I published this in my blog earlier this week - I've been trying to identify and articulate my feelings on my desire to make a living as a writer and how blogging does or doesn't help my larger goals. This post is a starting point. I suspect I'll explore this more in the future.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about my ultimate goal of making a living as a writer. I know I'm not the only woman out there who created a blog as a way to work on her writing and find her voice and all that stuff. And I also know that many bloggers are lucky in that they get to make a living from their blogs or various blog-related gigs.
But I've been thinking about this whole blogging thing, and I'm wondering what role it plays in my big picture (how it helps me achieve my bigger goals), and also how much it has or hasn't done for me as a writer.
I didn't get into blogging to make a living from it. Given that I've been *blogging* in one way or another since 2000, when the whole concept wasn't anything like what it is today, it's always been about the writing and community for me. But in reinventing myself as a non-anonymous, *real* blogger, I've been both lucky and surprised with the opportunities that have come my way. I've considered it an unexpected fringe benefit.
The thing is, when I think of myself as a writer, I think of books. I think of all the essays and poems I've written, all the stories (on paper, in the computer, in my head - started, finished, dropped half-way through) that I want to put together into real, actual books. Books that people would read and enjoy. When I say "I want to make a living as a writer", this is what I mean: I want to be a published author in the traditional sense.
And sure, I think the Internet offers so many opportunities and alternatives (hell, I started writing like this with the sole hope of finding and cultivating an audience without having to rely on publishers who don't have time or interest for a nobody like me); and I want to reap whatever benefits I can from blogging and whatever connections I make through here, but. But. But.
The Internet is also such a wasteland of crap. It is littered with bogus opportunities and dead dreams. And I worry sometimes that I will end up being Tere the Failed Writer because I never figured out the right way to do this.
My main beef with using the Internet to further your writing career is that - based on the very extensive research I've done - people expect amazing writing for shitty pay. I've lost count of all the "job opportunities" I've seen where the demand is excellent writing and editing, creativity and quick-turnaround, and they want it all for... $20 or so.
Are you effing kidding me? It's like everyone wants brilliance to help sell their products, to generate attention, to build a business, to promote, to inform - but no one wants to pay for it. And yet, you're supposed to somehow make a living from taking 10 hours to create a masterpiece and getting a whopping $15 for it.
Another source of frustration is all these websites that promise "valuable information", "funding sources" or any other such seemingly important thing - and all you get is a bunch of crap. Dead ends. Obscure info. Bait and switch. Really, nothing very different than what the Internet offers in every area of life.
It's not that I expect people to pay loads of money for a few articles or something; it's that no one (except writers) factors in one important aspect of producing good work: time. Those perfect piles of words people want take time (to research, to interview people, to put it all together). And when you divide that amount of time by the precious $20, you're basically making $2 an hour. Which, please. In the real world I inhabit, this is ridiculous.
These thoughts are present in my mind because I really want to get somewhere as a writer. And by getting somewhere, I mean that I want one of two things: to find an agent and/or publisher I can work with, or to not have to have a job so I can really put my mind and focus into my writing.
Oh, wishful thinking, I know. Everyone else in my boat wants the same thing. I'm much too small a fish in an enormous pond. And every other appropriate cliche.
Still, it's what I want. I don't want status quo and I don't want to settle. I want to fight for my dreams. I want to make those dreams real.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The psychoanalytic implications of blogging
Psychoanalysis? That’s something to do with Freud, isn’t it? Yes, it is, yet to talk about Freud in the 21st century is almost to invite conjecture and doubt, especially when we specifically referring to Literature and creativity. This is because in its early years, psychoanalysis did suffer from over-applied textual analyses.
Huh?
Well historically, if a text contained imagery or description of guns or statues then the assumption was sometimes made that it had some sort of phallic significance. A fertile glade or subterranean hideaway was, therefore, a vaginal reference. A fountain that spurted water was….well, you get the idea. Fortunately, psychoanalytic theory has come a long way. Now, it is generally held that psychoanalytic theory attempts to comprehend the "relations between practice and commentary"*, and because thought, writing, dreaming, wonder, delight, creativity etc spring both from the conscious and the unconscious, you can see why a bit of couch-session-ing mightn't be such a bad idea.
What has any of this to do with blogging?
