Are We All Great Writers?

Warning: I’m going to act as if I were younger and full of braggadocio like most of you young writers who boast about your voice, your muse, your "work" and fearlessly market like crazy because you are full of yourselves, as I was.

What a handicap age and experience is beyond the obvious! It’s a cliché of course but as we age we increasingly understand that we know very little. While young, we understand, theoretically, that people believe themselves smarter than they really are. Old, we know with absolutely certainty that we are all as dumb as a bag of hammers. (Some cliches are too good to pass up.)

And really, what good is it to embrace the truth that we are all dumb asses? Does that get you anywhere? No, much better to be boastful and arrogant, full of overblown confidence. It levels the playing field, makes the least talented among us eminently marketable.

If we can fool enough people, we can sell ourselves and, by extension, our "work." But we must whip up the enthusiasm, and we must believe in ourselves no matter how inferior the product. This applies to vacuum cleaner salesmen (even though they joke their job sucks). It applies to politicians, and especially to radio and TV blowhards. And despite our denials, it also applies to writers.

I used to think writers’ purposeful exaggeration and ginned up enthusiasm was merely a result of our techno-modern age in which we’ve become not only writers but self-publishers and marketers. Ironically as a result of modern technology I was able to watch an old interview of William Buckley interviewing Norman Mailer. While I had some prior sense of Mailer’s bombast and boastful personality, the you-tube interview crystallized it. It shows that writer self-aggrandizement has been around forever. Not surprising really. In most cases, these guys are the greatest, like Mohammed Ali.

Is bombast more prevalent today? Or is there merely an overabundance of writers who have the means to get themselves "out there" into the world, or at least the online world? Aren’t we all great, all of us Mailer, Buckley and Ali. And since we are so great, why languish in obscurity? Why not boast? To be fair, writers inflating their worth is understandable. No one stands over the writer’s shoulder and says, "Good sentence." We must think ourselves infallible, at least while writing. Otherwise, we wouldn’t write a word and we’d keep our tortured emotions bottled up and we’d extinguish ourselves in some grand suicidal gesture without anyone noticing. The logical extension of our delusion, especially in this age of instantaneous publishing and social networking, is to shout about how we’ve just written the best thing we’ve ever written in our entire lives.

However, some writers seek the middle. They don’t mind some attention but would much rather let their writing "speak for them" and would rather their self worth be judged by the quality of their product and not their publicity photo. On the other hand, we don’t strive to be Emily Dickenson type souls who die happily enough leaving behind a transcendent literary legacy. Most of us want to make at least a scant living from our craft.

Increasingly it seems that it has become more difficult to be heard amidst the shouting. There seem to be more "voices’ than ever. Or just a bigger platform for the shouting. It’s the technological conundrum of our time. It’s never been easier to present your voice to the world while at the same time it’s never been more difficult to be heard. This can be seen everywhere -- the number of contests, online journals, self-publishing, ebooks -- in virtually every topic, not only in the writing profession of course, but in everything. We have been overwhelmed with information and misinformation, and incessant self-promotion. We now have "Social Media Consultants" who provide three times a day, status updates, comments on other posts, tweets, retweets, "likes," even blog entries. This last one seems particularly odd. A ghost blogger? The end result of this is of course an avalanche of only slightly disguised advertising.

Occasionally, in publicity photos, you can sense the Lady Ga Ga type self-consciousness and utterly fake romantic gaze. Authors aren’t sure their writing is any good but boy, do they look sensitive, insightful, and slightly vulnerable, yet with a tough exterior of course. But that’s the whole point isn’t it? To put the best face forward. To advertise the personality. A writer friend once pointed out that nobody looks as good as they do in their Facebook photo. Some people don’t even bother to produce anything, and they become great "personalities" because they know how to "brand" themselves. (I always think of cows.) Some "writers" are pre-branded -- radio, TV, and political personalities. "The book" is almost incidental.

I was advised once to put together a publicity packet/news release. I had to change my "author’s bio" so that it gave more information about me. Me. My personality. Sell your personality. Sell yourself. We are all told that. What about my writing? Yes, of course, that must be good. Goes without saying. Really? So much for letting my writing speak for itself. When I was a kid, I read because I liked the story. Usually it was fiction. Often it was "literature." Aside from a few interesting secondary points about the author – like how he killed himself – the writing came first. Has that changed?

It seems more writers lack the sweat, the "blood on the brow" commitment before posting their "life’s work." Not only that, since everyone else is trying to do the same, no one seems willing to say bluntly something like, "This is crap. Go do the work and then post." Most often, we writers lavish praise. That’s because it’s so easy to destroy someone online. No one wants to risk becoming the target of negative online campaigns. It can be devastating. Just ask any politician. So we chuck honesty for fear of ruining our chances of becoming a successful author. Writers are very nice to other writers. I realize of course that I am setting myself up to being ridiculed here. And frankly, I do worry about it. Otherwise, why would I mention it?

Some writers have been around long enough and had have been told by people who should know that a fraction of their writing reaches rarefied air. That’s nice. But as we are gasping for air, trying to survive and adapt, we are also drowning in the latest self-published erotica or avalanche of slush pile crap marketed by hard driving salesmen. Agents and publishers have known this problem since the advent of word processing. (I am writing this with a blue ink pen and a yellow legal pad. Think me smug, but word processing often increases only the number of words.)

I’m not sure that, if I were young today, I wouldn’t succumb to temptation and post my drafts in the hope that I was an accidental genius, that somehow no one noticed it before, but now everyone in the world (online) will see how wonderful I am. Maybe I would have posted rough drafts, but I doubt it. Even before the technological expansion I was extremely reluctant to show my work until I’d rewritten many times. I couldn’t even talk about a story until it was "finished." A few times someone had the balls to hurt my feelings with the truth. And I had to reluctantly agree that my current finished product was crap. Enough other times, however, I produced acceptable stories written with a somewhat unique viewpoint. And occasional "near misses" from big time publishers and several contest wins encouraged me. I’ve been on radio, praised in print newspapers, and so on, and on. Yet sales still provide only monthly beer money. Maybe it’s best we all just convince ourselves that our writing is crap, that lots and lots of people were wrong, that they were somehow mentally deficient in their assessment. Or worse, that they were merely other writers, lying to us while trying to boost their own careers.

If we still want to earn enough to justify ourselves as writers, must we shout? Must we become salesmen? I’ve tried that profession once – one of many jobs, you know the story, to support the obsession. How wonderful it was selling light bulbs. I sat in the sun on my back deck (no stuffy office for me) with my stack of cards -- my daily quota of making 50 telephone sales calls. I made two calls. Stared. A few more. I checked the time. Ten o’clock in the morning and I’d made about twelve calls, but I had also been amazingly successful in consuming three martinis and a pack of cigarettes. I don’t smoke. Maybe this wasn’t the job for me.

I thought selling my own writing might be different, but a quota of online exposure doesn’t feel much different than pimping light bulbs. Occasionally, I give it a try. So if you see a self-aggrandizing post from a certain Jeffrey Penn May (for most of my life I have been happily Jeff May), it’s likely I’ve had several drinks. I won’t be smoking cigarettes. Maybe that is the pleasant difference between selling light bulbs and selling my writing. I don’t need to smoke. I just need to be smokin’ hot, man!