Archive for the ‘Money’ Category

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A Proper Relationship

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

The relationship between artists and money has never been a simple one. In fact, I have recently found myself in conversations with writers who simply did not want to mention publishing for fear of that dread word spoiling their creative experience.

This is understandable. Money is tied ineluctably to thoughts of our survival. Whether you are an artist, or a banker, or a nanny, it is easy enough to turn the game of life into a survival contest, to view the world in a cold Darwinian search for food and shelter. In this light, life has no meaning outside of not-dying, which is to say it has no meaning at all. That which is meaningless is worthless, and that which is worthless can and should be thrown away. In this way, paradoxically, thoughts of mere survival lead eventually to thoughts of suicide.

To write, meanwhile, is to seek meaning in the suffering inherent in life. This meaning has nothing to do with mere survival, and yet in the end it is more essential to our continuation than food or shelter. You would not deny a friend food or shelter if you had it to share, why would you withhold meaning? And yet this is what we do when we choose not to publish, we withhold meaning for fear it will be called meaningless, and there we will be again, back in the game of dead or alive.

If mixing art and money disturbs you, do not look upon publishing simply as a means of putting food on the table; think of it as sharing what is most valuable in life. That this brings food to your table is recognition of the proper relationship between the body and the soul. The body is in service to the soul, never the other way around. It cannot be, for without the soul there would be no body. Art, love, friendship, compassion—all these things correct the suicidal reversal that is survivalism. So share what it is you already know you want most in your life. Share it so you can see that is it more real than the hand with which you give it.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
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The Beginning and The End

Thursday, November 29th, 2012

Writers cannot write for praise from readers, friends, family, or critics. The quickest way to kill anything you are writing is to stare at your page or screen and wonder, “What will THEY think of it?” They – whoever They are – aren’t there, and so you can’t know what They will think, and so you cannot answer this insidious question. As long as you are asking it, you are probably not writing.

That said, hearing from appreciative readers can be very helpful. It is easy as a writer to become preoccupied with how successful a piece of work is, to become preoccupied with whether or not a story sold, and if so for how much; to become preoccupied with how many copies of it have been bought, or with its ranking on Amazon. It is easy, being a human being who depends on such things, to become preoccupied with the numbers in your bank account and how these numbers are affected by the stories you have written.

It is tempting because all these things are measurable, and humans have developed a relentless love of measuring things – including, unfortunately, themselves. Yes, it’s no fun to be measured last and worst, but this is the price we all seem to be willing to pay so that we might be measured first or best.

Which is why it’s good from time to time to hear from an appreciative reader. To hear someone say, “I loved your book,” or, “It was just what I needed,” or, “It kept me up all night turning the pages,” can remind us why we picked up the pen in the first place: because we had something valuable we wanted to share with other people. Yes, there would be money and praise and maybe fame – but first there was that, the immeasurable impulse to increase the quantity of good in the world.

I know this sounds a bit altruistic, I know publishing is a business, I know everyone needs to make ends meet, but that cannot alter where this work begins, and where, in the end, we must return to every day at our desk.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!

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Strange Business

Friday, November 2nd, 2012

I have a writer friend who usually has one piece of advice for every new writer: Remember, it’s a business.

As with all of our favorite pieces of advice, this was a lesson I believe he was forced to learn experientially, a lesson he probably learned again and again, and may, for all I know, still be learning. If books do not sell, they are pulled from the shelves. If an author cannot earn back a sufficient portion of her advance, her advances will go down. Publishers buy books they believe they can sell, and they sell those books to make money. It’s a business. That’s what businesses do.

There is a reason writers need to be reminded that publishing is in fact a business. Publishing may be an engine that, like all businesses – from banking to grocery stores – exists to earn its participants their living wage, but it is an engine whose primary fuel source is imagination. Without imagination, there would be no publishing business.

The problem with the imagination is that it does not care about money. The imagination does not care that publishing is a business. The imagination does not care what is hot or trendy, or about Facebook or Twitter or blog tours. The imagination is loyal and tireless, but it does not care what kind of car you drive or which house you live in or what wine you drink. All the imagination wants to do is make stuff. What you do with that stuff is your business.

