What Makes You a Professional Writer?

So, last night on Twitter I came across a link to a quiz–if you answered “yes” to eight out of ten questions, the blogger asserted, you could truly claim to be a professional writer. Otherwise you’re just a hobbyist!

I’m not going to link to the quiz itself, for various reasons, but I’ll link to Scalzi’s post about it.

He does a fine job taking down at least one of the assumptions behind the quiz–that one person’s process is the one and the only way achieve a particular result.

There are other assumptions in that list of questions, assumptions that bug me. And I’m saying that as someone who actually did answer “yes” to a fair number of those questions. The one about your living space being a mess because you’d rather write–yeah, I’m a crap housekeeper. But, you know, I’ve always been a crap housekeeper and I hate cleaning stuff with the fire of a dozen supernovas, so my choosing to write or read rather than clean isn’t a sign of my devotion to my art. And people have varying tolerances for different states of messiness–I can easily imagine a writer who just can’t work when the room around them isn’t straight. For such a writer, taking the time to clean would, in fact, be a necessary precondition to becoming a professional writer.

And let’s look at the question about whether you’ve taken a lower-paying job so you can have more time to write. I have also done this. But, see, Mr Leckie has a job that pays enough to keep us fed and housed, plus that job has benefits. If that weren’t the case, it would not have been possible for me to do that. And if one were to go by that list of questions, no single parents could ever be professional writers. Not really. No one with serious medical needs, or kids with serious medical needs, could ever really claim to be a pro.

In fact, the entire list assumes a level of privilege that’s really pretty offensive. Which is why the folks in my twitter feed were agape at that quiz last night.

So, if you’re an aspiring writer looking for direction and advice, or if you’re working seriously on your writing and wondering if you can or might be a pro, I would urge you not to take the advice or judgement implied by that quiz. There’s nothing helpful there, and most likely it will only leave you feeling like you never can be, like you’ll always be found wanting.

Which is, in fact, the point of the quiz. The blogger begins by explaining how disappointing it is to meet people who talk as though they’re pros but come to find out they’re really only hobbyists. The quiz only tells you the grounds on which the blogger makes this judgement–they have not sacrificed sufficiently for that coveted professional status.*

It’s pretty obvious that knowing where that distinction is, knowing who is and who isn’t in the club (and making sure those who don’t make the cut are aware of that fact), is the important bit.

But, see, why is this distinction even a thing? I get why SFWA, for instance, would want to put definite boundaries around who is and isn’t a member (whether where they’ve placed those boundaries makes sense is its own, entirely different issue, and not under discussion here). But aside from that, who the hell cares? Scalzi points out, sensibly, that if you’re getting paid for your writing you have every right to call yourself professional. I would ask, “Do you consider yourself to be a professional?” And your answer is your answer. Why would I bother to police that? Why do I care if you’ve met any other requirements? My sense of myself as a writer doesn’t require that I be better or different from anyone else, whether “anyone else” is a writer or not.**

Of course, if I saw writing as a status thing, if I envisioned myself as somehow nobler than the average Jane because of my GREAT SACRIFICES to Art, then, yes, I’d want to put a boundary there, and a Border Patrol. Because if any slob in a sweaty t-shirt could claim they were a professional writer, where would that leave me? Where would I get that sense of superiority that gets me through the day?

Writing is hard. Writing for money is hard. It does, indeed, require hard work and sacrifices–every writer is different, and every writer’s work and sacrifices will be particular to their situation. Nobody needs the extra burden of people drawing arbitrary, self-serving lines around what it means to be a “real” writer. And I’d suggest that if you’re tempted to do that, you might want to consider whether spending time drawing those lines isn’t in itself a waste of time. Shouldn’t you actually be spending that time writing?

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*The sufficient sacrifices, of course, are ones that its only possible for certain people to make, as I mention above. If you don’t have the spouse with a good income, or if you have kids with medical needs, or if you’re in a position where cutting your hours so you can write more means getting evicted because you can’t pay rent and where’s supper coming from anyway, well, you aren’t a pro because you haven’t sacrificed enough for your art. (Honestly, I cannot roll my eyes hard enough.)

**That way lies madness! IMO, of course. Maybe you get energy from comparing yourself to others, and can do it without losing your mind. Me, I become a gibbering mess of anxiety and panic if I compete with anyone but myself. And I’d much rather invite people into the club than keep people out.

July and August Fiction at GigaNotoSaurus

I’ve been remiss in announcing stories as they go up at GigaNotoSaurus. Sorry about that!

July was “A Man Not of Canaan” by Alex Jeffers.

“The men are afraid,” I said.

