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Managing the Backburner Is The Third Most Important Skill That A Writer Can Acquire*

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 23, 2013

2007-10-02stove

It wasn’t until I was several years out of college that I suddenly realized, in a flash of insight, that in addition to being a metaphor, the back burners are also a real thing that you can find on your stove.

A long time ago, I read a book whose name I don’t remember. It was nonfiction. I don’t remember the topic of it either. But it contained an essay by a scientist who was talking about his creative process. The book might’ve been about the creative process, even though I feel like I’d never read a book that used a term like ‘the creative process.’ Maybe they were sly about it and didn’t use that phrase. Maybe no one really uses it.

Anyway, the scientist was saying that he had two ways of solving creative problems. The first was to beat his head against them and think about them constantly and go through tons and tons of experiments and brainstorm every possible solution and chase down every possible lead for weeks upon weeks until he finally tracked down the answer. And the third was to not think about the problem for three days, until the answer suddenly popped into his head.

He had some tips for the right way in which to go about not thinking about the problem, but I’ve forgotten them.

However, I’ve learned how to do much the same thing. For me, writing often involves these wide rivers that I don’t think the story can ford. Crossing those river requires some sort of intuitive leap. Sometimes I manufacture that leap, by jotting down every possible solution and writing draft after draft until something gels. And sometimes I do something else until it all comes together.

Both solutions seem to work just fine and both seem to produce work that’s of roughly equal quality. But the latter is, obviously, a bit less time-consuming.

However, there’s a way in which I have to go about it. Because there’s different kinds of “doing something else.” There’s the “doing something else” where you’re subconsciously facing the problem and there’s the “doing something else” where you’re running away from the problem.

And it’s very difficult to tell which is which.

In order to avoid forgetting about the problem I’m working on, I sometimes…

  • …do a little work on it, even if that just entails jotting down a few notes or writing a paragraph of text.
  • …daydream about how great it’ll be once the story/novel/essay/blog-post is done.
  • …create a dedicated folder for it and move all the relevant material into that folder.
  • …set a target day or month during which I plan on working on the project.
  • …figure out where I’m going to send it when I’m done.
  • …write a blog post in which I vaguely allude to working on something that’s really kneecapping me.
  • …reread whatever I’ve already written
  • …read some book or online post or something that’s somewhat relevant to what I’m working on

 

The trick is to keep the project somewhere in the brain’s active memory without allowing it to come so far to the forefront that it drives me crazy. Then, eventually, the solution will suddenly come to me. Usually when I am either driving somewhere or am just about to fall asleep.

Actually, this is how I solve all my life problems. It’s almost a joke how many times I’ll begin a conversation by saying, “So, the other day I had an epiphany…”

I have life-altering epiphanies like once a month. It’s a bit crazy. Just three years ago, I wrote a blog post about how the epiphany doesn’t really exist! But I was wrong. It absolutely does. It’s just that it’s a skill—a mode of thought—that gets stronger and more perceptive as you use it more often. Nowadays, the epiphany-making centers of my brain are so strong that I actually find it a bit difficult to work out issues in a logical and rigorous fashion.

When people have problems, my standard advice to them is to worry about it until they have a sudden epiphany. I think that, to some extent, epiphanies are self-defense. The great thing about an epiphany is not the quality of the insight (it’s often no better than something you could’ve worked out consciously), but the level of certainty that accompanies it. I think the brain generates that certainty because it’s just so damn tired of thinking about the problem (even unconscious mulling is tiring for the brain, I think). The brain is all like, “Okay, this answer is good enough, so let’s just go with it.”

Of course, maybe that’s just me. Sometimes I think I might perhaps be a little more certain about some things than other people tend to sometimes end up being.

 

*Oh, the other two skills are obvious:

  • The first and most important skill is learning how to manage your despair and avoid giving up, because any amount of production, if you engage in it over a long enough period of time, is likely to eventually result in something of value.
  • And the second most important skill is learning how to work in a sustained and regular fashion, because while it is possible to have a writing life that relies entirely on inspiration, that life’ll certainly be a lot easier if you learn how to make inspiration keep a regular schedule.

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How I would try to get a story published in the New Yorker (if my dream was to be published in the New Yorker)

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 2, 2013

I understandBeing published in the New Yorker is pretty awesome. You get a few million potential readers (assuming each copy has more than one reader) and they also pay pretty well. But there are a lot of things in life that are pretty awesome: book deals; Stegner Fellowships; cloudless summer days; etc…and, for whatever reason, being published in the New Yorker has never been one of my particular daydreams.

I think this is mostly because I don’t read the New Yorker. I have literally never opened an issue of the New Yorker and read the short story inside it. I’ve never watched a story go from being in the New Yorker to being on the tip of everyone’s tongue—I just don’t have the same positive associations with it that I have with Asimov’s or F&SF or The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

But ever since entering this MFA program, I’ve learned that getting published in the New Yorker is an obsession in the literary world. Many MFAs subscribe to the New Yorker. Even more MFAs read it. And almost everyone is familiar with what is published in it. Over the last six months, I’ve had countless conversations where someone said the words, “Last week, I read in the New Yorker…”

There’s nothing wrong with that. The New Yorker is a great magazine. And even when it’s not great, it’s still very influential. The New Yorker’s readership makes it the definitive place to publish a short story. It is the only place where general readers might encounter a contemporary short story writer.