I am sure there are publishing CEOs who lay awake some nights wishing they could simply drill into writers’ heads and extract imagination like crude oil. There are probably desperate writers who share this wish. Unfortunately, you could drill a thousand holes in my head but you would never find a single scrap of my imagination. My brains, yes, but not my imagination.

What a strange business this is. All those books we hold in our hands, all those office towers built on publishing profits, exist because of something we will never see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. Viewed from a certain angle, it is a business built on nothing. Viewed from another, it is a business built on everything.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!

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Service

Friday, July 27th, 2012

My brother works in Hollywood, which in certain ways isn’t all that different from publishing, but in one way is significantly different than publishing – money. I’m not saying you can’t get rich writing books – indeed I’ve met many writers who have – but success in television and film almost always translates to a level of financial wealth not known by every successful novelist.

Money is great, but its potential can sometimes distract you from the job at hand, which regardless of your medium is always telling the story you most want to tell. The other night my brother was playing poker with a new group of pals. It wasn’t going well. The stakes weren’t high, but he was in the hole and playing poorly. After another bad hand, he realized he wasn’t even enjoying himself. Why bother if there’s no pleasure?

He got up from the table for a short break. As he stood outside he realized he was only playing for himself. He was only playing so he could walk away with twenty extra dollars, so that he could win not just cash but these men’s approval. It meant nothing. So he told himself a story. He decided he was no longer playing for himself but for his new girlfriend’s children’s college fund. He sat back at the table and was immediately dealt a near-perfect hand. Before long he was back in the black.

He did not know it at the time, but he had discovered a fundamental truth of all artistic endeavors: that every work of art, that every story ever told, should be in service to something greater than the Small You, the you who needs a roof over your head and the approval of others. And by service I do not mean the sort of altruism my brother concocted that night, though that is fine; rather the understanding that you write to share whatever you believe is of value.

Once upon a time you were not a working writer. Once upon a time you merely loved to read. One day you read a book, and you were transported. What a gift! Why, it was as if the writer had told this story just for you. Remember how glad you were on that day that such a book existed? You are writing now, in part, to offer such a moment to another reader like yourself, another reader you will probably never meet. This is service. Do not doubt for a moment that the world is a slightly richer place when you offer it the gem of a story you discovered in yourself.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!

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Woodchoppers All

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

There is a famous story about Alfred Hitchcock. The legendary auteur was having troubles with an equally legendary actress who could not “find her motivation” to leave her chair at one end of the set and walk to the other end of the set, as the script called for.

“Your motivation is your paycheck,” explained Hitchcock. ”Please walk across the set.”

Who doesn’t love this kind of practical bluntness? Drop your Actor’s Studio pretentions and get to work. Except there’s only one problem: a paycheck is not a motivation. It may be a motivation for the actor to act, but it is not the character’s motivation to do anything at all.

I understand that what Hitchcock might have meant was, “I am paying you good money. Please come up with whatever motivation you wish to get across that stage so I can finish this damn scene.” But this is not the story.

I think there is a temptation within us all to believe that a paycheck truly is a motivation in and of itself. It’s so simple, you see. We need money and so we chop wood and so we make money. And then we die. Such is life. Except it is not a question of if but when we ask, “Do I want to chop wood?”

That is the question from which the paycheck motivation allows us to hide. As if we weren’t free not to chop wood. As if the page is not in fact blank every morning, and we do not have to choose, choose, choose every word from all the thousands of words. Money cannot tell you what interests you; money cannot tell you what your characters are thinking and feeling. You may want that money, but it hasn’t one idea about what goes on the page.

If you need the idea of money to get you to work—fine. If you need the threat of homelessness to get you to finish your book, that’s fine too. Play whatever games you must. But do not mistake mere money for motivation. The best woodchoppers are the ones who love the feel of the axe handle in their hands and the sound of wood splitting. They may not know why, but they know it’s enough to bring them back to the woodpile day after day.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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The Herd

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Writers sometimes make reluctant capitalists, but whether we wish to discuss it or not, we are responsible for creating a product that we must in turn sell to the general public. The knock on capitalism, generally speaking, is its cold heartedness, a necessarily unfeeling engine of commerce whose deity, The Market, rights all wrongs through a Darwinian winnowing of the entrepreneurial herd. We writers, meanwhile, usually like to view ourselves as caring, empathetic people. Empathy is more or less in the fiction writer’s job description; how else to render believably all those people who aren’t us?