“Of course,” said my friend the foreign magician. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Behind us in the belly of the boat, my crew huddled over their oars, muttering, praying. I felt that was not wise. The Mother, it seemed to me, must have fled our island, far beyond the reach of any man’s voice, long before the little people who honored her. Else why had the great bull of fire under the sea grown so restless, so angry? Even as I thought this, he bellowed. I flinched. Murmuring my own vain prayer, I glanced over my shoulder, north across the choppy waters of the gulf. White steam and black smoke billowed from the peak of the new mountain the bull had shouldered out of the sea. It appeared to be taller than when last I saw it, only two months before. Red as bull’s blood, subterranean flame stained the smoke and steam. Lightning flickered within the column of cloud as the bull thundered again. A warm, caustic ash of burnt stone began to fall. One of the rowers coughed violently.

For August, “The Litigatrix” by Ken Liu:

The fifteenth day of the first month in the seventh year of the Huayin Era:

The old man, Hae-wook Lee, had been bedridden for months. He lay on the sleeping mat, wrapped in a blanket. The drugs helped him sleep, and forget about the harsh words of his son.

It was an unseasonably warm winter day, here in this corner of Northeast Asia. Though the fire in the kitchen hearth next door had been extinguished, the gudeul smoke passages below the floor would continue to radiate residual heat for several hours. The room was so warm that the maid, Kyoon, had left the windows open to give the old man some fresh air, dry and invigorating after the new snow of the day before.

He dreamt that he was having a dinner of gogi gui. That pretty girl from years ago served him. He felt a pang of regret.

Comment Policy

So. Comments.

Currently any first-time commenters at annleckie.com are automatically sent to moderation. Once I’ve approved your comment, you’ll skip the moderation queue.

I reserve the right to delete any comment posted to this blog (this LiveJournal, this Dreamwidth journal). I reserve the right to place comments in a moderation queue, and I reserve the right to determine who does and who does not comment on my posts.

Free speech? Yeah, I’m a fan. But the thing is, anyone asserting that I have some obligation to host speech I don’t want to host is actually advocating a violation of my free speech. This is my space, and I will manage it to suit myself. This does no damage to your ability to speak freely–there are several free blogging platforms available. Sign up for one or more and speak, speak, speak to your heart’s content. Manage comments there how you wish–I support your right to do so.

But here, in my space, I get to say what goes. And what doesn’t.

No, I’m not worried about suppressing debate–see the note above about the availability of free blogging platforms. And, frankly, some things are just not up for debate. And no, I don’t care if you think I’m wrong about that. Or that you think I’m being a meanie pants. Or that you’ll never buy my books. Honestly, if you end up getting a comment deleted off my blog, chances are you weren’t going to be a fan of my writing anyway, so, you know. And I was never under the illusion that everyone, everywhere, would love my work. I fully expect some number of people not to like it and not to buy it, and I have no problem with that. I, myself, don’t buy or read things by authors whose work I don’t much like. That’s life.

Morning Walk

Scene: The bridge in the Japanese Garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden. The weather is warm and sunny. There are some HUMANS on the bridge throwing food pellets to an assortment of VERY LARGE CARP. Some DUCKS are competing for pellets. A TINY FUZZY DUCKLING swims into view.

VERY LARGE CARP: Gape, gape. Perhaps the humans on the bridge will continue to shower me with food pellets!

TINY FUZZY DUCKLING: Is this leaf good to eat? It is not. Is this small twig good to eat? It is not.

VERY LARGE CARP: Gape, gape.

TINY FUZZY DUCKLING: Perhaps this very large carp is good to eat!

HUMANS: Tiny fuzzy duckling! Your towering ambition delights and amazes us, but we fear for your safety!

VERY LARGE CARP: I am not good to eat, tiny fuzzy duckling. I may even bite you.

TINY FUZZY DUCKLING: Well, that was rude! I was only asking.

VERY LARGE CARP: Gape, gape.

TINY FUZZY DUCKLING: (sticks its head ALL THE WAY INTO THE CARP’S GAPING MAW) Perhaps something in here is good to eat!

HUMANS: Tiny Fuzzy Duckling! No!

TINY FUZZY DUCKLING: (examines the interior of the VERY LARGE CARP some more)

HUMANS: …

TINY FUZZY DUCKLING: No, nothing good to eat in there. Perhaps I will swim under the bridge.

HUMANS: Oh, Tiny Fuzzy Duckling, why did we not get out our cameras the moment you came on the scene? We’d have been heroes of youtube.

So, I recently read this book, that I saw someone mention either on LJ or on one of the blogs I read. I read the title and the description and I said to myself, “Self, I think it would be beneficial if you would read that book.”

