The sun is sinking low over another workday in Rotunda Town, the air so humid you’d be thankful for Marlowe’s infamous Santa Ana wind, when it hits you. You’re staring down the barrel of a half-century’s tenure on the planet. With no backup. No ammunition and no prospects standing between you and the end of the funhouse. Life has boiled down to a scratched DVD of The Office skipping on permanent rerun interspersed with the occasional eight AM D.C. road rage.
Take heart.
Millions of your compadres are discovering another lease on life. They even have a buzzword for it these days: “Encore Career.” While you may be feeling that your first career is hardly deserving of an encore, don’t let that distract you. Get on with plans for whatever you’re supposed to be getting on to.
And for many of us, what better endeavor might that be than getting in touch with our own latent literary talents? After all, what poor part-time scribbler with years full of journals, stories, or just ideas, hasn’t dreamed about making the leap to the promised land of commercial publication, there to discover fame and riches not to mention critical adulation? The very notion conjures up visions of peace, contentment, and relaxation, interrupted only on occasion by inspiring bits of work far removed from the nine-to-five variety.
Get a grip.
Writing for publication is a job. It can be an exciting and rewarding job, full of variety and even the occasional inspiration, but unless the would-be career changer is willing to fall in love with the work of writing itself the most likely prognosis is for great disappointment if not downright disillusionment.
If you’re serious about pursuing a second career in writing, you’ll need to make an honest assessment of your abilities and prospects and detailed plans for enhancing both. You’ll need to spend some serious time researching your options. Do you go for a job in journalism, for example, or do you freelance? Will you write articles, essays, or short stories? Non-fiction or fiction? Books or shorter works? What about poetry? Can you afford to live with an inconsistent source of income? The answers to each of these questions will determine, in great part, how your writing career develops.
My advice? Figure out where your passion lies. Weighed down with years of training, maybe even prestigious degrees in your first career, you may be tempted to want to piggy back on your previous years of experience. Indeed, in some cases this might be a wise choice. But a better question might be: What do you love to read for pleasure? If you choose to right in the same field or genre(s) you read in your spare time then your chances of developing a fulfilling career will be much higher.
I was lucky—my own mid-life dream of being a writer bloomed about ten years early, but even then it took me a while to find my particular voice, a discovery I finally made by asking myself the above question and realizing how much I enjoyed reading crime fiction and especially private eye novels.
The classic Bogey-style fedora has long been recognized as a symbol of the PI genre. But I also remember my father, an engineer industrialist sporting one back in the nineteen sixties. The fedora didn’t signify anything so romantic as the mythical midnight detective for me then. I associated the hat with my father going off to work each morning, day after day after day. Writing is like that: A blast, for sure, but for most of us, also a lot of plain hard work.
What will be your next fedora?
You say you want to write. The shingle is hung and the office door lies open. I’ll leave a light on for you.
(this essay first appeared in The Next 50 magazine and The Blue Ridge Anthology 2009)
drawing by Victor Klimenko
The Amazon Kindle: Another Blustery Day?
by Andy Straka
Like the entrée of the first e-book readers a few years ago, Amazon’s recent introduction of the Kindle has caused everyone from bloggers to major magazines to opine about the uncertain future of the printed word. But my recent encounter with an old acquaintance, who just so happens to be an expert in such matters, also renews my faith in a more durable story vehicle.
The expert? His name is Winnie-the-Pooh.
The little bear needs no introduction, of course. Brought to life by A.A. Milne's classic books and first reproduced on film in Walt Disney's 1968 Academy Award winning Winnie-the-Pooh and the Blustery Day, Pooh has by now been beloved by generations of children and parents alike. That alone gives the stuffed guy credibility.
But seated in front of the original Pooh video with my four and five year-old, what strikes me anew is the opening sequence in Blustery Day where, after the animators employ the time-honored imagery of turning pages in an old-fashioned book, they continue the illusion until a critical point in the narrative when, courtesy of a flood to the hundred acre wood, the text on the page literally melts into a jumble of consonants and vowels washed away by the rising cartoon tide.
Symbolic? Perhaps. I can’t help but notice something curious, however, watching the Pooh Bear through the process. The little fellow, riding high on his waterfall of words (and despite the fact that Disney’s wizards appear to have morphed his book right out from under him), seems to be enjoying the show.
There is a lesson here for readers, anxious writers and publishers, and breathless e-book advocates alike. Winnie-the-Pooh’s magnetism transcends medium. The little bear proves that great writing has a life of its own, no matter how it is ultimately packaged or delivered. Born in Milne's imagination, Pooh leaps rather effortlessly from the page into movies. As Tigger might put it, Poohs are potable....er, that is.... portable.
With the superfluity of video and digital reading choices today, we may all be tempted to imagine ourselves empowered in vastly new and different ways. The twin promises of instantly available content for readers and an accessible, fast-growing audience for writers and publishers beckon like the sirens of old. But when it comes to actual content, has that much really changed? From the flashing bulletin boards of My Space to the infinite words of the blogasphere to the desperately self-published Internet novel, now every writer and every want-to-be writer has a soapbox. How many are saying anything worth listening to?
We can spend hours deciding which e-book reader to buy and invest hundreds of dollars simply to get at what were after before the Internet and e-books came along: better reading, better stories, more illuminating writing. We may decide to go digital or not, depending on our budgets, convenience, and habits – words are still the story engine we want.
For writers, we can rant and rave over the bookselling world’s latest machinations, obsess about promoting ourselves across the Internet, or simply do what we have always done: produce the very best work of which we are capable, pray, and offer up our writing in the best media we can find. Kindle or no Kindle, a writer's greatest power remains where it has always been—in his or her ability to engage the imagination of another through the charm and grace of words. For this writer, at least, there are more than enough battles to be fought and dragons to be slain in that arena without attempting to confront all the monsters, real and imagined, of the book distribution world. Seductive as it can be, our focus shouldn't be trying to figure out how to exploit some new technology—it should be creating more Poohs.
The joys and benefits for the reader are as old as books themselves. And creating such original content still offers the best and purest hope for any writer to obtain a wide and enduring audience.
Fittingly enough, back at the The Blustery Day, the film's makers have resorted to good old bound-book magic. At the end of the movie, they symbolically replace the narrative and close the very same volume from which they had so artfully dislodged the story's words. More importantly, our effervescent bear, having survived the flood, is still very much enjoying himself.
In the last decade, the publishing world may have seen a digital flood of its own. But my kids and I know technology will never be able to transmit a story the way the creator of the hundred acre wood did. The words of A.A. Milne, from paper, through film, and beyond, downloaded Winnie-the-Pooh into our hearts.
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[Disclaimer] Shamus award winner Andy Straka's crime novels have nothing whatsoever to do with Winnie-the-Pooh.
