Keeping Your Soul Work Alive - A Meditation on Writing and Self-Publishing
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Transcript of Keeping Your Soul Work Alive - A Meditation on Writing and Self-Publishing
Keeping Your Soul Work Alive:
A Meditation on Writing and Self-Publishing
by D. Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2010 BY D. PATRICK MILLER
SMASHWORDS EDITION
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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* * * *
I make most of my living these days from editing, critiques, and
publishing consultations – and less of a living from publishing my own
books. I’ve been editing from the beginning of my alleged career, when
double duty as a typesetter and reporter at a weekly newspaper necessitated
learning the skills of copy-editing and copy-amputating along with the craft
of writing. Since then I have critiqued hundreds of manuscripts and edited
many books bound for publication, along with co-writing, ghostwriting, and
working with editors on my own books. I’ve helped prepare books for a
well-known New York literary agency, as well as a number of major
publishing houses, including Viking, Doubleday, Crown, JP Tarcher, and
John Wiley & Sons.
Thus I’ve had considerable experience dealing with the tempestuous egos of
writers who are determined to defend their awkward sentence constructions, florid
overwriting, and clichéd expressions almost to the death. When I am edited by someone
else, I will likewise defend my own stylistic weaknesses nigh unto the bitter end.
Whether I am dealing with my own protests or those of my clients, I still marvel over the
remarkably thin and transparent skins of all writers. Why, I’ve often wondered, are we
so goddamn sensitive?
The cynic may answer that all of us ink-stained wretches (including the hip,
contemporary species of digital wretches) are just that: hopelessly neurotic folk trying to
sort out their hapless, unworkable lives through endless writin’ and ruminatin’, and
coming up with so little that’s truly defensible that the mere writing becomes more dear
to them than life itself. My own take is more charitable: I believe that most writing done
for creative purposes is truly soul work, the attempt to render in visible words the
invisible essence of our root consciousness.
Because all but the most formulaic or technical writing has a deep and
mysterious source, we tend to equate whatever we put down on paper or
the screen with our very soul. So when some smart-ass editor comes along and
suggests that what we have written isn’t very easy to read, or doesn’t make sense, or is
just plain stupid, we naturally take offense. The deepest, truest, purest part of ourselves
has just been attacked for no good reason, and we owe it to God and Cosmos to take up
arms against the infidels.
What I often have to remind myself — and gently suggest in various artful ways to
my editing clients — is that while our writing may indeed be inspired by the deepest and
truest parts of ourselves, those parts don’t get put down on paper in their pure form. The
mystical, creative oomph we feel in the gut has to rise up through countless layers of
thinking, feeling, word-associating, conscious and unconscious censorship, and sheer
egotism before it can find expression in words. Not surprisingly, this baroquely complex
translation process can too easily result in a hideous disguise of the original soulful
impulse.
If we recognize the hideous disguise and toss it in the real or electronic trashcan
before anyone else reads it, we’re lucky. That means we’re on the way to developing
some craft, which is the responsibility we owe to our soulful impulses. What hurts more
than anything is to mistake a total mistranslation of our soul for the soul itself, then
hand it over to an impartial reader — whom we naturally expect to collapse in grateful
tears upon the first reading — only to have our masterpiece handed back with a quizzical
look and the inquiry, “So is this supposed to be funny, or what?”
That said, a miracle still happens sometimes: we manage to write words that
shine like a dazzling facet of Truth itself, and our lives and those of others are changed
for the better because of it. I suspect that most writers take up their craft because they
have read such an illuminating fragment of soulfulness put down by a great poet,
novelist, or essayist, and then make the fateful decision: “I want to write like that
someday.” Of course you never do learn to write like that exactly; you may write better
or worse, but because your function is to translate a different bit of human soulfulness
for a different audience in a new time, you will always write differently than your heroes
or mentors.
If you are wise, you will remember that you are nothing more or less
than a translator of the collective human soul. Whether you sell a million copies
of a book or labor for a lifetime in obscurity, you are just the intermediary between the
giving aspect of your own spirit and the needs of readers who may be able to learn
something from you. Those who don’t need to learn anything from you never will, so it is
no use trying to convince them of your skill or sincerity. And the fact is that most people
will never even encounter your work, regardless of how wildly you succeed. Believe it or
not, the New York Times bestseller list means nothing to billions of people across the
world.
I mention that deflating fact because the soul work of writing needs an almost
constant infusion of humility to keep it focused and true. Because soul is a sort of
psychic ether that everyone shares, it is all too easy to globalize the significance of your
soul work in your mind. You know when you’ve just written down a gem of universal
truth (that is, until you show it to an editor) so you sensibly conclude that it should be
read and appreciated by the whole world. Right away! And you naturally expect a
magazine or book publisher to do that instantaneous worldwide distribution for you.
How it might get done is not your business, but theirs. After all, you’re working on a
higher plane — or is it a deeper level? At any rate, you’re a soul worker, not a
salesperson.
When you become your own publisher, you swiftly become aware of
the whole world’s stubborn resistance to hearing your soul messages. Even
with years of experience packaging, producing, and promoting my own books, I was still
shocked to discover how little response I would get from finely-crafted advertising and
publicity, tastefully placed in just the right media with exquisite timing. I was stunned to
witness how the shrewdly-executed launch of my latest title resulted not in an
overwhelming flood of orders, but an entirely manageable trickle. And though I had the
good fortune of working with a reliable national distributor, I was always disheartened
when that distributor’s statements regularly showed significant numbers of my books
coming back from bookstores after just a few months of shelf life. Books that
horrifyingly come back like that are called “returns” in the trade; many a carcass of an
independent publisher has been crushed under the smothering weight of returns.
There are other spine-chilling aspects of the book business that I could relate
here, but I don’t want to scare off potential self-publishers who may be among my
audience at the moment. For publishing is truly a hero’s journey that should not and
would not be undertaken by any sensible person who was properly forewarned. Like
Jonah, Odysseus, or Gilligan, you have to sail into the breach yourself and face the killer
whales, perfect storms, and situational comedies of such a voyage without a decent inner
tube, much less a lifeboat. There’s no point in being prematurely frightened away from
this risky undertaking when you will learn so much more from being maturely
frightened once you are too far gone to swim safely back to shore.
But the enthusiasm of would-be-published writers is virtually impossible to
dampen. And I believe that ever-upwelling enthusiasm has as much to do with the
natural impetus of soul work as it does with mere egotism or wishful thinking.
In fact I have come to see the struggle to write well and share one’s
writing as a spiritual path in its own right — a path in which disappointment
and exasperation teach the seeker just as much as vision and inspiration. To
stay on the path means that you must increasingly become both tough and forgiving,
hardened and softened, skeptical and idealistic. As you mature, you will increasingly
appreciate the joyful hardship of writing for its own sake, and worry less about whether
you make a fortune (or even a living) by it. That means you will become an ever more
effective medium for your soul’s timeless expression while becoming less attached to
your personal, temporal stake in it.
This ennobling process is rarely pleasant, and one doesn’t usually feel or act very
spiritual as the raiments of pride and self-esteem are progressively shredded before your
very eyes. But if you are a serious writer, you’ll have to endure this process of internal
purification regardless of your degree of external success. Publishing may be an
especially insane and unkind business these days, but I cannot imagine it ever becoming
perfectly ordered and fair. If so, those of us working hard to convey the very stuff of the
human soul in mere words would have to go elsewhere for the karmic kicks in the teeth
that serve to make us eloquent, insightful, and maybe a little bit wise.
See all of D. Patrick Miller’s e-books here:
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/fearlessbooks
And his website: http:// www.fearlessbooks.com