyone who's  written about it. That doesn't mean it's a good novel. Even if this particular criticism isn't that on-the-money, the story might just not be that good. Still, I just can't escape the notion that I'm supposed to put this novel out there, even if it's a complete failure commercially and critically. I could do that by self-publishing it. It wouldn't be what I'd want, but I'd feel that I'd fulfilled whatever obligation it is in my head to put this out in the world.

That's a ridiculous way of thinking, flawed by magical thinking. People do not have destinies they were meant to fulfill. They have things they are good at, and they should try to use those abilities to fill voids in the world and be useful. I ought to keep moving on with other things. Trying to publish a novel now would just be a distraction.

I was thinking I'd take the summer to edit the novel, which is now two years old since I wrote it in a blur in late spring and early summer 2016. I thought I'd see how I felt after editing it. But even an edit now seems like a lot of time to invest in something that's a bit of a fool's errand.

Several years ago, I had no reason to think anything I wrote would ever be published, no reason to think I was writing for any purpose beyond having done it. But I had limitless energy to write back then. Now, I've had a little taste of success and nearly saw the novel get to an agent who wanted it, but I feel like writing is pointless. The reasons why aren't unique--I wonder if writing is useful and if mine says anything worth saying. But they're reasons I feel pretty strongly. Writing seems like an incredible act of faith, such that I can't even find the will to bring to completion work that I've mostly finished already.

I really am that uncertain

In Hegelian philosophy, after a thesis is met with an antithesis, you're supposed to end up with a synthesis, merging the two clashing thoughts into a new thesis, which then leads to a repeated process of refinement. When I have a thought in my head, though, and I then start to question that thought, the two poles tend not to synthesize so much as collide and cause mutual destruction. 

In my last two posts, I posted two opposing ideas that popped into my head while re-watching The Office over several months. On any given day, I might honestly believe either one of those two opposing ideas. I think I'm a little more likely to lean in the direction of the first post, which was why I put it in the lead, but there are days I really, really think the second one was more correct. 

Being able to embrace opposing schools of thought like this might mean I'm a reasonable person. But I don't think reasonable people tend to be that interesting. To be interesting requires being a little bit off-balance. It requires a little bit of shutting one kind of thinking out of your head and favoring another. That's why saints are so unfailingly odd, as are great artists, social do-gooders, and even great athletes. 

I wonder if maybe one reason my writing is stuck where it is has to do with this kind of reasonable-to-the-point-of-dullness agnosticism. Most people who captivate aren't agnostic. They might be horribly wrong about many things, but they aren't agnostic. 

I don't think I can make myself the kind of person who is a true believer. I can't make myself so off-balance the see-saw is always full of potential energy. It's all I can do to keep the bare minimum incline necessary to keep things from stopping altogether. I think a better goal is to try to be more concerned with practical matters and stop thinking so much about metaphysical and philosophical issues I can't solve. 

No book I could write will probably ever do the tangible good for humanity this man did with his 61-second YouTube video. I know I certainly appreciated it yesterday. I think I should aspire to be useful like this man, rather than brilliant like the unbalanced:

I don't even care that he thinks it's called a garbage "disposer." 

I am my own guest blogger: My last post was full of crap

In my last post, I argued that racism as a character defect does not, by itself, preclude someone from being a good person. I used Michael Scott, the insufferable boss from The Office, as an illustration to make my point. Here today to offer a counter-point is...me. Let's all welcome me here.

Guest Post

Art is not life

In Jake Weber's June 24th post, "Is Michael Scott both a racist and a good person," we get a good glimpse into how addled a brain can become after a lifetime of interpreting the world through fiction, rather than reality. Weber tries to debunk the notion that racism alone is enough to make someone a bad person. He derides the idea that racism is somehow a more elevated form of evil, worse than greed or parsimony or concupiscence.

It might be a convincing argument, if there were any examples in the real world of people with enough racism to be plainly evident but enough other charms to balance it out. But there are no such people, unless you find Paula Deen charming.

This is what comes of using fiction to draw ideas about real life. Fiction isn't real life. It follows a specific path meant to bring about a satisfying response in the reader or viewer by the end, leaving the consumer of the story to feel that all of what happened along the way was there for a reason. The real world isn't like that, and people in the real world tend to be quite different from people in art. In art, we need to show people as balanced, and give them some redeeming trait so they don't seem too simple. But the real world is full of people with no redeeming qualities at all, and racists are often at the top of that list. People who say the kinds of things Michael says don't usually also have hidden hearts of gold. They just don't. It's nice to think that people have some kindness just beneath the surface waiting to come out, but usually, when people seem like assholes, it's because they're assholes.

