Crash Course

by Robin Black

  And of course, behind all the jokes and schemes lies a frustrating truth: There is essentially nothing an author can do to make her book break through the public consciousness, yet it is impossible not to try to figure out what the elusive, non-existent thing might be. Social media is a fantasy land when it comes to making sales. For my money, Twitter is spitting in the wind—though not from a social perspective; I have made good friends on there. But I would love to see a serious study of how effective Twitter is for selling books. I would be shocked to hear that it has much impact at all.

  On Twitter and also Facebook, you are largely talking to people who already know about you and your work. Maybe if you are a best-seller and your publisher announces to their 300,000 followers that your next book is soon to launch, it has an impact. But when I tell the same 3,500 people anything over and over again, it has only an irritating effect.

  The other thing authors are told to do is to “get their name out there” which translates into blogging (for free) and writing pieces for magazines and newspapers. But no author I know thinks that ever does more than shift a few books. Maybe, bit by bit, your name becomes known; but most of us would rather spend that same time writing our next book—and some of us feel pretty vehement about that. Recently, I told a classroom of students that if they spent precious writing time building a platform, I would personally chop it down. Nonsensical maybe, but I made my point.

  The things that sell large numbers of books are entirely outside an author’s control. Things like winning giant prizes. Things like being famous already. Things like having a household-name author make a mission of getting attention for your book. Or having Oprah hit you with what a friend calls “the happy stick.” Movie deals sell books. Billboards in Times Square sell books. And all of these have in common that an author has zero zilch zippo control over any of it.

  So what can an author do, short of murdering her mother, to seize the book buying public’s attention? Despite the fact that I still spend sleepless hours gnawing at this question, convinced there must be a good answer, in fact, I believe there is only a bad one: nothing. An author has essentially no control over whether a book does or does not catch fire.

  So the question is, now what? What do you do with being told that for some period of post-release, it’s your job to market your book, if you believe that nothing you are positioned to do will cause the book to break though?

  My own answer, now, after years of turning myself inside out, is to do only what I enjoy. I shut down my Facebook Author page because it brought me no pleasure and seemed mostly like a way of doubly annoying my Facebook friends. I tweet for fun and occasionally to publicize something and often to thank someone who has said something kind—or to say something kind about a colleague. But I don’t approach it as though it’s going to sell my books in any serious way—because it isn’t. I write for magazines when the topic interests me and when the money is good. I blog because I happen to love blogging. I give readings because I like meeting readers, and because I so appreciate the booksellers who do what they can for authors of every kind. But with none of these activities do I ever let myself think: This is going to sell tons of books.

  I think instead: These are the activities that being an author has given me access to, and I enjoy doing them, I am privileged to do them, and so I do. And in this way, I’m sure, I do sell some books along the way, but nothing like the numbers that send a novel into the stratosphere of which we all dream.

  That is not an outcome I can force or woo or contrive. Or even influence. And doing so isn’t my job. My job is to write. Thank god.

  And my mother’s job is to listen to me vent, and to encourage me to get back to the keyboard, which she does. Oh, and to be my very best reader, always, which is just one of an infinite number of reasons that this latest scheme of ours is no more than yet another marketing plan I will never try.

  Shut Up, Shut Down

  I had dinner recently with a writer friend whose career is the envy of all, certainly the envy of me—one of those writers who by any standard is taking the world by storm. A critical success. A commercial success. Winner of prize after prize after prize. But he didn’t have his mind on any of that. Rather, he was obsessing on the vitriol of some of his online anonymous reader reviews. And this wasn’t a form of deflecting modesty—let’s not talk about my success, let’s talk instead about the people who hated my book—it was a genuine distress call, an appeal for help in managing the hurt he felt when he read these attacks—and let’s be clear, that is the proper name for the ones that had upset him. They were not reviews in any but the loosest interpretation of that word.

  “It makes me feel like never writing again.”

  I said the things one says. You can’t take it personally. It happens to absolutely every author. It’s just noise. It reveals more about the person writing the so-called review than about the book. These things are easy to say to someone else, less easy to hear in any particularly useful way when it’s your turn to feel bruised by the bullying.

  In the weeks since that conversation, and in the years since my own first book came out, I have thought a lot about this phenomenon of reader reviews that are not just negative, but vitriolic in a highly personal way. I have tried to understand what may underlie that vitriol and also why these bits of nastiness can be so genuinely hurtful when we all know how utterly meaningless they “ought” to be.

  I’m not talking about people who are unmoved by a book, mine or anyone else’s. I’m not talking about the person who says things along the lines of, in the end, I felt the prose was weak or the characters left me cold. I’m not even talking about the ones who say, I really disliked this book from start to finish and am not sure why I read the whole thing. I am—as was my friend—talking about the people who write things like, I can’t believe she thought I’d care about her stupid story, or I can just imagine him thinking he’s so impressive by using all those long words, or so-and-so obviously has pretty bad relationships if he thinks people are like that. In other words, the readers whose dislike of a book seems to lead to contempt—even hatred—for the author.

