Happy Memorial Day! And thoughts on Writing Priorities and True Success

Happy Memorial Day Weekend Everyone! And thanks to all our troops who have serve or are currently serving!

This weekend, after scanning with some dismay the number of poems I’ve written and/or sent out in the past twelve months, I decided to make this weekend profoundly unscheduled – no parties, no readings – and just devote myself to getting back my brain’s space, writing, and trying to send out some work and revise some of my manuscripts. It’s been tough – I’ve been easily distracted – but I’m getting back into my old habits after a day or two – staying up late to write poems, starting in the morning before I get out of bed to go over XL spreadsheets and deciding where to send out or researching publishers and magazines. I want to have some sort of higher ambitions – I’ve been reading, a little bit every night, Flannery O’Connor’s Habits of Being , and have been really struck noting both her tough ambitions, her constant revisions and aiming high in her publications. (I have some other literary memoir-type things calling my name to read as well – Pain, Parties Work on Sylvia Plath, and Z A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald when I’m done with Flannery.) Note that things didn’t really end well for any of these writers. Oh well. I’m taking note of their good habits and ignoring the bad. After all, that’s what we do in real life with friends and mentors, right?

I have been thinking about notions of “success” for a poet/writer (as you may have notice from previous posts) and have come to an odd conclusion: you cannot compromise or let your writing become commercialized or fall victim to trends or else, like the tragic example of the brainy teen girl whose high school crush finally comes around when she puts on a short skirt and makeup – she’ll find the shiny object of her affections sadly tarnished. As a writer, what I really mean when I say “Success” is that someone (or someones – hopefully a larger number rather than a smaller number) – appreciates what is unique and special about your writing in particular, not your writing as part of a trend, or your writing for what it represents, but what is unique to you in terms of ideas, styles, slant, POV…you know, without the short skirt and makeup, with your hair in a ponytail and your glasses on. We worry about how to make our writing pretty and popular.  But inside, you want your audience to love your writing in the same way you want a loved one to love you – that is, to embrace not just the exterior, but the true nature of you. Of course it would also be nice to sell, say, 7599 copies of your new book! But really, what is the use of “success” with money or numbers if your work has ceased to represent the real you? In other words, don’t worry about sending your poems to that Reality Makeover Program. Editors and readers – the ones your writing is meant for – will like you just the way you are. (This is advice, by the way, that you cannot give a teenage girl. Do not try. They’ll figure it out for themselves.)