But there is something beautifully democratic about capitalism that every business owner, including writers, at some point understands. We all have our own crowd. We all have the people we eat and drink with, the people we seek out at parties. Society, in some ways, remains an extension of the high school cafeteria, with everyone gravitating to their respective tables. It’s not always inspiring, but it’s practical; easier to talk to people you like than to those you don’t.

But then you become a writer, and someone from another lunch table does something unexpected: they buy your book. In fact, you might look up to realize that only people from other lunch tables are buying your book. Now these people aren’t so bad after all. And not merely because they’re putting quarters in your pocket. When you meet your readers you discover for whom, beside yourself, you were actually writing.

Though I was the sort who bounced between different lunch tables, I have my preferences. While it is gratifying in a way to learn that someone I know and perhaps admire likes my work, there is something singularly uplifting about a stranger finding comfort in it. On the savannah, herd animals seek safety in numbers. Writers must go it alone to do our work, and our safety, in the end, depends on our willingness to accept all comers, to welcome round us anyone whose questions match our own. You see life then for what it is: a collection of curiosity, whose form must yield by and by to the answers received.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Your Only Choice

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

When I was a boy I believed that writing for a living was the only way I could ever be free.  At that time I did not know what it meant to be both an adult and free, but I believed I knew what freedom felt like, and as far as I could tell it was the only way to live and therefore the only thing worth pursuing.

As I grew up, I continued to connect writing and freedom, though my reasons for doing so evolved. First, I believed it had to do with time. You could only be free if your time was entirely your own, and how could you call your time your own if you had to begin working when someone else told you to? Only with the complete, pristine autonomy that was the professional novelist’s life would I ever know freedom.

Then I had autonomy, and it didn’t feel anything like freedom. My autonomous time felt like all the time I’d ever had in my life, both in and out of work, time I was forever having to decide what to do with. So it must have had to do with money. Modern humans needed money to survive, so if you made this money doing something you loved, you were free.

Then I had some money, and all it freed up was the tiny part of my brain that would periodically worry about money. So perhaps it was attention. We all need a little recognition; perhaps the combination of time, money and recognition would bring me the freedom I wanted.

When I had a bit of all three, freedom still felt like a promise from an absent father. It would be here soon; the next car slowing outside the window would be his. And then one day I wrote something, and as I reread it I thought, “Yes. That’s precisely what I meant to say.” And there it was, as familiar as my own reflection. It was as if all I had been waiting for my whole life was a mirror.

Writing was my freedom because writing made me happy. There was nothing more complicated about it than that. I wanted it to be more, but it wasn’t. And in that moment of understanding, freedom became merely a choice, not a pardon, not a deliverance – just a choice. The simplicity of it is humbling and confounding, and yet all the knots my mind would twist life into to find the straight rope of freedom come undone in a choice. I look in the mirror and see judge, jury, and accused and call the trial to a halt. I was never on trial, and I was always so free I could choose prison or the road.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Why?

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

I knew a man once who wouldn’t answer “why questions.” Why are you going to the store? Why don’t you want a piece of cake? Why didn’t you call? If you asked him such a question, he’d respond, “I don’t answer why questions.” So you’d grit your teeth and rephrase, doing your best to drain any snark out of your voice.

But in retrospect, he may have been onto something. When I was fifteen I was nominated to attend The Future Leaders of America. Turns out, it was really Future Business Leaders of America. Nothing wrong with business leaders, but this was not really my crowd, shall we say. For instance, a group of us high achieving sophomores were sitting together waiting for the orientation to start, and to pass the time we told each other what we planned to study in college. Business, business, law, business law . . . and then me. Writing, I said. To which one of the Future Business Majors of America asked, “Why?” When I told him, “Because I like to write,” he felt I still hadn’t answered his question.