  The first time it happened to me, I was stunned. Not at the fact of someone disliking my work, for which I was as prepared as one can be, but at the anger directed my way. I was stunned until I realized that the anger makes a kind of sense if one thinks of such a reader as being—in his own view—like any consumer who buys a product that doesn’t “work.” My “whiny” stories were no different from a toaster that blows a fuse because the construction is shoddy. I spew venom about companies with lousy workmanship. I question their decency in taking my money for something that didn’t perform. And that is exactly how some readers react to the authors of books that didn’t work for them.

  Which should be reason to dismiss the whole thing with a shrug, maybe even a laugh. Yet I rarely see any writers laugh at the most vitriolic of their reviews.

  Beyond the obvious fact that it’s inherently unpleasant to have people call you nasty names, it’s also likely that such personal invective feels so bad in part because its opposite, the love with which some readers so generously respond, feels so good. If we are to let ourselves believe all the praise, how do we not take in all the hatred? Live by the reader review; die by the reader review.

  I also believe that most if not all writers share another quality that renders them particularly vulnerable to the charge that their work makes them despicable. So many writers felt silenced at a critical point in their lives. In some cases, such a taboo on truth-telling exists because of family secrets; in others it grows out of a secret kept about oneself; while in others the silencing force may be a political one, or have its roots in religion. But with pretty much every writer I know, some such taboo has been in place since childhood, sometimes since birth.

  Of course, this is true of many people who aren’t writers, too. Those people live with their own scars and their own challenges. But writers are a special case because the a
ct of writing is itself a direct violation of taboos against speaking freely and honestly. The state in which many of us do our work is one of constant, internal battle between the silencing voices and the need to be heard over them. So the nastiest reviews, the most personal of them, the ones that demean our characters as they insult our work, are all too likely to find an echo, albeit an ancient one, within our hearts.

  And this isn’t just about nasty reviews. This has implications for any of us who write, whether reviewed or not. How much of what we call writers’ block is in fact the result of our having internalized the message that if we fully express ourselves we are somehow “bad”? I often advise others (and remind myself) that the most efficient way to combat such blockage may not be to take such practical steps as being sure to sit at the keyboard every day, but to get angry at whatever internalized voices are encouraging you to stop writing, stop speaking up.

  How often do we talk about writers who need “permission” when they are just starting out? How frequently do we see writers who inexplicably stop writing after they experience a level of success? After they experience the reality of speaking out and being heard?

  In truth, it’s all too easy to succumb to those silencing voices—whether they come from an anonymous reader or from forces we have been battling all our lives. It’s all too easy for any of us to say, as my enviable friend did the other night, “It makes me feel like never writing again.”

  I speak from experience. Nearly twenty years of blank pages, fear and anxiety winning out. Taboos, winning out. I don’t know why I was lucky enough, maybe stubborn enough, to triumph in that long-running argument with the echoing voices silencing me. I don’t know that there are tricks I can share—beyond determination and outrage at the idea of being shut up, being shut down. But I do know that anyone who thinks that they should quit because they run the risk of being revealed as “bad,” whether by readers or by ghosts, needs to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, and push on—because losing decades of your life to such fears leaves a very deep scar. And it turns out that even vicious responses to your work produce relatively superficial wounds—unless of course you allow them to do more.

  Material

  When I first moved to Philadelphia, in 1988, I had turned twenty-six a week before and given birth to my first child five weeks before that. My then husband (we have long since divorced) had a full-time job; while I had my infant daughter, a stroller, no friends, and a lot of hours on my hands every day. But it was spring, the best time of year to be out and about, so out and about I went.

  Our home was located just two blocks away from Philadelphia’s fabric district, Fourth Street, just below South Street, an area where twenty-seven years later I still shop for fabric when in need of curtains or new slipcovers, but that back in the late eighties seemed like it couldn’t possibly last so long. It was then—as it still is now, as it has perhaps always been—a street spotted with businesses looking to be on their last legs, interspersed with vestiges of businesses already long gone.

  It’s an oddly bleak stretch, even in spring, even with bolts of colorful fabric spilling onto the sidewalk, but, bleakness and all, back in ’88, it had a wonderfully welcoming feel, a vibe that hummed a familiar tune. I grew up with my grandmother living in our home, her six sisters frequent visitors. They were old school, their speech sprinkled with Yiddish, their stories often ones of the Lower East Side where their father had been a tailor in the early 1900s. The world of their memories was not the world of my own childhood—me, the daughter of university professors in Connecticut—but it took root, becoming something I carried inside myself, and still do. When I think about my grandmother’s youth, the images I see, the atmosphere I feel, are all so vivid, they come to me much as memories of my own childhood do. The boundary between memory and imagination is a porous one.