So if you write short stories and love short stories and want your short stories to be culturally relevant, then by far the best place for them to be is in the New Yorker.

So, before I go on, let me stress that I am a guy who is very much on the outside of the publishing world (particularly the world of literary fiction). With one exception (my story in the Diverse Energies anthology), I’ve only ever sold stories through open submission systems (and I have the 982 rejections to prove it). Although I take on a pretty definite stance in this post, everything within it is based on observation and supposition–it’s entirely possible that a bunch of it is wrong. However, when you’re on the outside, supposition can be all that you have.

So here is where the chain of supposition begins.

It appears to me that if you want a short story in the New Yorker, there are two ways to do it:

  • Submit directly to the fiction editor (i.e. bypassing the regular slush pile) through some personal contact. I imagine that this personal contact takes one of three forms:
    • Direct networking – meeting her and making her acquaintance.
    • Being put in touch with her through a mutual friend or one of your teachers.
    • Being a staffer (an editorial assistant, proofreader, secretary, copy-editor, etc) at the New Yorker (a la Nell Freudenberger)
  • Have your agent submit the story on your behalf.

Note what I left off this list: submitting through the online submission form. There’s nothing wrong with the online form, but even if it was possible to sell through it, then the odds (assuming they buy 1 story a year from the slush) would be 1 in 40,000. That’s such a low probability that, to me, it’s not even worth fantasizing about.

However, there is also substantial evidence that it is completely impossible to sell to the New Yorker through the submissions form. The previous fiction editor of the New Yorker, Bill Buford, never bought a single story from the open slush during his eight-year tenure. The current editor, Deborah Treisman, is a bit more cagey, but, in interviews, she has never named a single person whose story she’s selected from the online submission form. She does name unagented and unsolicited authors she’s published, but it feels entirely likely that all of those stories were submitted through connections. And when she’s asked how to get a story into the New Yorker, she basically says, “Through your agent.”

Thus, it’s possible that the last time the New Yorker published a story it got through the open slush was sometime in the mid-90s.

Now I’m not here to piss and moan and wail about that, since I don’t really care. But if it is your ambition to be in the New Yorker, then you should stop fantasizing about the online submission form and start thinking about how you’re going to make your dream come true.

You might try to leverage whatever contacts you have.

You might try to make some contacts that might be leverageable.

You might try to go to one of the MFA programs whose students tend to publish in the New Yorker: Iowa, Syracuse, Cornell, etc. (On the theory that these programs have some kind of pipeline to the magazine).

You might move to New York and try to get a low-level job at the New Yorker.

All of these things are absolutely worth doing. But they’re all murky and chancy endeavors. It’s very difficult to tell who might be willing to open that gate for you: people who have that power are unlikely to advertise it.

However, there is one relatively easy and unambiguous way to get in the New Yorker. The editor herself told you how to do it. Get the right kind of agent.

Now, plenty of agents don’t really accept clients through unsolicited queries. But many actually do. I think it’s more common than not for agents (or at least someone at an agency) to at least glance through the queries and think, “Might we want to represent this person?”

The only way an agency can stay in business is by finding an author whose work might sell. And good work does sometimes come in through the transom. Furthermore, it’s often a lot easier to network with and make personal contacts with an agent, since: a) there are more of them; and b) as middlemen, they are, almost by definition, somewhat approachable.

As an author who wants to be in the New Yorker, you have to do two things:

  1. Find out which agents are capable of placing something in the New Yorker.
  2. Find a way to make those agents interested in representing you.

The first aim is accomplished easily enough. You just need to comb through the New Yorker and find a hundred or two hundred authors who’ve recently published in it. Some of these authors might’ve gotten into the magazine through other means, but most of them probably got there via their agents. And when you see a novel excerpt in the New Yorker, I think the likelihood is fairly high that it was placed by an agent.

Then take your list of authors and compile a list of their agents. Agents whose names appear two or more times in your list of authors are, in my opinion, highly likely to have some connection to the New Yorker.

So now you have a list of agents who you’re going to query.

All you need is something to query with.

In order to interest an agent, there has to be at least a chance that your work is going to make some money for them. And the only kind of fiction that really makes money is novels. Even short story collections by really, really famous writers often sell pretty poorly. Maybe once in every five years,** there’s a break-out story collection that becomes a best-seller, but yours is unlikely to be that collection. Agents will sometimes rep collections, but it feels like that often occurs when an author already has some buzz (usually because they’ve already published in the New Yorker) and the agent wants to lock them down and extract a novel from them. No agent in the world is excited to see a short story collection show up in their inbox.

On the other hand, I feel like novels at least have potential. Some random MFA student’s novel could turn out to be the next Lovely Bones or Everything Is Illuminated. It probably won’t happen, but at least the odds are a bit better.***

Actually, if you’re really set on hooking an agent, then probably a literary-type memoir might be an even better bet.