The Office is fantasy

The Office is escapist fantasy pretending to be a realistic comedy about working class people in middle America. When Michael says things no longer tolerated in any office in America, the audience cringes, but it also feels a slight tinge of vicarious thrill: someone is getting to say something that none of us is allowed to say anymore, and because it's presented as bad, we can enjoy it without feeling guilty about enjoying it. In this manner, the show gets to have it both ways: it can give us a stock heel character, but it also gets to show that same character humanized enough that we feel warm and fuzzy when he once in a while gets something right. Because Michael so frequently offends, the emotional payoff is that much higher when he acts appropriately.

Can't you tell when you're being played, Jake? 

There is no greater example of this than the very scene Weber cites: the one in which his employees sing a tribute to him before he leaves. The writers need the audience to have warm feelings for sweeps week, so everyone remembers the Michael of the previous three episodes instead of the one who picked Stanley for his basketball team because he was black.

Some flaws really are more important than others

Racism might not be a greater sin than avarice in a personal or spiritual sense, but that's between you and your confessor, if you're into that kind of thing. Because in its effect on society, racism is far more dangerous, as the entirety of human history teaches us. Society's judgment lies on the behaviors that most threaten its harmony. So yes, it is appropriate to hold the racist's racism against him more than than egoist's egotism.

Michael may grow throughout the series, but we don't see him ever explicitly repent of any of the terrible things he said or did over the years. By the end of the show, we did, it's true, witness fewer lines like "Mo' money, mo' problems, Stanley; you of all people should know that." But it seems more likely (other than the business reasons that the show couldn't keep going to this well) this was because Michael learned from his many scoldings from corporate, not because he had a change of heart. In other words, the punishment worked. Society is right today to treat racism as a special brand of evil, because treating it like this works.

Is Michael Scott both a racist and a good person? Thoughts on re-watching all of "The Office" on Netflix

While suffering through a lecture on gender roles in Renaissance literature--the most painful class I took in graduate school--my professor made an off-handed remark that has always stuck with me. She said the writer we were studying--I forget who it was now--exhibited such ingrained prejudices surrounding class in her writing that she suspected that we, in reading her, would find her to be "a classist, much like we would now think of someone as a racist."

What she meant was not just that we would find her assumptions about class to be anachronistic; we would actually find them evil, the way we find racism to be evil. We would find her prejudices to be inexcusable. She feared that we might be so put off by how ugly her thoughts on lower class people were, we'd be unable to see value in anything else the writer had to say.

I don't recall what I thought of the writer. I hated both class and professor, so I assume I hated the assignment, too. But what stuck with me about that comment was how easily I knew what she was saying. Our age finds racism to be so heinous a crime that anyone guilty of it is written off as altogether unredeemable. It's what makes trying to label a politician a racist such a powerful and divisive claim. Who would vote for a racist, even one who had a plan to fix schools and the economy? Being a racist in 2018 (or 2002, when I was in that class) is a tenuous step above being a pedophile in the hierarchy of public enemies.

Can a racist be in any way redeemable? You'd probably get a mixed answer to that question, depending on whether the person answering has had enough personal experience with a variety of racists to be able to distinguish between them. You'd get less of a split, though, on this question: Can a racist be a good person? I'd wager there'd be a pretty sizable split on that question, with the overwhelming majority saying no.

Michael Scott of the 1970s

This was a question pop culture made people ask when I was very young. The show All in the Family featured Archie Bunker, who was clearly a biggot, but also could show flashes of a rascally charm from time to time. The New Yorker ran an interesting article a few years ago about how All in the Family did not accomplish its goal of getting viewers to examine their own prejudices through humor. The article quotes Saul Austerlitz: “A funny thing happened on the way to TV immortality: audiences liked Archie. Not in an ironic way, not in a so-racist-he’s-funny way; Archie was TV royalty because fans saw him as one of their own."

I remember reading a Reader's Digest--that paragon of conservative mores--that was strategically placed by the toilet in my home when I was a teenager. An opinion piece within it noted that even though Archie was a biggot, you couldn't deny that Meathead and Gloria were living in his house and mooching off him.

Nussbaum saw All in the Family as the show that launched the "bad fan," the person who unambiguously likes the character meant to be ambiguous and partly hateful.

Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin 

Watching the entire nine seasons of The Office forces the viewer to consider it as one large work of art, with the entirety of the series operating as one extended narrative cycle. (Okay, I see it as seven seasons with a two-season spin-off by the same name once Steve Carell leaves.) While individual episodes and seasons certainly have a self-contained meaning to them, the series continues narrative threads from one to the next, and so it asks us to consider it as a unitary whole.

A quick non-sequitur 

The first thing that struck me watching the series in 2018 was something I'm sure others have noted, but I'm not even going to bother to Google. Michael Scott is a white man who has succeeded in business in spite of having almost no sense, no intelligence, little education, and being a generally irritating person. He is racist. He is sometimes a terrible friend. He ogles the secretary and makes comments on how attractive women in the office are. Yet, he is somehow a gifted salesman with the common touch who can make people like him if he shuts up long enough to let them. I will just say that in 2018 that...reminds me of someone.

