It's somewhat idiotic to devote one's life to a form of communication while at the same time not wishing to share it with anyone, but it's a combination not unheard of. Writing is nice because you can do it alone, and ideally no one gets to tell you how to do it. In my ideal world, I would just sit here and write novels all day. Actually, in this world, that's primarily what I do. The problem here is the sustainability of such a lifestyle. The problem here is that, like all of us, I must once in a while think about money.
My family would like me to make money. The main reason they want me to make money is so that I can live and not die. It comforts them to know that I have the means to live, so that they don't have to worry that I will one day run out of money and die. I can empathize with this position; I am also often concerned with maintaining my status as a living being. However, I can't make money. I've never been able to make money. I believe it's quite possible that I never will be able to make money.
I’m talking about excess money, here: money beyond the money required to sustain a single man’s life, renting out basements and eating lentils. Regular readers will know that I once worked at a fruit store. The only way I could reliably convince myself to go to the fruit store was to pretend that they weren’t paying me. I would tell myself that I was doing my boss a favour (he’s a good guy.) If I tried to motivate myself by saying, “Hey, they’re going to pay you like 100 bucks to stand at that register all day," I would reply, "Well, I could probably live with 100 less bucks." So, I had to completely sever the causal relationship between “job” and “money” in my mind. The money showed up in my bank account due to God’s Grace; I showed up at the fruit store out of a sense of charity.
Look, I know as much as anyone how little sense any of this makes. Just bear with me.
At some point, I don't know where or when, I fell off the boat when it comes to money. While other people my age began to realize that they would need to work in order to get more money in order to buy and do more things, I had the opposite realization. It occurred to me that if I develop a lifestyle that requires little money, I could work less and spend the rest of the time doing whatever I want. I never liked working, whether at school or otherwise. Nobody could ever figure out how to motivate me. They tried to motivate me with threats and punishment, but I just accepted the punishment. They tried to bribe me with rewards, but I never thought the rewards were worth more than not working, which I considered its own reward.
I remember in the summer prior to twelfth grade my dad offered me some ridiculous wage to paint the railing of our deck. I think it was over $20/hour (in Canadian dollars.) I went to bed every night thinking, "Cool; if I just do a little bit of painting tomorrow morning, I could buy a new video game or something." But when I woke up, instead of getting to work at painting, I got to work convincing myself that I didn't need a new video game. I think it took me over a month to do probably seven or eight hours of work. I just couldn't see the point.
When I wanted to buy something growing up, my dad would always interrogate me regarding its necessity. Usually, I needed to buy things online, which required my parent's credit card. Even though I would pay them back with my own money, my dad was incredibly stingy with his credit card. He needed to make sure that I truly and passionately desired the item I was purchasing, whether it was a new video game, a subscription to some online service, or what. Most of the time, my interests were so obscure that it was impossible to explain to him why anyone would want the things I wanted. ("You see, dad, there's this tournament in Korea where they compete at a computer game, and it's really cool, but you need to pay a monthly fee to watch the livestreams in HD, and get access to the VODs.") This process of interrogation made me feel guilty and ashamed for ever desiring anything that costed money. It wasn't even that we were poor -- we had money. I had money. I guess he wanted me to appreciate the value of said money.
And I suppose it worked. Whenever I want to buy something, a little voice in my head interrogates me in just the way my dad used to. I have become incredibly proficient at talking myself out of purchases. Every purchase I talk myself out of is several less hours I have to work. I became so good at this sort of argumentation that I was able to talk myself out of desiring much of anything at all. And since I had no desires, I no longer needed disposable income. This bizarre calculus where money’s primary value is its ability to decrease extrinsically-enforced labour became the foundation on which I built my life.
I don't want money, because money doesn't get me anything that I want. (The books at the library are free, after all.) This has been my stance since my first job after high school, which damn near killed me. This stance has worked nicely for me for over a decade now. However, as I approach 30, I am starting to see the cracks.
Like many young people, I thought I would die young. Maybe that's not the right way to put it. It's not that I thought I would die young, it's that I never thought I would live to be old. It just wasn't conceivable. I was too stupid, too inept, too unfit for life on this planet to be allowed to remain on it for that long. So, money was only an issue in so far as I needed it to pay this month’s rent and buy this month’s food, both of which I was able to do easily by working a few days a week, living in basements, and eating a lot of lentils. And I probably could have kept at that forever, if something hadn't gotten in the way (by which I mean, saved my life.)
I was lonely and depressed and generally not living a particularly enviable life in any way, but that was okay because I didn't expect anything better and it wasn't going to last that long, anyway. I wanted to write novels, but I couldn't be bothered, and I wanted to publish essays online and share them with the world, but I couldn't be bothered with that either. In the midst of all this, in a shocking move whose catalyst I can't for the life of me remember, I decided to get a girlfriend.
In an even more shocking turn of events, I succeeded. Now, I'm married. I'm married, I'm writing novels, I'm publishing essays online — and heck, I even have a Youtube channel, for some reason. Now, this is all gravy and, frankly, what a lucky man I am. But as all these brilliant developments have come about, they've reached an impasse with the way I'd learned to live my life.
Because of my happiness and my passion for the novels I am now able to write, I find that I would like to keep living for a bit. In fact, so pleased am I with all this that I'm even thinking about having my own kids. Now this is a wonderful dream, but the unfortunate fact is that these little creatures, similarly to myself, require money in order to live and not die. And they are even less capable of making money than I am. It's actually illegal for them to make money, for the most part. So once again the problem of money has reared its ugly head.
