So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  I wait that long to share what I have written with my agent partly because I do not want anybody telling me I can’t tackle a particular subject or that something isn’t commercial or sexy or fashionable or whatever before the work is essentially in place. It may need some tightening, some tidying, some trimming or perhaps some expanding, but it stands.

  You must learn, once something is completed, to hustle for your work. You would not hesitate to push a little for a child or a lot for a business. Your work is an “other,” once it’s completed, and it deserves the same attention. It may be an unfortunate reflection of our times, and it is certainly ironic, given that writing attracts people who enjoy working in isolation, but a writer today has to be something of an entrepreneur, ready to market one’s work, if not oneself. This certainly means submitting it, again and again. It may mean getting yourself readings, writing query letters, learning to deal with rejections and, on occasion, insults. It may mean writing reviews, for print or online media, to make connections, to make deposits in the favor bank and to get your name known by readers and by publications who will be more likely to review you. As foolish as it may feel to spend half an hour yakking with a talk show host on a local cable channel who may or may not have read your book, or a radio disk jockey who certainly has not, you never know who is listening, who may become curious now or five books from now. It’s well to remember that close to 125,000 books are published every year. You have to separate yourself from the pack by reading and signing books in libraries, in schools, at conferences; in mall stores where you may be asked to sit behind a stack of books at a card table, of no more interest than the parakeets in the pet shop window. Do it; then laugh about it with other writers. If you push your work collectively, you will feel less shame, less guilt, which is another reason to have a group.

  A writer must have the support of some kind of community in writing about her experiences, or she will feel crazy. A person who believes she is crazy will not write or will write, perhaps, but in a code. She may destroy what she has written because it is, she believes, bad—bad in not measuring up to standards she has been taught usually based on the work of men who grew up in the 19th century or bad in a moral sense—wicked. A strong woman is still widely seen as a bad woman. A woman who internalizes such judgments—as to some degree all women raised in sexist societies do—will punish herself for her strengths as well as her weaknesses.

  Similarly, a man who writes may feel he is less of a man because he deals with feelings, emotions, the epiphenomena of the interior and daily life. Or simply because he does not go off to a job every morning as other men in his family have done. He may feel the need to counter the image of himself as wimp by acting twice as macho or writing twice as offensively as anybody else. He may accept the judgment that he is less of a man, less of a person, and thus less deserving of respect. For this he may blame himself, his mother, women in general or some woman who personifies the sex to him. We have seen examples of writers who’ve done all of the above. We all have emotions and inner lives, whether we choose to put them into a particular work or not. It is wise for a writer to accept that we all have strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, failed intentions and shameful fantasies as well as simply silly ones. We are all bundles of variant selves we may never have a chance to live out in the external world—and often for good reason.

  Now, a work must be able to be conceptualized before it can get past the inner censor and be written. We are limited to what we can imagine. What we do is partly determined by desire, partly by what we think will be the consequences, and partly by what we imagine are the possibilities we can choose among. We need to read widely and critically to study the craft of other writers. We also read because when someone has written about a particular subject or in a particular vein, it may prick our imaginations into new possibilities—not an imitation but a new direction that the other writer has opened up or simply rendered imaginable.

  Basically, good writing is done because it has to be done, because the person doing it cannot be dissuaded, distracted, ignored or punished into silence. It always happens against the odds. But you don’t start back on square one. If art demands a long apprenticeship, it also offers the rewards of mastery, of what was once inconceivably difficult becoming second nature, and of there always, always being something more difficult and demanding asking to be tried. Our imaginations, our abilities may fail, but never the possibilities before us.

  17

  Fame, Fortune, And Other Tawdry Illusions Marge Piercy

  My name is not a household word like Drano or Kleenex. Mostly people have no particular reaction when they meet me, although you can never be sure. My gynecologist “knows who I am” because his receptionist Audrey read one of my novels, as has my accountant. However, from time to time people recognize me on the street or in odd and disconcerting circumstances like in a shopping mall when I was trying on a skirt, or another time in a restaurant when Woody and I were having a bloody if moderately quiet argument. I am not so bad about accidental recognition as as I used to be. I do not try to crawl into my own pocket or pretend if I don’t move a muscle or breathe, I will wake in my own bed, but I can’t say I ever behave more gracefully than a sneak thief caught.

  Publishing books, especially about women, brings letters that can break your heart: women losing custody of their children, women shut up in mental institutions because they rebelled against being an unpaid domestic or took a female lover, women in all shapes and colors of trouble.

  Women dyeing the air with desperation, women weaving like spiders from the gut of emptiness, women swollen with emotion, women with words piling up in the throat like fallen leaves....

  —from “Women of Letters”

  You also get flattering letters from women as well as some men who tell you what your books have meant to them. You also receive hate mail, if you have any visible politics.