But how could I, and how could anyone? It is almost impossible to say why you do anything, because eventually the answer will circle down to, “Because I want to.” Why have you chosen to tell a particular story? You can roll out all the marketing research you want, but in the end the only reason you write anything is because you want to.

As it should be, but merely wanting to do something is not much to hold onto, at least not for that lizard part of your brain bent on keeping you alive. All the Future Leaders talked about money and prestige that day, and I understood, and I wouldn’t have talked them out of it because I’m sure their lizard brains rested satisfied in the warm sun of all that money coming their way. But I hope they liked business, or law, or business law. I hope they looked forward to the actual work of it. If they didn’t, they may have looked up from their wide mahogany desk one day and asked, “Why am I here?” And that is a why question nobody wants to answer.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Writing Life

Monday, August 30th, 2010

As you may know, in this space I like to explore how what it takes to write the book you most want to write is also what it takes to lead the life you most want to lead. I had yet another example of this recently. I had reached a crossroads of sorts in my life where I needed to decide What To Do. Specifically, about money. I don’t tend to think about money very often, but to my own surprise I looked up one day and thought, “Bill, you need more of it.”

So there I was.  I had a goal – money – but no road toward it.  First, I did what I have done so often and what has always proved useless: I came up with ideas.  These were things that I could logically do and for which I knew I would be paid. This depressed me and I stopped. I felt as though I was trying to come up with a story whose sole purpose was to make me money.

Next I did what I should have done at the outset, which was stop thinking. Instead, I searched for the feeling that would lead to an idea. Because every idea, every thought, every memory I have or have ever had carries with it – sometimes forcefully, something subtly – a feeling. The idea of meeting a friend is accompanied by a feeling of anticipation and familiarity; the idea of going to the grocery store carries the feeling of productivity with a dash of tedium. So to make more money I sought the feeling I wanted to experience while making the money, and that feeling was what it felt like to help people. Once I had that feeling in me, new ideas started coming.

And what did this process remind me of? Writing, of course. I was starting a new chapter knowing where my characters had to go but not knowing how they’d get there. Whenever I reach such a place in my writing I decide first what I want that chapter to feel like, then let the ideas rise to meet that feeling. So my search for money was precisely the same process but without characters and stories. The characters and stories have never been the point. The point has been aligning action to feeling. My whole life is nothing but what I feel, never what is happening, just as a story is a flow of emotion, not a string of events.

Writing teaches me how to live, and living teaches me how to write. You don’t stop living when you write, and you don’t stop writing when you leave the desk. Rather, you change the expression of your continuous creative desire, from words to recipes, or from stories to money.

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Practically Done

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

The Editor is on vacation. What follows is an older post. Enjoy, and I’ll see you next week.

Life can appear to be divided in two: that which you must do, and that which you want to do. The musts are certain, the wants optional. There is bread to be buttered, roofs to be kept overhead. The march of survival tramps on unceasingly, and somehow, somewhere in the dirty, daily business of not dying we hope to squeeze in time for that which we most want to do.

Yet as someone who has spent many decades attempting to appease the beast of what must be done, I will tell you that his hunger is limitless. There is always something else you must conceivably do. And all for what?  Some meager corner of your life you call your own?

Someone once said to me, “Bill, why don’t you write a book like John Grisham, make lots of money, and then write the books you like to write.  Wouldn’t that be more practical?” In fact it would be impractical. I have tried and tried to do things I didn’t really want to do, and I usually can for a time, until the tension between where I want to go and where I am telling myself I must go becomes so great that something snaps and I must start again with something else I don’t want to do—saying to myself, “This time I will work harder, and be more diligent, and this time I will finish this thing.”

Everything in your life is working tirelessly to get you to do the thing you most want to do as often as possible. You will be forever sabotaged and distracted and disrupted whenever you do what you don’t want to do. No matter how simple it appears, no matter how logical, it won’t work.

If you want to be practical, if you want to butter your bread, if you want to survive, then do what you most want to do the way you want to do it. It is the only way to ensure you will keep wanting to do whatever it is you are doing. You are the only one doing everything in your life, after all, and so if you don’t want to do what you are doing what you are doing won’t get done, and I don’t see what is so practical about that.

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