So yeah, the hard truth is that the aspiring New Yorker author should write a novel. I feel like that’s unwelcome news, because I think that part of the reason people want to publish in the New Yorker is to somehow make the transition to novel-writing a bit easier. If you publish in the New Yorker, then the world will want your novel. It’s very possible it’ll get sold before you even write it.

But that’s completely backwards. Publishing in the New Yorker in order to become a novelist is like buying a house because you want a secure place to do your laundry for free. It’s like killing your baby in order to get it to stop crying. It’s like getting elected President because you want free security for life.

Selling a novel is much easier than getting published in the New Yorker—the New Yorker only publishes 52 stories a year, whereas the Big Five (and the big independents) publish many more literary novels than that. Furthermore, there’s much less competition in the novel arena, since fewer novels are written (although the competition is still very fierce).

The reason to publish in the New Yorker is not because you want to publish your novel. The reason to publish in the New Yorker is because you want people to read your short stories. Publishing in the New Yorker is one of the very few ways for a short story writer to achieve any kind of visibility in this country.

So, yes, if you want to be a successful short story writer, then you should write the novel first and then use it as leverage to get what you want for your stories. When the agent calls you up, all excited about your novel, ask them if they’d be willing to place your stories in the New Yorker. After you sign with them, send them a story and ask them to do it. If they hedge and refuse, then fire them and find another agent.

Obviously, following my advice would be incredibly difficult. First you’d need to write a novel that could excite an agent who sees a thousand novels a month. Then you’d need to write a short story that could believably appear in the New Yorker. And then a dozen other things would need to line up in the right way.

But your odds of success would be a ­hell of a lot better than one in 1 in 40,000.

*Looking on the acknowledgements page of one of their books is usually a pretty good way of doing this—for instance, I just looked through my copy of Prep: Curtis Sittenfeld’s agent was Shana Kelly, at William Morris.

**In the last fifteen years, I can only think of three story collections that’ve been best-sellers: George Saunders’ Tenth of December; Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies; and Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide To Hunting and Fishing;

***My understanding is that it’s much easier–in the literary fiction world–to get an agent if you have some decent short story credits. And it’s definitely worth trying to get those. In any case, your MFA program will likely require you to produce 12 or so short stories, so you’re going to end up with some product that you’ll need to try to unload. But you don’t need the New Yorker to impress an agent–I’m pretty sure that stories in some of the snazzier reviews (Kenyon, Boston, Missouri) would be enough. But even if you do have those credits, an agent will still, most likely, turn you down if you don’t have a novel.

As a final P.S., if you want more answers on how to navigate a career as a writer of literary fiction, you really can’t do much better than Mary Anne Mohanraj’s FAQ page. I read it years and years ago, before I ever even began to consider an MFA, and it really set me straight.

Posted in Advice, General Principles | Tagged: , | 5 Comments »

“Conduct your job search as if it is your job” is advice that keeps people unemployed

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 1, 2013

unemploymentI have no advice on how to find a job. I got my World Bank job through the kind of amazing fluke that is, well…the way that people generally get their jobs. But I do know how to not find a job. After college, I spent something like nine months without employment, and it was not the happiest of times. Whenever I meet or see someone who is in that situation, I just want to hug them and tell them that I understand and that everything will be okay.

But other people have a different reaction. Other people go and give them terrible job-finding advice that drives them down into the mire of agony and despair.

So let me clear this up. If “treat looking for a job as if it is your job” means “work on it for an hour or two and then go off and browse Facebook for the rest of the day,” then yes, that is what you should do.

But if it means “go to your desk and sit down and work at it for eight hours,” then I have to seriously question whether the advice-giver has ever actually tried to find a job. It’s amazing sometimes that we can all have these hard-won experiences in our memory bank, and yet we’re still so willing to overlook our own experience of the world in favor of these nice-sounding platitudes.

Finding a job is a lot like writing fiction: the most important element of the task is managing your own despair. And one of the major cripplers of productivity is overambitious productivity goals. If people think they’re supposed to be looking for a job eight hours a day, then they’re going to be filled with dread and ennui and they’ll put off the task.

Also, on a purely practical level, job-finding just isn’t that time-consuming. There are basically two ways to find a job:

 

  1. Apply for positions
  2. Leverage your contacts

 

The second way is an order of magnitude more effective than the first way, but it’s also not something you can spend very much time on. All you can do is send out emails, have cautious rounds of coffee with people who might jobs, and, just generally, let all your acquaintances know that you’re looking for a job. That doesn’t take very long.

The first way is the one that will occupy most of a job-searcher’s time, but it’s very much a numbers game. Especially for people looking for entry-level work, 90% of the applications you send out are going to get either no response or a negative response. That means you literally need to send out hundreds of applications in order to get a job.

But even sending out hundreds of applications doesn’t take eight hours a day. If you send out three a day, you’ll have sent out almost a hundred in a month.