Since its beginnings, psychoanalysis has suffered from its oftentimes conflicting dynamics. So has blogging. Both have attempted to answer any or all of the following questions: Who am I? Why do I write? Because I do write, does that make me an Author? What is an Author? Does an Author require an audience? Why have I chosen this particular medium of expression? How will it be interpreted? Perhaps most important: How can the language which I have acquired possibly convey all that I wish it should, when language, in the first place, is an arbitrary, 'man-made' construct.
I could go on…
Because psychoanalysis is so often also identified with Science (as Science); and because Science is so often polarised to Art; then perhaps it’s not so hard to see why they have such an uneasy relationship. The same can be said for blogging. Consider this —blogging could be seen as slightly incongruous. What once might be saved for the private diary, or art portfolio, or photo album, or galley proofs of a book can now be found in the logical world of Binary and silicon.
But online or offline, there is one commonality: the narrative.
How one interprets narrative – whether it be their own or someone else’s – is, of course, completely individualistic. That might seem like an obvious statement, but before the work of post-structuralist’s like Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan dominant ideologies (Psychoanalysis included) suffered from a kind of overt formalism that homogenised readings and conclusions of a text – whether it be a book, or a blog.
My main point here today was to explicate a bit on the historical background of psychoanalysis, and to show how our pedagogical alliances may help – or hurt – how we go about our daily writing and reading.
Note: I realise I haven’t really even gone into what psychoanalysis is or given basic examples of its practice, but first I just wanted to write that little introduction, just to (if I'm being honest) ease my way back into some sort of familiarity with a subject I am a little rusty on, although I devoted a chunk of my life to it for a while. If you like it, I’ll continue it in another post at a later point. Feedback is appreciated!
*Brophy, K (1998) Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing. MUP: Melbourne.
Cross posted at Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum
Huh?
Well historically, if a text contained imagery or description of guns or statues then the assumption was sometimes made that it had some sort of phallic significance. A fertile glade or subterranean hideaway was, therefore, a vaginal reference. A fountain that spurted water was….well, you get the idea. Fortunately, psychoanalytic theory has come a long way. Now, it is generally held that psychoanalytic theory attempts to comprehend the "relations between practice and commentary"*, and because thought, writing, dreaming, wonder, delight, creativity etc spring both from the conscious and the unconscious, you can see why a bit of couch-session-ing mightn't be such a bad idea.
What has any of this to do with blogging?
Since its beginnings, psychoanalysis has suffered from its oftentimes conflicting dynamics. So has blogging. Both have attempted to answer any or all of the following questions: Who am I? Why do I write? Because I do write, does that make me an Author? What is an Author? Does an Author require an audience? Why have I chosen this particular medium of expression? How will it be interpreted? Perhaps most important: How can the language which I have acquired possibly convey all that I wish it should, when language, in the first place, is an arbitrary, 'man-made' construct.
I could go on…
Because psychoanalysis is so often also identified with Science (as Science); and because Science is so often polarised to Art; then perhaps it’s not so hard to see why they have such an uneasy relationship. The same can be said for blogging. Consider this —blogging could be seen as slightly incongruous. What once might be saved for the private diary, or art portfolio, or photo album, or galley proofs of a book can now be found in the logical world of Binary and silicon.
But online or offline, there is one commonality: the narrative.
How one interprets narrative – whether it be their own or someone else’s – is, of course, completely individualistic. That might seem like an obvious statement, but before the work of post-structuralist’s like Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan dominant ideologies (Psychoanalysis included) suffered from a kind of overt formalism that homogenised readings and conclusions of a text – whether it be a book, or a blog.
My main point here today was to explicate a bit on the historical background of psychoanalysis, and to show how our pedagogical alliances may help – or hurt – how we go about our daily writing and reading.
Note: I realise I haven’t really even gone into what psychoanalysis is or given basic examples of its practice, but first I just wanted to write that little introduction, just to (if I'm being honest) ease my way back into some sort of familiarity with a subject I am a little rusty on, although I devoted a chunk of my life to it for a while. If you like it, I’ll continue it in another post at a later point. Feedback is appreciated!
*Brophy, K (1998) Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing. MUP: Melbourne.
Cross posted at Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum
Monday, October 8, 2007
Back To Basics
If you really want to put the zap on your blogging mojo, you should rush out and read The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen.
I was cleaning the bathrooms and listening to our local public radio station (very, very glamorous, no?), when Keen was on air discussing how blogging is going to destroy the world.
The glut of unprofessional (his word, not mine) writing, journalism and criticism out in the blogosphere is slowly chipping away at the centralized "cultures" of the western world.