Since the possibility of any other career has withered away along with my twenties, the only option left is to make money via the work I am already doing. I have been doing this work for quite some time, and have put far more effort into it than any work I’ve ever been paid for. I used to think that I was lazy; well, I am a bit lazy. Like any stationary Newtonian object, I am prone to inactivity. However, given the right force, I am capable of much more than I ever dreamed. Unlike a Newtonian object, that force needs to come from within me; it can’t be imposed from outside.
At the fruit store, when I considered my work a favour, when I was working for the sake of helping out my co-workers, I went out of my way to do as much as possible. When I considered my work a service toward my customers — at least the ones I liked — I felt like a hero. When I considered my work a job, designed to facilitate the money-making of my employer and thereby myself, I no longer wanted to go. It suddenly seemed like a waste of my time.
If I try to write for money, I will fail. I will stop writing. When I was dreaming of being a famous and successful novelist, I didn’t write novels. It was only when I gave up dreaming and started working on novels for their own sake that I was able to motivate myself. Now, I have devoted my life to this work. It no longer matters whether it succeeds or fails. I am going to do it no matter what.
Very few of the role models I attached myself to when I was younger made any money. Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Philip K. Dick -- they all made little to no money from their novels throughout their life. Others, such as Marcel Proust, were born into money and thus never had to concern themselves with such prosaic concerns.
Proust had a particularly disastrous influence on me, and at just the right time too. For whatever reason, his reclusive lifestyle — bedridden due to asthma, and surviving off of just 2 croissants and 2 cups of coffee per day until his death at 51 — appealed to my twenty year-old self like no other. I could not imagine a more wonderful way to live. All I wanted was to get sick and remove myself from society in order to write books. The only issue was that, while we weren't poorly off by any means, my family didn't have infinite wealth. I couldn't afford a courier, a driver, a live-in assistant, and a large apartment in Paris. I didn't have the connections to Parisian high society that would allow me a broad readership (even if Proust did have to personally finance the publication of In Search of Lost Time's first volume.)
However, this issue didn’t bother me much. I assumed that at some point a large sum of money would materialize in my lap, enough at least to allow me to work in solitude for a few years before succumbing to the debilitating illness that would hopefully crop up around the same time. It didn’t need to be much — I figured I could get by on just over $10,000 a year if I played my cards right.
While that money never did materialize, and thankfully neither did the sickness (although you could say that I had to be somewhat sick in the head to conceive of such a plan in the first place), the idea of a reclusive, ascetic, artistic, early death never quite left my mind. Outside of fits far more fanciful than even that just described, I never made many real plans for the future. I never considered any means of success aside from miracles.
Thus, although I now publish materials online somewhat regularly, I have lived my adult life in a state of near-total ignorance of and apathy towards the arcane algorithmic processes that govern the circulation of content on the internet. I always figured that if I do my best, it'll all work out in the end, perhaps via magic. That certainly helped me reach the point I’m at now, where I am capable of putting out my best work, but I'm starting to think that soon enough I am going to have to come face-to-face with the reality of the situation, which is that if I want people to read my work, I am going to have to learn how to market it. I mean, no one else is going to do it for me.
Even aside from my ignorance and folly, it is somewhat inherent in my nature that this is an aspect of the job I will suck at. My dad, who runs his own business developing computer programs, also struggles with this same problem. He's not a salesman. I am even less of one. We like to sit with our heads down and do our work. When it comes to putting the work in front of people, or convincing them that it’s worth putting their money towards, we don’t know where to start.
Every time I see my dad, he asks if I've found a way to make money from my writing. I say that I'm "figuring it out." I seriously wonder if I'll ever be able to figure it out, or if it's even worth figuring out. The only way to make money with what I do is to have people look at you. The more people look at you, the more they see, and the more trouble and pain they’re able to cause. It’s frightening.
Yet, of course, I want people to read what I write. In my years of isolation I was able to convince myself that I don’t need popularity, or fame, or even validation. Because I was afraid of exposing my work with people, I learned how to appreciate it on my own. But I wonder how much of that self-reliance is real, and how much is compensating for my fear.
I would like people to read and connect with my writing. It is the only thing I know how to do — the only means I have of justifying my existence to the world and expressing what it means to be the person that I am. I know there are people like me out there. I’ve read their books. I know that by encapsulating my emotions in words, I could be for someone what those authors are to me. Disastrous influences, perhaps, but also lifelong companions, living proof that I am in fact a human being.
I reach out with love and at the same time cower in fear, my half-extended arm shaking with trepidation. As I beg for attention — as, perhaps, I must — I am also begging for mercy.
I might be better off if I didn’t have to do this. If I didn’t have to publish, didn’t have to play this cat-and-mouse game of finding an audience. I would certainly be more comfortable. But when I look back at the comfort I felt doing nothing and being nothing and feeling nothing, I realize that comfort isn’t the only metric by which to judge a good life. Back then, writing felt as impossible as publishing does today.
I can’t just keep telling myself that I’m doing my best — I have to actually do my best. Perhaps I will languish in obscurity either way; perhaps even if I devote all my energies to gaining readers, I will fail and die unread. Perhaps! But just as I would regret devoting my life to anything but writing, so too would I regret hiding that writing away and never sharing it with anyone. Yes, it is frightening — I still feel nervous sharing my work even with my wife and best friends, after all — but it must be done! Who’s to say that I won’t succeed? Who’s to say that this isn’t but the glorious beginning of my tale?
I’ve got to give it a chance!
Balckwell Rising!!!