The narrative arc of Michael Scott

Michael grows as the seasons go by, influenced by the people around him. But at the beginning of the show, Michael is pretty clearly a racist. Season one is the status quo for Michael as the curtain raises, letting us see what he is like before the events of the show begin to change him. He is clueless, stupid, racist, and sexist. We laugh at him because he is what is wrong with the American workplace. He is not a good person with flaws so much as an incarnation of all that is bad. This montage captures most of him at his his worst:

After the short season one, the creators realized that unlike the British version of the show, this one was going to try to stick around for the long haul. That meant they couldn't leave Michael relentlessly awful. So Season Two starts to give us a more complex view of him. We see that he is a good salesman who was pushed into a position that isn't right for him. This alternating Michael--the terrible, tone-deaf racist and the sympathetic, goofy guy who just needs to be surrounded by better people--is carried into season three.

Season four is where the real change in Michael's character takes place. Is it possible that his relationship with overbearing Jan is the impetus? That her terrible treatment spurs a change in him? Michael's fundamental weakness is his need to be liked. But in Season Four, Michael, possibly learning from his mistakes in failing to stand up to Jan, manages to stand up to Stanley even though he risks not being liked because of it. If all of the first seven seasons are one narrative arc for Michael, then Season Four is something of a crisis point. Having gone through the climax of learning from Jan makes him ready when Holly comes along.

The show then goes on a three-season-long denouement, in which we wait for Michael and Holly to get together. Michael backslides for our amusement often, which makes it difficult, sometimes, to follow his narrative path. For example, Michael is sometimes extremely loyal, insisting on sticking with Ryan in spite of Ryan's obvious character flaws, or refusing to say his employer is a bad place to work even when it costs him millions of dollars. But he will also be suddenly and disturbingly disloyal to his faithful henchman Dwight when the writers need a joke. There is then a second climax of development for Michael when he goes off with Holly. Right before he goes, he manages to get rid of Packer, a far viler man than Michael ever was who has had a terrible influence on Michael. It shows that Michael's judgment has improved at least a tiny bit.

So how do we answer the questions? 

Is Michael a racist? At least as we define these things in 2018, I think he's absolutely a racist. Although he's not, by the end of the show, what he was in Season One, he still shows some signs of racism. He is still afraid on occasion that Darryl will physically assault him based partly on Darryl being a large black man, even though Darryl has shown his good sense and trustworthiness over and over.

One might claim that Michael isn't racist, he's just ignorant. It's okay to laugh at his racism, because it's based on him being a rube who doesn't know better rather. He actually believes that he is enlightened, as a matter of fact.

Granted, there is a difference between Michael assuming things based on assumptions he isn't bright enough to question and a KKK Grand Wizard who quotes from dozens of books of racist theory he's consumed. One has been educated into hating others, while the other inadvertently hurts others through a lack of education. But we tend, in 2018, not to forgive this kind of racism via ignorance. Archie Bunker's racism was also ignorance-fueled, but we are less likely to overlook it now. Furthermore, Michael's racism through ignorance is, at times, pretty profound, and he never seems to learn from it or apologize for it. When confronted with the fact that his actions are racist, he stubbornly refuses to change his mind: "When Chris Rock does a routine, people call it edgy and groundbreaking, but when I do the same routine, I get called racist?" he says, speaking of a bit Rock did criticizing black people and using the N word liberally. So I think you have to say Michael is a racist.

Is Michael a good person? Well, it certainly seems that viewers like him. (The surest sign that fans have taken to him is the number of people I know who still do the  "That's what she said" bit at every opportunity. I'm one of them.) Does this mean we're being bad fans? I don't think so, as long as we "like" him in the ambiguous way the show presents him to us. I definitely found myself cringing and
even shouting at Michael during some scenes I'd forgotten about. But when I'm shouting at him, it's because I've seen enough to know he can do better, and I'm disappointed when he doesn't. But I can still laugh at his failures.

I don't think I'm a bad fan for liking him, unless all of Michael's subordinates on the show are bad people for liking him, too. They've certainly been given more reason than anyone to dislike him. But they send him off with a loving Broadway-style tribute song they wrote for him, Why? Well, at the end of the day, most of us don't get to pick our co-workers anymore than we get to pick our family. You can end up with anyone. The employees of Dunder Mifflin/Sabre are wise enough to know that given all of the people out there you could end up with, Michael Scott, weighed in the balance, isn't the worst you can do.

Racism isn't a special genus of defect that should be privileged above avarice, hubris, sloth, indifference, ignorance, fastidiousness, or any of the other flaws we ridiculous humans show. While it can be especially insidious when it manifests itself at a macroscopic social level, in individual humans, it shouldn't be a hammer to smash the scales of character pluses and minuses we would otherwise weigh character with. Racism is not a special class of human wickedness. It is not different from the other vices. It is at times shocking and terrifying and at other times so absurd one can only laugh at it. In that, it is like humanity itself. 