So, you know, I got myself a copy. The book is Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts and it was absorbing reading and I recommend it.

So the “hidden transcripts” this book is talking about are the things groups of people don’t say in public. In the case of the powerful, these are things that, acknowledged openly, would undermine their claims to power and authority. And in the case of the less powerful, they’re things that can be downright dangerous to say in the hearing of the powerful. Sometimes the hidden transcripts of the less powerful become visible, for various reasons, but mostly they don’t make it into histories, they don’t get officially acknowledged. Because that’s kind of the point.

So, very little of what the author presents is particularly new to me–I’ve had varying amounts of power, relative to various other folks in my life, and I’ve seen the hidden transcript thing in operation. None of the examples surprised me at all. Mostly what I liked about this book was the way it connected things together–like, I already knew this and this and this–did it occur to you that these were connected in this way? And gosh, it should have because that makes so much sense.

For instance, the author points out a thing that of course I’d noticed–that (relatively) more powerful groups often consider less powerful groups to be unreliable, shifty liars. It almost doesn’t matter what less powerful groups you pick, right? The author here suggests that it’s due to the fact that the more powerful can see that the “public transcript” isn’t all there is–usually when a hidden transcript pops into view, it’s veiled or deniable, but sometimes it’s obvious there’s more to what someone is saying or doing, no matter how veiled, no matter how plausibly or strenuously denied. But they don’t actually have any access to the subordinate group’s hidden transcript. And for various reasons there’s no percentage in admitting the existence of that hidden transcript (see above, undermining legitimacy). How to resolve this problem? Easy! That class of people are just naturally dishonest.

“I should totally have thought of that myself,” says I. Because I should have. But I didn’t.

So, another thing the author points out–or at least that I came away with–is that when you ignore the hidden transcript of a subordinate group, those moments when that transcript becomes suddenly, plainly visible–someone finally snaps and tells off someone more powerful, or a whole group of the less powerful up and revolt–those times when that happens quite literally make no sense if you don’t know about or acknowledge the existence of the hidden transcript. Now, because of who writes history, those hidden transcripts just don’t show up. So you get stuff like theories about how crowds can be whipped into a hysteria or whatever. Without acknowledging the existence of that entire back-channel, there’s no way to acknowledge the agency of the people in that crowd. So you get theories of how these things happen that do not attribute agency to the people who are acting. It’s mass hysteria, it’s the madness of crowds, it’s people being whipped up. *

And I thought to myself, “Self, that’s like Wossname you used to know, who had married three or four times and every single time, after however many months or years of wedded bliss, his wife would just all of a sudden inexplicably lose her mind. Completely out of the blue!”

And then I said to myself, “Self, this is making me think of all the “witch hunt” and “lynch mob” comments I’ve seen lately.”

It used to be all this stuff was back-channel. If you were a cis, white, straight guy, you could go your whole life and never see that hidden transcript out in the open. You never had to, and like as not the non-cis, non-white, non-straight, non-guys around you never really let on, because it wasn’t safe. I mean, like, physically safe. But things are changing a bit, and some of those groups who would never say anything aloud before? Are now saying things aloud. And since you (cis, white, straight guy that you are) don’t know of or admit the existence of those hidden transcripts, what could it possibly be except agitators, mass hysteria, the madness of crowds whipped into a killing frenzy by…uh…somebody?

There’s more to dig into, there–like, actual witch hunts and lynch mobs weren’t actually something the less powerful ever did to the more powerful, and like, there’s something about a member of a relatively powerful group framing the deliberate actions of one relatively powerful group against a less powerful group as being without agency (hit publish instead of preview by mistake. Edited to add–framing it as without agency so you can compare it to the powerless defending themselves from the more powerful) that’s just messed up. But that’s beyond what I’m up for right now.

No, what I’m intrigued by is the idea of the invisibility of the hidden transcript. The fact that this anger has been there for ages, I’ve been seeing it plainly all this time, and seeing hints of it from groups I’m not a member of, but it’s only ever been behind scenes–whispers to avoid this or that guy, complaints and commiseration in more or less safely private places, just seething in furious silence because you just can’t safely speak. We’ve been soaking in it all our lives, some of us, women and PoC and folks who are LGBTQ, or some or all of the above. So it’s genuinely baffling when someone’s response to actually seeing that anger is “Wait, this must be mass hysteria! This is a mob and you know how mobs work!” Because we know it’s really just the obvious outcome of the anger we’ve been living with all our lives–but they’ve never seen it and apparently don’t really believe it exists. *

This is something I’ve felt for a while, whenever I run up against that “but this is just a lynch mob!” thing. I just couldn’t articulate it, why it was so baffling and wrong, why the people saying it couldn’t even begin to imagine that all these people are angry because they’ve got a good reason to be and it’s been there all this time and just got too much for people to contain, or people have found themselves in a place where maybe they won’t be hurt too catastrophically if they express it. The people crying “witch hunt!” can’t even imagine any other way to process it except to dismiss it. Because to acknowledge the hidden transcripts is to begin to undermine exactly what keeps them in the position they’re in.

