On Walking, Writing, Publishing, Telling Stories, and the Importance of Ideas

Walking & Talking.

On another misty-day hike in a local forest preserve, our little group winds around huge cedars and Douglas fir on muddy trails, stretching to step up rocky ascents or across small streams until we arrive on the shores of a quiet lake.  Ducks patrol the water’s edge, while farther out the glassy surface reflects trees and sky.  There we find a resting place to sit, talk, and munch energy bars or nuts before hitting the trail again back to our cars.

As we rest, a friend and fellow writer and I commiserate about the difficulties of getting our writing published in the popular press.  She writes historical novels and children’s stories.  In her excellent self-published novel, Sun Road, available on Amazon, a strong young Icelandic woman of the tenth century sets out on a series of adventures to a new world.  For my part, I am writing and want to publish a non-academic, non-fiction book on some recent ideas about human nature and culture.

How did I come to take on such a project?  Here’s a bit of background.  After graduate school I taught anthropology classes in university for a few years, and then had an opportunity, which I took, to work for an American Indian nation on practical problems it faced related to coal development in the Northern Plains region of the United States.  I subsequently spent most of my working career outside of academia as an applied social/cultural anthropologist.  I remain basically an academic at heart, however, even if I worked mostly in non-academic settings and am writing a non-academic book now.

Original research with culturally-diverse peoples and communities is central both to practicing anthropology in the world and teaching anthropology in the classroom—as is writing.  In my case, work outside the university in part involved preparing research-based, policy-related reports several of which are book-length.  I also wrote articles for academic journals.  Even as a child I was always fascinated by science in general, and later developed interests in law and social theory as well, and carried these interests through my academic and work career.

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Writing & Publishing in the World of Commerce

Been there, done that. Now I want to relate some of what I’ve learned to wider audiences in less specialized language and less restrictive settings. So, I got a book on how to publish popular nonfiction (as opposed to academic) books. There and in online sources I learned that typically the hopeful author writes a book proposal and submits it to numerous book agents until one finally agrees to represent it.  So I went to work. I wrote the proposal and six completed sample chapters.

Meantime, as I read more about non-academic publishing, and poked around the topic on the internet, I could see some parallels between the process of getting a popular or “trade” book published and academic publishing.  But overall they’re quite different and occur in different contexts.  Academic publishing relies on “blind” peer review, with contributions to disciplinary development or the general advancement of knowledge being key criteria. Here, in contrast, the agent’s and then the publisher’s assessment of the immediate commercial potential of your book drives the process.

So of course in the world of non-fiction trade book publishing, review is not “blind” as in academia: Who you are matters.  I’m sure that writing quality and intrinsic interest matter too. But being known matters more. It’s better if you’re a known quantity, a public figure, perhaps an already published author with successful books or best-sellers behind you.  All this becomes obvious, though it remains largely implicit and taken for granted.

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The Entrepreneurial Author

After you write your proposal and sample chapters, you don’t submit that package. You put it on the shelf, and then start sending short, highly formulized “query letters” to agents describing your project.  (There is even a book just on how to write the one-page query letter.)

It may take months, at least, and many tens if not hundreds of queries, before you pique an agent’s interest (if you’re lucky) and he or she requests your full proposal.  If an agent likes your proposal and takes you on, she goes to work to sell your book to a publisher.  If she is successful and a publisher accepts your book, you may get an advance—and away you go.

But, that’s a lot of “ifs,” a lot of risk.  Why would anyone do that?  Why am I doing that? Why do we bother?  Why do novelists write excellent novels they have to spend their own money to self-publish?  Why are there so many non-fiction writers inundating agents’ offices with query letters, and manuscripts and proposals that will never see the light of day?

It takes hard disciplined work to do research, to write—and, a lot of time. And, it looks like, in the end it’s all a hugely speculative venture.  Writers often do it like some developers build houses, as it were, “on spec.” It is even more difficult if, like me and many others, you come to the task late without having cultivated a more public presence with commercial potential earlier.  Why do it?  Why are there poets who take “real jobs” on the side, and starving artists?  It doesn’t make sense. There are far easier ways in our wealthy and highly commercialized society and culture to make money, to secure a good living.

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What Matters? What Lasts?

As we sat by the lake, surrounded by great trees, munching and talking, watching the ducks and thinking about our respective writing projects, that “Why?” question came up. Asked and answered: There is something inherently, deeply satisfying on the human level about telling a good story for others to learn from and enjoy; and the same is true for reading, developing and communicating ideas.

And, these things—ideas and stories—matter.  They matter on a whole other level. In the larger scheme of things, they matter more than immediate financial gain.  Not that financial gain doesn’t matter too.  It feels good and right to be financially rewarded for the work we do.  And, of course, necessity may enter in here as well: Everyone has to “make a living, and here that means making money.  But most people—perhaps not everyone, but most people—also look beyond survival and accumulation to other values.

One such value resides in ideas, in stories.  What is our whole cultural world made up of, in the end, but ideas?  Stories broaden our horizons, give us access to the lives of real people elsewhere or in the past, help us imagine our futures.  Every story carries ideas; and every significant idea gets woven into stories.

 

What Matters? What Lasts? What gives the greatest satisfaction? Is it the accumulation of things or the growth of ideas? Your answer, of course, depends on who you are—and also defines who you are.

A hard-headed realist (I’ve never actually met such a creature—though I have met a few people who imagine they’re one) might think that ideas, stories, mere theories, exist in some airy mental realm unconnected to “the real world.” In fact, ideas and stories largely make up our real world. The stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, become the very lives we live. That’s as true for the self-proclaimed realist as for anyone else.

What lasts? If longevity or durability are measures of “realness,” then nothing is more real for human beings than ideas.  Our ideas, the stories that make up our cultural lives today, transcend time.  Some key ideas have persisted and grown through the rise and fall of civilizations whose stone monuments and buildings long since crumbled into ruins.  Great music, written down and performed by countless choirs and orchestras, heard live or in recording generation by generation, becomes woven into cultural tradition that is as durable as the massive stone cathedrals in which it was, and still is, so often played and enjoyed.

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To sum it up:

Well, we didn’t solve anything as we sat there watching the ducks, talking about writing, and looking at the trees and sky. But it did bring up the thoughts I’m recording here.

In the human world ideas are as real and consequential as things—and often even more so.  That’s what defines us as human.  Our present economy and culture, however, tends to emphasize material things and tries to commodify everything.

In that way our economy actually runs against grain of human nature, perhaps even distorts it, rather than naturally growing out of human nature as mainstream economic theory still assumes.  Focusing on self-interest—just one aspect of human nature (and not a very evolved or distinctively-human one at that)—our present economy develops and channels that motivation into the scarcity- and fear-based, production-oriented, commercialized society and culture we have today.

But all that is changing as I write this. The “information age” that social commentators say we are transitioning into relentlessly moves ideas, information, organization itself, much more center-stage in our cultural life.  It de-emphasizes things, challenges the central place of physical property in our culture, and opens spaces for new ways to think about and value ideas on the most practical levels, as well as in their aesthetic and ethical dimensions.

It is hard to measure, divide, and quantify ideas.  Ideas are inherently harder to commodify and commercialize than material things.  Paul Mason, in his fascinating book, Postcapitalism, writes that this contradiction between the growing centrality of ideas and the fundamentally commercial foundations of modern Western culture sets up one of the major challenges of our present era.  My next post looks further at evolving ideas about who we are as human beings in light of this evolution of culture, and consciousness.