But most people don’t do that. Because they feel like job-finding should be their job, they usually send out ten on day one, then five on day two, then nothing on day three. And then they do nothing for three months. And for that entire three months, they hate themselves, because they feel like there is something they should be doing.

And there is…but what they should be doing is so minor. Job-finding is such an insanely chancy business that the key is to just do something instead of nothing. If you do even thirty minutes of work on it a day, then that’s all you really need in order to put yourself in a position where something good can happen to you.

I will note that there is another side to job-finding: the side where you just need to find some source of money immediately or you won’t be able to pay your mortgage, feed your children, etc. I don’t know anything about that. My solution to running out of money was (and still would be) to move in with my parents. Sorry. I feel like there should be a disclaimer on my blog: “Advice for shiftless youths, about shiftless youth problems.”

Posted in General Principles | 9 Comments »

If you go to a workshop with the expectation that people will lavish praise on your writing, there is a nonzero chance that you will be destroyed

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 28, 2013

you suck

A bunch of my friends are going to writing workshops this summer, so I thought I’d share the most hard-won piece of advice that I possess: don’t go there looking for people to tell you that your writing is great.

What makes this advice so hard-won is that I’ve gone into so many critique situations looking for that kind of validation and I’ve rarely gotten it and the not-getting-of-it has melted me into a boneless jelly of self-hatred. And now I don’t look for it, and I am much happier and much more willing to take criticism.

Now, I know I am going to get a ton of comments where people are like, “Oh, of course it’s stupid for people to look for validation at workshops,” but c’mon, let’s be real. You do it. Or at least you’ve done it. You don’t admit to doing it, because that is gauche. But you know if, deep down in the back of your brain, you’re really hoping that the instructor will tell you that you are amazing. Honestly, it’s really hard to not hope for that…at least in the beginning.

The reason it is so dangerous to look for validation is not because you never get it…it’s because you sometimes do get it. Let’s face it: in every MFA program, Clarion class, and workshop, there is a star. And when you are that star, the validation that you get from your teachers and classmates is so intoxicating that it can become addictive. The impersonal world of submission and rejection offers no pleasure which is as exquisite as when your workshop leader—frequently a well-published and critically acclaimed author—tells you, in detail, why your story is excellent.

That has almost never happened to me. But the few times it has, I’ve gone home shaking. The excitement frequently rendered me unable to sleep. That joy was capable of nourishing me for days.

I think I am lucky to have not been given too many tastes of this joy. Because when you take too many hits of that crack-pipe, you start to need it. And chasing after validation starts to affect your behavior. You feel the need to run all of your work through some kind of critiquing process. And if the critiquers don’t like it, then you start to hate it too. And you start waiting for people to validate you: you wait for an authority figure to tell you that you’re ready to publish, or ready to write a novel, or ready to send a story out.

Recently, a writing colleague told me about a person who’d been working on a short story for ages and ages and felt like they had finally finished it, and then they’d put it up for critique and received a really wonderful and positive critique from a well-known SF writer.

Which, okay, is wonderful…until you stop to think…if they’d finished the story, why did they put it up for critique? And the answer is that they were looking for someone to tell them that it was finished.

But what if it hadn’t gone that way? Many very well-regarded novels have received a few negative reviews, after all. What if this story had received a lukewarm or a negative critique? The answer is that the author probably would’ve spiraled down into another round of revisions and rewrites.

That’s insane. At some point, a writer should be able to take control of their lives and their work and say, “No. This is finished. This deserves to be published. I believe in it, even if no one else does.”

Because the alternative is to put your self-worth into the hands of anyone who might possibly offer you a kind word.

And that’s a terrifying place to be. I should know; I used to be there. Sometimes I’d get negative critiques that would haunt me for days. Several summers ago, I got one that I literally could not stop thinking about. When I woke up, the first thing I’d think, even before “I’m hungry” or “I need to pee,” would be “Shit…I got that critique.”

I was so devastated by this critique that it called my whole future into question. I could not go to an MFA program if I was going to continue to react to criticism in this way. I couldn’t ever enter a workshop situation again if I didn’t sort this out.

So I did. I was driving on the 880 (I have a lot of epiphanies on the 880) when I realized that the reason the critique had affected me was because so much of my self-worth is tied up in being a good writer. And if someone had had such a negative reaction to a story that I’d liked so much, then it meant I might not be a good writer, and if I wasn’t a good writer, then I wasn’t really anything.

Right there on the highway, while I was crossing the Dumbarton Bridge, I did some mental reshuffling. I told myself that I was not, first and foremost, a writer. I was just a guy who wrote stories. And if the stories were bad, it was no big deal, because that was not who I was. And it worked. Ever since then, I’ve gone into critique situations with zero expectation of validation and no matter what gets said, I tend to walk out of them with very little angst sitting on my shoulder.

Yes, this is a really hokey and shopworn epiphany, but it’s also an epiphany that people can go their entire lives without having. There are really famous writers who die inside when someone says something negative about their writing. Don’t be one of them!

Posted in Advice, General Principles | Tagged: , , , | 8 Comments »

AWP is kind of a social scene, but then, so is everything.