He cites very specific statistics about the number of blogs being created each minute - an impossibly large and daunting number - and how this cacophony makes it impossible for us, as cultural and media consumers, to make informed decisions about our consumption of literature, film, radio, television, news and every other aspect of the cultural spectrum.
Keen's theory is that we are reducing the people who once were the arbiters of our cultural world to pink slips, with trained critics, authors, filmmakers and newsroom employees being laid off in droves while we "monkeys with a million typewriters" bang out a bunch of crap.
I take issue with some of what Keen theorizes, and I haven't yet finished the book. And ironically, for someone who makes a strong case that blogging causes a cultural apocalypse, Keen seems to have no problem hyping his tome on - you guessed it - his Typepad blog.
However, in some ways, I can see his point.
It takes time, he says, to weed through the gazillion blogs out there and find the ones you want to read, the ones that are of value to you. Time is our most precious commodity, and where once we were able to find our information in specific, expected areas of media, now we are sometimes lost in the vast digital forest.
Yup.
I can buy that.
And I, my friends, am one of those trees obstructing your view.
I got this cool template and I put ads on my site and - I can admit it here, among friends - I got awfully cocky.
I started writing for you.
I began to assume what you wanted to read. How you wanted to be directed. What you wanted to think.
Shame on me.
I am trained in this profession, that is a fact, and so Keen cannot really accuse me of being an amateur.
I am a paid professional in the world of letters, and I earned that privilege through an arduous, costly education and a tremendous amount of personal effort and hard work.
But you don't pay me.
You come here voluntarily. You are a community, not a commodity.
I apologize for mistaking the two.
Making deliberate editorial decisions about what I will or will not write about is not appropriate for this forum. You are not looking for an expert - and I think we can all agree that I offere no parenting and/or life expertise.
Traffic is nice, sure. The small profit I see from the ads in my sidebar is helpful, and does not go unnoticed in my checking account. After all, both my husband and I are, essentially, unemployed.
But that is not why I started writing Chicken And Cheese.
So I will henceforth be writing here as I used to write over here - as if no one was reading.
As if I were writing for myself.
I hope you still want to come along with me.
I was cleaning the bathrooms and listening to our local public radio station (very, very glamorous, no?), when Keen was on air discussing how blogging is going to destroy the world.
The glut of unprofessional (his word, not mine) writing, journalism and criticism out in the blogosphere is slowly chipping away at the centralized "cultures" of the western world.
He cites very specific statistics about the number of blogs being created each minute - an impossibly large and daunting number - and how this cacophony makes it impossible for us, as cultural and media consumers, to make informed decisions about our consumption of literature, film, radio, television, news and every other aspect of the cultural spectrum.
Keen's theory is that we are reducing the people who once were the arbiters of our cultural world to pink slips, with trained critics, authors, filmmakers and newsroom employees being laid off in droves while we "monkeys with a million typewriters" bang out a bunch of crap.
I take issue with some of what Keen theorizes, and I haven't yet finished the book. And ironically, for someone who makes a strong case that blogging causes a cultural apocalypse, Keen seems to have no problem hyping his tome on - you guessed it - his Typepad blog.
However, in some ways, I can see his point.
It takes time, he says, to weed through the gazillion blogs out there and find the ones you want to read, the ones that are of value to you. Time is our most precious commodity, and where once we were able to find our information in specific, expected areas of media, now we are sometimes lost in the vast digital forest.
Yup.
I can buy that.
And I, my friends, am one of those trees obstructing your view.
I got this cool template and I put ads on my site and - I can admit it here, among friends - I got awfully cocky.
I started writing for you.
I began to assume what you wanted to read. How you wanted to be directed. What you wanted to think.
Shame on me.
I am trained in this profession, that is a fact, and so Keen cannot really accuse me of being an amateur.
I am a paid professional in the world of letters, and I earned that privilege through an arduous, costly education and a tremendous amount of personal effort and hard work.
But you don't pay me.
You come here voluntarily. You are a community, not a commodity.
I apologize for mistaking the two.
Making deliberate editorial decisions about what I will or will not write about is not appropriate for this forum. You are not looking for an expert - and I think we can all agree that I offere no parenting and/or life expertise.
Traffic is nice, sure. The small profit I see from the ads in my sidebar is helpful, and does not go unnoticed in my checking account. After all, both my husband and I are, essentially, unemployed.
But that is not why I started writing Chicken And Cheese.
So I will henceforth be writing here as I used to write over here - as if no one was reading.
As if I were writing for myself.
I hope you still want to come along with me.
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