Thoughts on a late-arriving review of my book

When my book came out last year, I tried to focus my marketing efforts on getting it reviewed. My graduate school adviser helped me navigate the process of finding someone to review it at American Book Review. ABR focuses on small-market books. In exchange, my adviser asked me to review a book for someone else. It took me a lot of effort to stop everything last year, read that book, and come up with something intelligent to say about it. I actually don't know if they're going to publish my review.

Apparently, there is a fairly lengthy lag between when ABR gets the reviews and when they publish them. Diane Goodman's review of my book just appeared in the January-April edition of ABR. (They usually put these out more often than quarterly. I have to imagine they're having issues at the journal.)

It's a really nice review, just like the other ones I've gotten. I think that ABR is mostly in libraries, so the majority of its readers are probably people who read the print version. If that's true, the people who might have read this review already saw it a while ago. ABR puts its digital versions out months behind the print versions, which is why I just now saw it.

Here's what I've learned about reviews from smaller venues: they're really nice, and they make you feel good, but they don't sell books. This review from ABR has been out for a while, and in that time, my book has sold two copies on Amazon. Marketing books is a social media game. I was talking to someone this week who was describing how Twitch, the video-streaming site that focuses on video game play, works for people trying to gain sponsorship. It sounded a lot like how we are encouraged at writers' conferences to market our books: Twitter stalk anyone who matters, make friends, hope they cross-reference you. My reviews would only really have helped me if I had posted a link to it on Twitter and had an army of people to re-tweet it. That sounds awful. I like to write words in silence, not chat up my friends while drunk-playing Overwatch. Do I really have to market myself the same way?

I don't think I'm cut out for the modern world of self-promotion. I tried looking around for a new job the other day, just to see if anything might be out there. Job hunting sites all push LinkedIn now, and there is some algorithm-driven science to not only how you write a resume, but how you create your LinkedIn profile. I gave up. In any event, an awful lot of the jobs for people like me, whose main skill is writing, seem to be in creating social media content for companies. I don't like tweeting to pimp my own work, so I doubt I'd enjoy tweeting or doing whatever a post on Pinterest is called for someone else.

For now, that was a nice surprise to find that review had finally come out. In all likelihood, it's the last one I'll get for this book, and the last time anyone will ever talk about the stories in it. It's nice, at a time when I have a ton of other work I've done--work I think it better than Don't Wait to Be Called but that I can't seem to get published--to look back on the book and realize that I managed to have a little bit of success there when I didn't even know what I was doing. Maybe I'll get lucky again.

Worth talking

I've been away from the blog for a while. I'm likely to stay that way for another few weeks, but a lot of people have been asking me what I think of the summit that will start in about an hour between the U.S. and North Korea.

I don't see the harm in talking to Kim Jong Un. I've never seen the harm in it. For a long time, I listened as very respected diplomats and think tank chiefs opined that even meeting with North Korea in a bilateral setting would somehow "legitimize" the regime. It would "give Kim exactly what he wants," although nobody is at all certain what it is he wants.

I've never understood why it wasn't worth talking. We know so little about Kim himself. If nothing else, this would give the people who have to make decisions about Kim a chance to observe him up close and to interact with him. It's not perfect information, but it's a lot more than what exists now.

Some argue that Kim is an abuser of human rights, and no U.S. President should ever talk to him. There are a lot of other human rights abusers in the world the U.S. talks to all the time. Kim isn't a bigger abuser just because his country is more idiosyncratic about its abuses. Yes, terrible things happen in North Korea. I've read plenty of testimonies from defectors on DailyNK. But if you thought you could make life in North Korea better for a few people by talking to him, shouldn't you talk to him? Especially if it might make the rest of the world safer in the process? If you could talk to the devil and give everyone in hell a glass of water, don't you have to shake the devil's hand and smile at him? 

This could be a waste of time. It could be another false start. If it is, we're no worse off than we were. The reason administrations have been reticent to take decisive action for decades now is because there aren't a lot of good options. Seoul has always been hostage to a ton of North Korean artillery. All options are risky.

Well, someone seems to think it was a good idea to go to Singapore. 

In a situation like this where no orthodox options seem good, unorthodox options ought to be on the table. If there is an advantage to having a non-politician in the highest office in the land, it's for moments like this. It's been dogma for a long time that talking directly wouldn't get us anywhere. I like when someone kicks the tires on dogmas.

I'll be watching YTN in an hour. I'll stay up late and I'll get up early to watch. I'm excited, but guardedly so. There is nothing but upside to this, and even if that upside never materializes, it ought to be interesting to watch what happens.