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 9, 2013

I’m at the Association of Writing Programs’ annual convention (this year, it’s in Boston). This is the big professional organization for people affiliated with writing programs (which, by extension, has turned it into the big convention for writers of literary fiction in the U.S.)

It’s good. Kind of big. Twelve thousand people. Pretty much all of them are writers. And I know barely anyone. I’m here with almost all of the MFA fiction writers (and some of the poets, too), which definitely assuages some of the loneliness. But I still feel a bit on the outside. Obviously, as a student, I’m a bit low-status. But it’s more than that.

I’ve come to realize that, regardless of their states purpose, almost all gatherings—AA meetings, churches, meetings at offices, corporate retreats, concerts, protests, etc—are basically social scenes. There are a bunch of regulars, who have the most connections (mostly with each other) and power, and they basically organize the whole thing for their own benefit. They’re the ones who the gathering is for. And, because of that, when outsiders come in, they always feel a bit rejected and shut out.

The important thing for the outsider is just to realize that the left-out feeling is a normal thing that everyone has to go through when they try to break in. And you can try to be friendly and outgoing and that helps a bit, but, really, the moment when you start to fit in is this weird, invisible transition. You come back a few times and, suddenly, you recognize people in the halls. Your schedule fills up. You get invited to dinners and parties. You start only going to panels that your friends and acquaintances are on. You don’t know quite how it happens, but suddenly you’re part of the in-group.

I’ve experienced this process a bunch of times. I was part of my college’s newspaper staff and twice a year we’d have banquets. During my first few, I stood in a corner and was desperately lonely and really made no attempt to talk to people or anything. But during my last few, I had a lot of fun. My first few science fiction conventions were miserable and lonely experiences. My last few were significantly easier and more filled with, like, talking to people and having them talk back to me.

So yeah, I imagine that my fifth AWP will be a riot.

Posted in Background Checks, General Principles | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

I really enjoy knowing approximately how long it’s going to take me to read a book

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 17, 2013

self-measure-titleI only read one book at a time. But, since I’m in graduate school, I need to read a book a week as part of my readings’ course. Thus, I now need to time exactly when I’m going to finish my books. This has resulted in a huge leap forward in my ability to assess how long it’s going to take me to read any given book.

Basically, the lynchpin of this system is the Kindle. Anyone who has used one knows that the Kindle doesn’t use page numbers to mark your location in book: it uses location numbers. For instance, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (the [amazing] book I just completed) is around 7000 locations long. Now, there’s no hard and fast rule for what a location actually means. Really, it measures the length of the encoding that underlies your text. Thus, even if you have two texts that’re of the same length (in terms of a wordcount), the text with more encoding (italics, bolding, lists, tables, fonts, etc.) will have more locations than the one with less encoding. However, a general rule of thumb is that 1000 locations = about 22,000 words. For instance, Gone Girl has 7000ish locations and is about 150,000 words.

As I noted years ago, I used to read about 15,000 words an hour. Now, that was an actual reading speed: it included bathroom breaks, checking my email, fidgeting, making a snack, staring into space, etc. It also tended to include 10-15 minutes of going outside and smoking. Since quitting smoking, I’ve observed that I’m usually able to read 1000 or so locations (20k or so words) in an hour. If the novel is a very fast-paced thrillerish novel (i.e. one that has a lot of skimmable prose), that can sometimes be more like 1300-1400 locations in an hour (it’s possible that some of this is due to fast-paced books catching my interest and resulting in fewer distractions per hour)

Thus, I knew, even before I began it, that Gone Girl was going to take me at least 7 hours to read (it actually took more like 5.75 hours, since this was one of those books that you can read fast). Next, I’m going to read George Saunders’ Tenth Of December: Stories for a Monday book club discussion. Since it’s about 3000 kindle locations, I know I’m going to have to devote about three hours to it tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll read after that, actually (although I am feeling an urge to return to either return to J.M. Coetzee or to read one of Gillian Flynn’s earlier novels), but I know that I need to finish it by Wednesday night (when I have to read the text for our Thursday class—it’s short, so this should take no more than an hour). Generally speaking, I can’t expect more than two hours of reading time on a weekday, so I need to make sure that I don’t select anything longer than 100,000 words. It’s all a very orderly system.

The result of this calculation is that I feel less afraid to take on long books. Even if book is about 300,000 words, I know that only represents 15 hours (or about a week and a half) of effort.

Posted in Books, General Principles | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Why I distrust doctors

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 4, 2013

I am obsessed with the medical profession. On the one hand, doctors have very high social status. They’re respected and even beloved. There are few, if any, negative public conceptions about doctors (making them very different from lawyers, bankers, cops, etc). And they make so much money. There is no other profession where even a mediocre graduate from a mediocre school is pretty much guaranteed a job and a six-figure income. A middling graduate from a middling school can easily expect to earn more than 200,000 (once his or her residency is over). And it is not at all absurd for a doctor to earn many multiples of that. A substantial number of the millionaires in this country are doctors. I ever was to have a child, I’d encourage it to become a doctor.

