Dear writers and readers,
Today I read this article in the New York Times about a songwriter who writes as many as fifty songs per day and has been doing this for decades. While no one song is anything you know (probably), he manages to make $200,000 a year off his Spotify royalties. Which is…astounding…given that a Spotify royalty is less than half a cent per stream. To give you some perspective here, we Nields––who have twelve albums on Spotify and get around 3K streams/month––make less than $1000 annually. How does this guy do it? I don’t want to wreck the fun of this article, so I encourage you to read it here. But in short, he writes a lot of songs about poop, and also a lot of songs entitled things like “Sarah Sullivan is a Really Cool Person.” Imagine writing such a song, making it a minute and a half long, then “re-writing” it so that the only difference is that now it’s “Elaine Apthorp is a Really Cool Person.” Somehow, he gets enough “listens” that this adds up to a living wage and then some.
Of course this made me think of my perennial question about finding our inner Authority––where do we find it, how do we trust that something we’re making is ready to share with the world, is good, or conversely that it’s not yet “good” and needs more time? In the case of this guy—Matt Farley––he doesn’t worry about that. When the piece is done, it’s done (listen to the song “Brett Martin, You’re A Nice Man” here to see what I mean by “done.”)
He thinks it’s very bad form to leave anything unfinished and unpublished—that it insults the Muse to do so. But he sets the bar very low in terms of “finished.” He also must have the thickest rhinoceros skin in the world, because…wow.
During a graduate workshop which took place during my second VCFA residency, our teacher the novelist Bret Lott interrupted someone’s critique with this bit of wisdom, a Russian proverb, borrowed (by way of David Jauss) from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel Prize speech:
Your brother, he might lie/Trust your own bad eye.
I was so gobsmacked by these words––more a koan than anything else–– that I interrupted the workshop to make sure I’d heard right. I copied the concept onto an index card and affixed it to my refrigerator, centering myself on this notion every time I opened the fridge. Which was often.
(Why would we be told this in the middle of a friggin’ grad level fiction workshop? Isn’t the entire point of getting an MFA so we can learn what’s wrong with our work and make it right and fix it?)
I’d spent years in manuscript groups taking everyone’s suggestions and pasting them into my text, ending up with a Frankenstein’s monster of a book. While some suggestions were great and entirely helpful, some were just the opinions of people who didn’t really understand what I was trying to do.
My more experienced writer friends said, “Stop listening to other people! It’s your book!” But every time I received a rejection from an agent, I had the same thoughts. If there were reasons for the rejection, I would try to address those issues in the next draft, even writing entirely new books. If there weren’t reasons, I just assumed the book sucked, and either way, I didn’t do what most writers do, which is simply to continue to send out the manuscript.
What should anyone do? Continue to revise a work until it’s perfect, which it actually can’t be? Or publish the imperfect work like Matt Farley, risking the permanent ruination of one’s reputation?
Like the protagonist’s father Abraham Ebdus in Jonathan Lethem’s marvelous bildungsroman The Fortress of Solitude, I might be very happy working on my “masterpiece” for the rest of my life, content to have it keep me company. “If the green triangle never fell to earth before he died and left the film unfinished, it would never have fallen––wasn’t that so? Wasn’t it?” (Lethem, p. 508).)
Putting aside the question of “when,” I want to first return to the Solzhenitsyn quote to ask: Given that I fear my eye is bad, how can I trust it?
Well, why do I fear it’s bad? And who decides whether or not it’s bad?
The etymology of the word “world,” is derived from two Middle English words: were (man) and eld (age) “Weoreld.” The World is what man has created, and only in this particular age.
When we trust what the World has taught us to believe, we are on shaky ground. Great art, I would argue, is ageless, transportive and usually a shock to the status quo. Moby-Dick was considered a great failure of its time. So part of trusting my bad eye is to understand that my art might be just fine, thank you, but it might not be received as I wish until long after I’m gone.
