Break Your Dream

On getting real about making art today

You are a writer and you have written a book. Naturally, you want your book to be published by a big corporation, you want copies of your book to be on shelves everywhere, and you want thousands of readers. In fact, you want a career writing books. So you learn the rules and play the game: you get a fancy MFA, you get an agent, then your agent sells your book (this part takes five years). A year or two later, the big day arrives; your book is published. You are interviewed online and in print and your book is reviewed and discussed widely, topping many bestseller charts. As is right and good, your publisher offers you a big advance for your next book. You write that book, it is published, and the reading public loves it. This process repeats until you decide to retire. Eventually, on your own time, you die happy, well-regarded, and rich.

This dream is dangerous.

Big corporations mostly produce bad books that age poorly. Capitalism demands growth, and cowards believe that art's popularity is a function of its recognizability—the new thing sells well because it resembles the old thing. So big corporations hedge their bets, rarely publishing weird work that tries something new. The best way to raise your chance of being published by a big corporation (and to get a lot of money for doing so) is to already be famous (and, ideally, to already be rich).

Punks have always known the truth: most traditions are deranged and degrading. Traditional publishing is no exception. Its output has been mostly bad, and for a long time. If you disagree with that claim because you read a lot of traditionally-published books and think most are great, remember the poker player's adage: if you can't spot the sucker at the table then you're the sucker.

Young writers want to believe the dream of the artists’ lottery because they fantasize about being paid well and respected widely for doing what they want. This is naive. Our political and economic systems are designed to squeeze money out of you and fuck you up in order to sell you comforts which inhibit you from understanding your situation; that's the hell loop. Young people who make art don't want to believe the hell loop is real, but they’re probably artists because they already do.

Once you've discarded the dream of winning a nonexistent prize, you are left with three options:

1. Self-publish.

2. Work with a small group of trustworthy weirdos.

3. Try for big publishers anyway (waiting ≥5 years in the process).

The good news is that all these options involve writing. But the first option is the only one that requires publishing. These are distinct activities. This is obvious shit but it needs to be said: writers are people who frequently and seriously write, then share their work with the public. Publishing is an important part of being a writer but publishing is not writing. I've got good friends who've been published at every scale, so believe me when I tell you that publishing is a very weak source of the meaning, satisfaction, and surprise which artists so faithfully chase. You get the book in the mail and stare at a coffin. Writing, the work and thrill of it, is the actual thing.

More good news: if you want to self-publish, it's incredibly easy. This is the best time in the history of civilization for writers who want their words to sustain in a book. The distance between a writer whose work hasn't been bound in a nice paperback and a writer whose work sits on bookshelves is an hour and a KDP account. You can also make zines or other limited-run productions of your work. Sharing your work with friends and family has never been easier; making your work accessible online takes no more than thirty minutes. Don't forget that Homer (whether that name accurately refers to one guy or to numerous people) essentially wandered around doing slam poetry readings. If you want to get your work out there, extend your creative mind to the puzzle of socializing your art. Waiting around for another adult to do it for you isn't necessary.

Publishing is maximally satisfying when it is a process by which a writer comes to know and trust their readers. I've been writing and publishing for nearly 20 years. My most rewarding publishing experience was for my book A Task. I ran a Kickstarter to fund a small print run and pledged to have an hourlong conversation with each of the book's first thousand readers. Have I found one thousand readers? No. But the conversations I had with the readers I did find—sincere, curious, kind people—strengthened my conviction in the power of art. "Number go up" isn't an ethics, it's a catchphrase for dipshits. Publishing is a bridge, not a resume, so instrumentalize it at your peril.

Rather than nurse and spread a dangerous dream, artists should own up to the world in which they actually live. I hope we'll see associations of artists that look more like a social experiment than an LLC.¹ I hope artists abandon the sad quest for imagined respect ostensibly bestowed by stressed-out New Yorkers barely clinging to corporate jobs. I hope artists remember that trust among likeminded people is the foundation of life-sustaining labor and communal innovation, not spending years of your life gambling for a review in The New Yorker.

No one knows how much time they have left, energy is finite, and fascism hasn't gone anywhere. We must dump the fantasies which infantilize us.

1. Yancey Strickler's Artist Corporation is a good idea, but it's limited by the premise that legal structures enable and protect dignity and fairness, contra Frank Wilhoit's law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.