But, on a personal level, I have also disliked almost every doctor that I’ve ever seen. Every doctor I’ve ever gone to has begun their examination of me by lecturing me about my weight. Apparently, this is something that average-weight people don’t experience, but all that us overweight people get from doctors, from childhood onwards, is this cold stare of disapproval.

It makes going to the doctor extremely unpleasant. After I started smoking, I avoided going to the doctor for eight years, because I was unwilling to face their condemnation. Now…was that healthy? No. But it’s a direct result of the way that doctors treat people. Because doctors have much higher social status than their patients, they feel free to criticize them in a somewhat paternalistic and dehumanizing way. This is, obviously, an experience that’s uncomfortable and annoying and one that we don’t wish to repeat. So we avoid the doctor.

(After I quit smoking, I finally went back to the doctor and the first thing he told me was that I should lose weight).

Every doctor is like this. I think it’s an inevitable result of power relations. The only “nice” doctors I’ve ever been to were the fancy rich-person doctors that my parents go to. In that case, the power relation is reversed: the doctor has less status than his tony clientele, so he is less able to be judgmental.

It makes me a bit sad to think that this is what’s going to happen to all my med student friends. They’re going to graduate and be jerks to their patients and make them afraid to go to the doctor and thereby increase the net amount of misery in the world.

However, I have finally learned how to fight back against this BS. I recently went to the dentist for the first time in, like, nine years. Obviously, while I was drinking heavily, proper tooth care was not my highest priority, but I am doing my best nowadays to remedy that. However, the dental hygienist would not get off my case about how I needed to do this or that or my teeth would fall out. I found myself putting off my next visit and falling into that old pattern of avoidance. So when I rescheduled this time, I called and requested a different hygienist. I am no longer going to tolerate medical professionals who lecture me. I am an adult. I do my best to do what I need to do in order to stay healthy. Just give me the information that I need. If you push harder than that, then you’re basically trying to bully me. And I’m not going to stand for that.

*Also, perhaps doctors should stop tormenting people with this advice. Being overweight is not associated with higher mortality rates.

Posted in General Principles | 2 Comments »

I don’t think that people need to be productive in order be happy

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on January 28, 2013

slacker-at-work

The general consensus re: my post about the Cracked.com article seems to be that you should love yourself and everything, but you should also whip your ass into shape and go out and try hard to, like, do things and make things and produce things and become good at things. That was pretty much what Captain Awkward wrote in a response (in which she referenced the Cracked article) to a question last Thursday from a respondent who lived with her mother and wasn’t really going anywhere in life.

But I disagree. Even if you’re miserable in your current situation, I don’t necessarily think that the solution is to work hard and do things. I feel like I have a lot of friends who are miserable in their high-powered, high status jobs and who are currently looking for other high-powered, high-status jobs in which they will not be miserable. For many of them, that’s probably the right solution. But not for all of them! I think that some percentage of people would benefit from doing less stuff or, perhaps, from discarding our pretensions at doing stuff.

When we think about doing what makes us happy, I think it’s important to differentiate between the stuff that actually makes us happy when we do it and the stuff that only makes us happy when we think about doing it. This seems to be particularly the case in non-profit work. Thinking about doing it and thinking about helping people feel really great. But the reality of it seems to be kind of terrible: long hours, little pay, inefficient management structure, limited effectiveness, and rote, menial work.

When non-profit workers get to the end of each day and think about what they’ve done, they probably experience a flash of pleasure: they haven’t sold out; they’re fighting the good fight. But that flash of pleasure might be the only joy that they received from their work that day. And, to me, that’s foolishness. People shouldn’t aim for some kind of bitter, Stoic satisfaction from life. They should aim to enjoy each hour, minute, and second of it.

Choosing a low-status job means that you’ll probably experience flashes of agony whenever you think about your situation in life: you’ll see your more successful peers and wonder what the hell is wrong with you. But that flash of agony is only going to disrupt your life maybe 5% of the time (err…also…it’s worth noting that more-successful people experience these same flashes of agony). But if you enjoy the texture of the rest of the day…if you enjoy not being stressed out…if you enjoy being able to come home and not think about work…if you enjoy being able to spend time with your friends and watch your favorite TV shows and play video games and smoke all the pot you want…well…then maybe that’s a good deal for you. Because, honestly, I know some people who don’t work nearly as hard as they could and aren’t nearly as successful as their intelligence would seem to indicate that they should be…and they seem pretty happy. I mean, they could be faking it, but I think that plenty of them aren’t. And I think that a lot of people who work really hard and appear to be happy are faking it (because happiness is just another kind of status competition).

My favorite advice columnist is Cary Tennis. And I loved this one column where he explained that being a slacker is kind of a countercultural choice. I agree entirely. Slackers disregard societal notions of value in favor of their own. I think that’s cool. This prevailing notion that you need to work as hard as you can on everything is…well…it’s kind of a slave mentality. Actually, it’s not even that, because I bet slaves thought their work was bullshit. It’s…it’s…enslaving yourself.