  Back in 1988, lonely, a little at sea with new motherhood, I passed hour after hour strolling those dreary blocks, admiring the fabrics, the silk tassels, the baskets of buttons, taking in the rhythms of the volleys between customers and salespeople, the bargaining and the near-physical heat that rose from a person tempted to buy something for more money than she should, the seduction of that. I loved the hints of Yiddish intonation to some voices—or maybe I just imagined them, as I imagined my own family, once upon a time, handling, measuring fabric on just such a street. There was so much about my life then that felt new—exciting in many ways, but also frightening. The sense I had of coming home, if only to a kind of ancestral home, soothed and strengthened me.

  A quarter century later, some months into writing my novel Life Drawing, deep into the experiences of world creation and of trying to understand the people on my pages, I found myself with a central character, in Philadelphia, who had betrayed a beloved partner in the aftermath of losing a cherished sister. She felt isolated and scared. She felt like she had no home. It had been a very long time since my days of pushing a stroller on Fourth Street, but in wanting a “safe zone” for this woman who was facing a new, painful reality, I instinctively returned there. I invented a milliner shop, Steinman’s, placed a brother and sister in charge—older, old school, with attitudes I remembered, attitudes I understood. I drew on a mix of my own memories and those I had inherited, long before. And I placed my character in the middle of the activity and the fabrics, where she sat painting a canvas and healing, for the course of a long bleak winter.

  As different as her situation was from mine back when I found comfort amid the bolts of fabric, I understood, if only intuitively, that her needs were the same. And I understood too, as I hadn’t in 1988, that even beyond matters of familiar accents and familial memories, there can be something oddly comforting about being among materials that are also in transition, yards of damask soon to be reinvented as drapes; buttons, loose and unattached, soon to be used to close a coat. There is comfort and there is hope in the knowledge that these unformed, not yet defined objects have such miraculous potential to be renewed.

  For Augusta, my forlorn painter, watching the milliners craft marvels of beauty from bits and pieces of netting and velvet, scraps really, was just the healing experience she needed at the time. The promise of the unfinished, the inherent optimism of such transformation, all of it helped bolster her—as it had me when I was a new mother, lonely and scared.

  Few days go by without someone asking me where I get my material. Puns aside, this tale of Fabric Row is typical—in part because I never had a single conscious thought, as I placed Augusta on Fourth Street, about why doing so felt so right. Material, for me, the fictional sort, is a matter of hunches and unexpected associations. I have only vague ideas, as I write, about why my stories take the turns they do, why they are set where they are, why my characters have the strengths and foibles that they have. And I like it that way.

  But then I can almost always find evidence of an associative logic behind my choices, later on.

  I still shop on Fourth Street when it’s time for new slipcovers, or when a set of curtains has outlived its prime. Or sometimes when I just want to be in that place of optimism, and aspiration, and familiar cadences, once again. There is comfort for me, even now, on those eternally dreary blocks.

  Father Chronicles:

  To the Extent That He Was Able

  “Your father would have been so proud of you.”

  When my first book came out, more than one family friend told me this. Many tell me this still. For the most part, I only smile in response. Unless my mother is nearby, in which case, as soon as possible, I roll my eyes at her; and she nods her head, maybe shrugs her shoulders, in return.

  That’s about all the eloquence we need. We have reached the point at which gestures and code cover all we have to say, though the first time we heard mention of my father’s hypothetical pride we talked it through.

  “I don’t think pride would be his primary response,” I said in a cab back to her apartment from a gathering in New York. “I think he’d be absolutely flummox
ed about how to respond to my having published a book.”

  “Unfortunately,” she said, “I think you’re right.” And then we went on to remind each other of the many things we both already knew, but struggled with—and struggle with still, well over a decade after his death. His emotional instability, his crippling narcissism, his passionate longing for fame, the alcoholism that left him, even when sober, often preoccupied with longing for drink; and his lifelong desire to believe that he knew how to love.

  “He really did love you kids,” she said.

  “To the extent that he was able,” I said.

  “To the extent that he was able,” she said.

  It is the mantra that hovers always in the overlap between my father’s good intentions and the limitations that thwarted those, the same limitations that almost certainly played a role in thwarting my creative ambitions for so many years.

  Causation and coincidence are not to be confused, but the fact that I was unable to write in any productive way until my father died, and then that I began to do so three weeks after his death, has always seemed more significant than any notions of mere coincidence would imply. That doesn’t mean I fully understand what lies behind the timing, only that it’s an important enough fact of my life that I cannot shake my sense that I should understand it. And so I look around for clues, particularly in the character of the man himself.

  He wasn’t modest, and like many immodest men, he didn’t much like those who competed with him. His critiques of others in his professional field, notably those whose reputations rivaled or even overshadowed his own, were both scornful and condescending. This one was a “four-flusher,” all flash, no substance. This other one was a second-rate mind. He had tags for those he deemed overrated and also for those he deemed pathetic in some way, worthy only of his pity, if worthy of notice at all. To compete with my father, it was clear, was to be despised or demeaned—or both.