Not a world-shattering insight, I guess. But that’s kind of what I got out of this book–nothing in it was exactly mind-blowing, but when I was done reading, some things just made a lot more sense.

____

*Note to self–this same set of assumptions is perhaps inseparable from the ever popular “What these people need is a honky” plot.

**This works, of course, wherever you’ve got groups with relative power differences, so even though women have their own hidden transcripts with regard to men, when white women catch sight of WoC’s hidden transcripts, the reaction is often much like when men catch sight of women’s. Or, you know, any other set of groups with an obvious power imbalance between them. “So,” I say to myself, “Self, don’t go feeling smug because you know all about it cause you’re a woman but when they do it, they’re just a mob.”

Despicable Despicable Me 2

So, back in the day, I took my then-ten-year-old to see Despicable Me. We both had a good time–my only reservations were the couple of fat jokes, and wait, why does Gru have that accent again? But the fat jokes were minor, and Gru was really quite a charming character. The girls, of course, were wonderful, and who doesn’t love the Minions? I am still somewhat shocked that toy stores were not filled with plush Minions, I’d have gotten half a dozen. The next week we rounded up Mr Leckie and the then-thirteen-year-old and took them to the theater to see it. We bought the disc pretty much as soon as it came out on DVD.

Among the things I really liked about Despicable Me was the way the happy ending (oh, spoiler!) didn’t force the characters into a standard family structure. It’s Gru and the girls and the Minions and Grandma is proud and they love each other and it’s all good.

So when Despicable Me 2 came out, going to see it was kind of a no-brainer. The couple of reviews I’d seen said it wasn’t as good as the first movie, but then how many movies are?

Those reviews did not prepare me for what I saw. Honestly. People could watch that and say “Well, it’s not quite as good as the first one, but it’ll do”? Seriously?

Avoiding spoilers makes it hard to be specific about some things–but sweet, merciful Unconquered Sun, the ethnic stereotypes. The return of the fat jokes.

And the misogyny. No, seriously. In a movie with three built-in awesome girls, and with a female lead that was intended to be awesome and cool, pretty much every single other woman was hated on. Sickeningly so, in the case of the woman Gru goes on a date with because his nosy, annoying (female, natch!) neighbor insists on setting him up. I’m not going to describe how that date concluded, but I’ll tell you I sat there in the theater wishing I’d spent my rare movie ticket money elsewhere.

Then of course there’s the whole “but of course Agnes wants a mommy!” thing. For serious, that’s just lazy. I mean, you could take that direction and do something interesting with it*–but no, that wasn’t on the menu. We’re just going to assume that children without Mommies wish they had them and families must have Mommies to be complete. Because…um…look, we gotta turn this thing in before we can go to the bar. People love mommies! It’s just a kids movie, who the hell cares?

The whole thing was just freaking lazy. And a great way to totally ignore the elements that made the first one successful! I wondered briefly if they’d had different writers for 2, but no. Same writers. Kind of baffling. Something (or someone) must have held them to a higher standard for that first movie. Not to mention forced them to edit out the racism and the misogyny.

Anyway. My advice–don’t waste your money on Despicable Me 2. I wish I hadn’t.
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*Yes, even in “just” a kids movie. Please don’t make me write that rant, too.

Ancillary Justice ARC Goodreads Giveaway

So, as I said not long ago, I got a box of Ancillary Justice ARCs in the mail! And I’m going to give some away.

Just for starters, I’m giving three away via Goodreads.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Ancillary Justice

by Ann Leckie

Giveaway ends July 14, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

If that widget doesn’t show up, try clicking here to see and/or enter the giveaway.

You may notice there’s a cover image! I have not yet received word that I can post my cover, but there it is, on Goodreads. I’m quite pleased with it, myself!

Folks who are interested in scoring a copy but don’t have a Goodreads account, or really don’t want to sign up, or who aren’t in the US, Canada, UK, or Australia, never fear. I’m planning to do a small giveaway later just through the blog here.

Ancillary ARCs!

Well, look what came in the mail today!

ARC of Ancillary Justice

So, I’m going to be giving some away. I’m not sure just how yet–maybe just something as simple as a random drawing. I haven’t decided yet.

But look at it! It’s a real, physical book that really exists!!!