A lot of people try to excuse slackerdom (often using me as an example) by saying: “Oh, you know, Rahul…you haven’t progressed very far in the working world, but that’s okay, because you’re an artist and you work hard at that.” But, umm…guys…I know exactly how hard I work at being an artist. I write for an average of 101 minutes per day. That’s an hour and forty minutes. And I read for average of 1.92 hours per day (though that’s probably an overestimate). That’s like three and a half hours of writing-related work every day. I could easily work twice that hard.

But it would mean giving up all the other things that I enjoy. I like to go on aimless drives and take walks (an average of 4 miles a day). I like to trawl Facebook and Twitter–I find a lot of value in forming these micro-connections with a thousand people. I like to watch TV (an average of 53 minutes a day–though that’s probably an underestimate) and I like to hang out with my peoples at least every other day. I know plenty of people who hang out with their peoples like…once a week. To me, that’s barbarous. Life is not worth living unless you’re seeing your peoples on a regular basis.

I know what I care about, because I do it every day. And I think the same is true for most people: every day you decide what’s important to you.

Most people live their lives under the sway of a weird double-think: insofar as they’re able, they do what they actually want to do, but they say they want to do the things that society wants them to value. They spend their days working as little as possible and having fun, but they say they want to spend all their time on “rewarding work.” I wonder if this is not the case with the person who wrote to Captain Awkward.

It’s a bit sick, actually. Our society is this self-perpetuating machine: it rewards people who seek out public acclaim and it scorns the people who give out that acclaim; it rewards those are followed on Twitter and scorns those who do the following; it rewards people who make content and scorns people who consume content; it rewards people who respond well to being rewarded–people who really want money and applause–and it scorns people who show a disregard for society’s rewards mechanisms–people who show less concern for money and applause; basically, it rewards people who perform the higher-level idea-work that’s necessary to hold together our economic machine–the people who throw their full brainpower into the service of Mammon.

And that even extends to our conception of what leisure activities are praiseworthy. Leisure activities that resemble work are more praiseworthy than ones that resemble play. It’s why writing original fiction–a potentially salable object–is considered more praiseworthy than writing fanfiction, or why being a regular blogger is more praiseworthy than being a faithful diarist. It’s why reading books (which high-status laborers have to do as part of their work) is more praiseworthy than watching audiovisual entertainment (which very few workers are required to do). And it’s why hanging out with your peoples is the least praiseworthy activity of all, because it constitutes such a rejection of economic paradigms. There are so many ways to combine hanging out with your peoples with some kind of labor (volunteer work, writing circles, playing sports) that there’s no good way to spin just hanging out with your peoples without an underlying activity to justify it.

So, yeah, when people say to me, “Oh, pursuing status is bad, but people should do something purposeful with their life, like writing, instead of just watching TV all the time” what I hear is “Oh, pursuing status is bad, but what people should do is…pursue status.”

No. What people should do is what they enjoy doing. You probably know what it is that you enjoy. You enjoy working with your hands or playing video games or hanging with your peoples or whatever. In fact, you’re probably already doing it. You should keep doing it.* And if you keep telling yourself that you really want to do something, but you can’t work up the motivation to actually do it…well…maybe you don’t actually want to do it–maybe you just want the status you’d get from having done it.

Of course, you probably don’t enjoy working. But, in that case, you should look for a job where the thing you will be doing–the actual activity that will take up most of your day–closely resembles something that you do enjoy doing. In my case, my job involves bloviating for an hour to a captive audience (teaching). And it very closely resembles what I enjoy doing. (And my World Bank job also involved a lot of word-manipulation that I found to be a not terrible way to pass the time.)

Now at this point, you might be saying, “But…Rahul. You write original fiction. You spend a lot of time on it. You work pretty hard on it. Aren’t you being disingenuous when you say that it’s not a better use of a person’s time than playing Xbox?”

No, I am not. And that’s for one simple reason.

I am the enemy.

I care deeply about status. I wish I didn’t, but I do. I’m learning to care less and less, but I still care about it much more than, I think, most people do. I’ve always really wanted to be well-known and famous. And for that reason, I’ve always pursued high-status activities. I made this pretty clear when the Baltimore Sun interviewed me:

Q: Why write? What makes writing a book worthwhile?

A: When I was in grade school, authority figures praised my writing. That made me think that writing would be a good way to win the favor of other authorities: handsome strangers, intelligent people on the internet, my professors and anyone else who wasn’t yet sufficiently impressed with me. As I got better at it, writing also became more fun. Now it’s the most fun thing in my life and also the thing that I am best at. And I’ve impressed a few more people, but I suppose it hasn’t been as many people as I’d hoped for.

Writing is really fun and I do enjoy it, but there was a long period when it was not fun. And even today, there are many days when I’d rather not write. I do it because I want the status. I know the status won’t make me significantly happier than I am, but I still really want it. Since my status-winning activity has also resulted in a fairly happy day-to-day life, I think I’ve lucked out. However, If I knew that writing wasn’t going to win me that status, I’d probably switch over to writing fanfiction: it seems easier, more fun, and more rewarding.