  The admirers who do not give pleasure are those who call up, generally when you are sleeping or writing, making supper, entertaining friends and say, “Hello, I read your book, I happen to be in town, and can I come over?” There is no way to satisfy such a caller. When I was younger, I was so astonished and grateful anybody had read anything of mine and liked it, I would invariably say yes. Dreadful, dreadful scenes resulted. Worse than that, whole boring evenings and days and someone who felt they had the right to invade again at will and at some point would have to be dealt with forcefully. People who want to invite themselves into your house to meet you generally are pushy and sometimes more than a little nuts, and nothing less than letting them move in or letting them have at least an arm or leg of their own will satiate a baseless hunger. Now I make excuses, unless I know the person in some way, unless a genuine connection exists so that we can hope for two-way communication.

  Every week several books and at least one manuscript arrive with requests for blurbs, criticism, help of some sort. I used to try to respond to all those requests, but I got further and further and further behind. The books I now put on a pile in terms of when they arrived (I am currently a year and eight months behind) and the manuscripts I promptly return, if the authors provided postage. I do not attempt to read manuscripts at all, unless it is for someone I know or submissions to Leapfrog Press. They are screened anyhow by our first readers. All the books I do finally glance at or skim at least and a certain number I read, but I feel haunted, snowed in by them. I remember how long I was utterly unknown. I feel guilty, but I know rationally that if I were to read even a quarter of them, I would do nothing else; and I do not have a lot of time to read in the first place. Unlike academics, I don’t have long vacations or often any vacations longer than overnight. To make a living at writing, I have to hustle and have to work six days a week.

  I travel a lot giving readings, and there the weirdness flourishes in some pockets like mold. People go through ego dances before me that I find confusing and bemusing. I do not have the middle class patina and I am not much good at m
aking gracious casual conversation. I like best to talk to people one on one, not necessarily about me. Women who go about giving readings are expected to act like ladies, like mommies, or like tough dykes, and I don’t fit into any of those standard roles.

  Joanna Russ says it’s my body type and my style that gets me in trouble. Nobody tries to make her play mommy, or at least not quite as often at first glance. She’s tall as the Empire State Building, lean and elegant, and dresses tailored. I am five feet four (almost), zaftig¸ and dress more or less peasanty.

  I remember back in the seventies, I was wearing my standard Women’s Liberation army garb, slumped way over so my boobs wouldn’t jiggle too much because I wasn’t supposed to wear a bra, dressed in about thirty pounds of denim, when I thought to myself, Why do I have to wear male drag to talk to and about women? I went back to skirts or comfortable pants. I dress the way I feel good. And I always read in a dress: Let there be no mistake I am a woman, proud of it.

  What do people want from somebody they have heard of? It is not even, frequently, a matter of having read your work and formed expectations, for I have gone through upsetting pas de deux with individuals who had no idea what kind of work I produce. I was pure celebrity to them, some kind of superperson because a published writer. Of the people who have some familiarity, many are attached to one particular novel and express resentment that I do not resemble physically or in character Vida in Vida—that I am not a native speaker of Spanish, like Consuelo in Woman on the Edge of Time, or a systems analyst like Miriam in Small Changes, have never been homeless like Mary in The Longings of Women and do not live with a daughter and a stroke-enfeebled mother like Suzanne in Three Women. I have had fans become hostile when I tried to explain that a novel was not autobiographical. The hostility seems to divide into those who feel put upon (I thought it was true and now I find it’s just a story!) and those who suspect you’re trying to keep the truth from them; all novels are thinly disguised autobiography and you’re just trying to cover up being a lesbian or being a mother who has lost custody of her children, or whatever.

  Readers of the poems tend to have somewhat more accurate expectations, although one of the first things always said when I get off the plane is, “I/we expected you to be taller” or “I/we expected you to be bigger.” I intend to write a poem soon about being four feet tall, and then everybody will say, “Oh, but we expected you to be smaller.” All microphones are preset as if everybody were five feet ten, and the podiums are sized accordingly.

  Once in a while you arrive into a situation in which somebody has decided beforehand you are their sex object. You land and are visited with this great rush that has nothing whatsoever to do with you, and which seems to assume you have no commitments, no attachments, but are really a figment of their sexual imagination capable of fitting right into the fantasies they have worked up. I find that so off-putting I don’t even feel flattered. Mostly men do this, but sometimes women do it. There may even be the implication that they got you this real nice gig, paying more than they think you or any woman is worth, so you should thank them by rolling over belly up in their bed. That happened a lot more when I was younger, of course, but even at my age, it still happens sometimes.

  Occasionally you walk into a situation in which the brass of the department didn’t want you. You are the sop to the younger faculty or the small contingent of feminists or radicals. I was once introduced in Illinois by the head of the English Department in this way, “Our speaker tonight is Marge Piercy. I never heard of her, but the younger faculty made me invite her.” End of introduction.