Ultimately, of course, we need to trust our inner Authority, and the way we come to trust this is, like everything, through patience and love. We sit with art that moves us. Then, we return to our own work and continue until it moves us in the same way.
I have a newish song, slated for The Big Idea soundtrack we’ve been working on for quite a long time—it’s intended to go with the novels. I’d written a draft of it in a hurry several years ago, and while I loved the chorus, I'd written the verses sloppily, hoping the good chorus would carry them along. But when I returned to it last week, it made me cringe.
So, I immersed myself in World Party, letting the music make me feel, make me cry. Then I came back to my song and inhaled the intention to respond to the emotion invoked by another’s good art. I approached the revision from a much more sincere emotional place. And now the song works. And it makes me cry.
I wrote an essay for my blog on my infatuation with World Party. I am fighting the urge to cut and paste it into this newsletter, but I will refrain, having now told you it exists.
One of the byproducts of my Karl Wallinger obsession is that I just finished reading Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir Rememberings. (They worked together on her demos for Lion and the Cobra, and also he helped her arrange “Black Boys on Mopeds.” She sang on several of his songs, including one of my faves, “Sweet Soul Dream.”)
In the memoir, and in countless interviews, Sinéad is very open about her struggles with mental illness. But what I kept thinking as I read her testimony, pausing to listen to her outstandingly original music, was how often mental illness, deep creativity, and faith in a higher power go together. In her Guardian review of the memoir, Fiona Sturges writes:
[Sinéad] wanted to make a living as a performer but her idea of success wasn’t the same as other people’s. “I define success by whether I keep the contract I made with the Holy Spirit before I made one with the music business,” she explains. “I never signed anything that said I would be a good girl.”
By the way, for what it’s worth, the autopsy, conducted at the request of O’Connor’s three surviving children, proved that she died from “natural causes,” likely a stroke, aneurysm, or heart attack. This was news to me, and to others I’ve informed, as there was widespread speculation in the press that she had died of an overdose or suicide. Yet the last we all heard from her, in Tweets days before she died, was that she’d finished her record and was planning her tour.
People have such ingrained ideas about O’Connor and it’s hard not to see that same “We-orld” problem afoot. To quote her own song, “Black Boys on Mopeds,” If you were of the world they would love you.
She was brave and beautiful and funny. And I know, wherever she is, she is singing.
Morning Seeding & Tending
I don’t know where I’d be without my Morning Seeding & Tending group. We are a quiet but steady accountability group where we simply show up and get our work done. Every weekday at 10am sharp, a group of us gather to write for an hour on Zoom. Some days it’s one of us, most days it's four to nine. We blink at each other, mutter some greetings if we’re well-caffeinated enough, and then I read a prompt or a secular prayer (AKA a poem), and while I send it to the group via email, we each set our intentions for the day in the chat. What do we write? Whatever we like! Some days I work on a novel, attempt to get my “first draft” quotient in for the day of 1000 words. Some days I edit, some days I submit to literary journals or work on a query letter, some days I write something to you. I always know I have an hour in the morning to get SOME writing done.
Some folks come almost every day. Some just once a week. The low cost of the group ($20 month via Ko-fi subscription) means that no one feels like they’re not getting their money’s worth. Writing with a group of others is powerful, just like meditating in a group always felt more bolstering to me than meditating on my own. I know there are others out there aligning themselves in the same way I am.
You can sign up here to join the group. Every month, you’ll be charge that $20 fee. When does the month start? Whenever you want it to! How about now? What will you do with your hour a day? Questions? Send me a message!
Terri is always up and reading before I roll out of bed, and she was laughing so hard at the way your first paragraph ended that she rousted me to read first thing. So now I'm waiting patiently for "Elaine Apthorp is A Really Cool Person" to come out. It's bound to be worth at least some of that 1/2 cent :-)
Surely "Trust your own bad eye" is a perfect thing to have on one's refrigerator--one can reliably suspect that the dead celery is indeed dead before it flops in one's hand, if one follows that sage advice--but as you demonstrate in every song, post, and workshop, your own eye is spot on.