  My advice to the struggling young writer is, never thank anybody sexually, and never use your body as payment or prepayment for help. Fuck only people you want and then, no matter what goes wrong and how you get clobbered emotionally, at least you will have catered to your own sexual tastes and you will not feel victimized. You have been your own free agent and will be stronger for it. If you are honestly turned on by someone who can help you, clear sailing. But if you are a woman, you have to be especially careful you don’t get known as X’s girlfriend, because then you can write Four Quartets and still people will say you got published because you were X’s girlfriend.

  Every writer has some groupies, and how you deal with them is your own decision, within the law. You can sense that a great many of them would not like you as you are, as opposed to the idealized or otherwise fictional image they are toting around; or what they offer is a come-on for expecting you are going to be for them what Joanna Russ calls a magic mommy: solve all their problems, make them happy, get them published or produced or whatever, make the world right—for them—and have no real needs of your own to be satisfied. Since writers are generally pretty needy beings, such encounters are programmed for disaster.

  On the other hand, one of the possible relationships that may work out for a woman writer is a relationship with a younger person who does know who you are and what you do and who genuinely admires that before getting to know you—but does get to know you. Such an intimacy can contain a lot less bloody gut fighting than somebody, particularly a man, your own age.

  Oftentimes women who have achieved some small success find that the man or woman they lived with beforehand can not adjust to what they view as an unnecessary fuss about somebody they knew back when. Fame loses you lovers and friends, as well as bringing people flocking closer. It does, however, make it easier to find new relationships. You can pick and choose a little. That doesn’t mean you’ll choose any more intelligently than you did when you were seventeen and still squeezing pimples or twenty-five and invisible as a grain of sand at the seashore, but you may have learned something.

  Many men and many women cannot bear success even of the most limited and partial sort coming to someone they married or whose life they have been sharing. They may feel they cannot hold on to their lover with all the new competition, real or imagined. More often they resent what they feel is the shift of emphasis from themselves as center of the marriage or life, to the other person who was supposed to dance attendance on them, not to be rushing off to Paducah to give poetry readings, not be signing books, making speeches, or giving interviews. Certainly they should not be on radio or television or be photographed grinning no matter how foolishly.

  You will, as a traveling woman, find all too often that a welcoming fuss, however minor, also infuriates local men who feel that you are after all just a cunt and they’ve seen better, and why isn’t everyone fussing about them? Similarly you will find as a traveling woman that frequently academic women in universities who may write a poem or two a year or always meant to write someday will look at you with annoyance and just about say to you, why all the attention on you? You’re just a woman like me. Why should they pay you to come in here and read, lecture, pontificate?

  People also commonly confuse three things that are quite distinct. As an American poet you can achieve a certain measure of fame, but you don’t get rich and you don’t acquire power. The Bush family is rich and the Bush family is powerful. Bill Gates is very rich. Allen Ginsberg may have been famous, but he didn’t own half of Venezuela or even New Jersey and he wasn’t consulted on the national defense budget or our policies toward South Africa. Morris the Cat enjoyed far more fame than any writer I know, but you didn’t imagine him as wielding power.

  Few writers are rich. If they are, maybe they inherited money. When you hear about a $100,000 paperback deal, the hardcover publisher usually takes $50,000, the agent $7500, and the writer’s share on paper is $42,500 except that she got a $15,000 advance to finish the book, so that $15,000 is taken out of her share. That gives her $27,500 minus taxes. Let’s say it takes her three years to write a novel, I would think a decent average of what people need. My shortest book took two years; the others, all longer. That gives her about $9,000 a year income for the next three years. Happy $100,000 deal!

  For a writer, having some fame is surely better than having none, since if people have heard of
you they are likelier to buy your books than if they have not, or at least take them out of the library; but it doesn’t mean you’re drinking champagne out of crystal goblets while you count your oil revenue shares, and it doesn’t mean you have any choice about how the world is run and what happens in the society you’re part of. Similarly the writer above with the $9,000 coming in for the next three years is immensely better off than she was when she wrote for an occasional $25 or $50 fee from the quarterlies, or when she did a reading a week for twenty weeks at one hundred bucks per reading, ending up sick in bed and worn out with no writing done and having earned a total of $2,000 after her expenses on the road are deducted.

  Make no mistake: I like applause. I adore being admired, I even like signing books, which I understand some writers don’t. I’m tickled somebody is buying them. I work hard when I give workshops and try to give honest and useful answers when students question me. I like having my books discussed; I passionately care to have them read. I even like giving workshops where I read lots of often incoherent or sloppy student writing—I do enjoy trying to teach them how to make it all better.

  But I resent jealousy, especially when beamed at me by people who have made as clear choices in their lives as I have. I know how invisible I was to the kind of people I meet around universities and other institutions in my non-famous life, when I was poor and subsisting on various underpaid part-time positions. I know how they treat their secretaries, waitresses, telephone operators, cleaning women, store clerks. I was living in a slum, eating macaroni and wearing secondhand clothes (not then fashionable) and chewing aspirins because I couldn’t pay a dentist while I wrote the first six novels before the one that got published.