*Sometimes the thing you enjoy doing is sacrificing future happiness in favor of present-day happiness, as in the case of when I was drinking all day. That is not good. However, mostly when people present this scenario, what they’re really describing is an activity (slacking off and being lazy) that sacrifices future status in favor of present happiness. I don’t accept that paradigm. In fact, it’s much healthier than what most people do. Honestly, I love you, all my law student and med student friends, but I am absolutely horrified by the way you’re willing to accept 3-12 years of misery in return for an uncertain future job where you’ll make money and have status.

Posted in General Principles | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Why Do You Want To Be A Better Person?

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on January 23, 2013

self-esteemAwhile back, there was an article on Cracked.com that got a lot of play in my social networks. It was called “Six Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person” and it was all about how the only way to make the world care about you is to do something useful and do it really well. I did not feel the same glee about this article that many of my friends did. In fact, I really disliked it.

But I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, I am trying to do something pretty well. I am engaged in the business of trying to make the world care about me (i.e. winning status) and I am doing it in pretty much the way that the author recommends.

But I guess what I disliked were the unexamined premises of the article. A large part of that Cracked.com article is devoted to mocking the separation that people have formed between their own self-worth and the societal assessment of their worth. To myself, I’m the most important thing in the world. But to society, I’m utterly insignificant. Some people try to reconcile this contradiction by fostering an artificial sense of self-worth: they invent reasons—“they’re nice” or whatever—for why they’re really worthwhile. The article says that this wrong. You have no worth outside that which society assigns you. This means we have only one option: gaining status is a way to make society love us as much as we love ourselves.

And that would be fine…if it actually worked. The article pretty literally says that if you gain some high-status accomplishments, then you’ll stop hating yourself.

That’s not true. I don’t know how to put it much more baldly than that. Accomplishment does not cure self-hatred.

I feel like I know a little bit about this. I’m in this program that’s kinda hard to get into. I’ve sold stories. I’ve gotten a few good reviews. It’s all totally low-level stuff, but it also makes me an object of envy to plenty of people. And there are times when that feels pretty good.

But when you start to rely on and trust in that feeling, then you’re lost. Because your status isn’t actually real. It’s something that exists mostly in your head. It’s basically just a list of all the reasons why you’re better than everyone else. And eventually those reasons will be undercut.

As you rise, you inevitably come into contact with people who are a bit higher than you. If you publish a short story, then you meet people who’re winning awards. If you publish a novel, then you meet people who are best-sellers. And no matter how hard you try to qualify your own status (“Oh, I’m younger than him” or “Oh, I haven’t had the material advantages that she’s had”), someone will always come along, eventually, who is better than you in every appreciable way. In fact, usually you’re lucky if there’s just one someone—usually there are a lot of them. In this world, there are thousands and thousands of people who are younger, better-looking, more talented, better-published, and more charming than me. And I will never be better than them.

And when I think about that, it really doesn’t matter that I am doing better than, literally, millions of other aspiring writers…all I can think about is not being the best. And it sometimes comes close to driving me crazy.

If my self-image was entirely based on being better than other people (as it sometimes has been, during some dark periods of my life), then I’d either have to create delusional castles in the sky in order to maintain that belief or I’d slide into a very dark place (probably both at once, actually).

But it’s not.

You know, it sounds super cliché to say but I do think that I have an intrinsic worth. I don’t think that necessarily means you need to value me, but it does mean that I value myself. Valuing yourself is really what gaining status is all about. Gaining status isn’t about proving yourself to other people…it’s about proving yourself to yourself—it’s about affirming that you really are worth something: “See, all these people value me, so I can value myself!”

But why bother? Why not just cut out the middleman? There’s no one else back here behind my eyes. I don’t need to live my life for an audience, and I don’t need the approval of other people in order to do what I want to do. No one really owes me anything, but I also don’t need to apologize for being super interested in myself.

I think we get confused by the statement “everyone is special.” There’s something monstrously meaningless about it. If everyone is special, then no one is special. And to a certain extent, that is true. We cannot have a society that regards everyone as special. From society’s point of view, specialness is unequally distributed. But that is no reason why you need to internalize society’s point of view. From your point of view, you are special. Instead of engaging in a kind of guerilla action to get society to agree with you, the trick is just to learn to live with this asymmetry.

There’s really no other option. In my short life, I’ve already come to realize that no amount of status is ever going to satisfy me: even best-selling authors torture themselves by thinking about all the awards they haven’t won and all the respect they haven’t gotten.

This is a really obvious conclusion, but I actually only realized it about eight or nine months ago. It was very freeing. I still pursue status, but in a more light-hearted way. It’s no longer a matter of life or death. It’s a game.

Posted in General Principles | 5 Comments »

I do not use shame and anxiety to motivate myself

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on November 29, 2012

So, it looks like November is going to be my least productive month of this year*. In fact, unless I make some kind of push over the next three days (don’t worry, I’ll make it), this is probably going to be my lowest-productivity month since January of 2011, which was the month that I left my job in DC and moved to Oakland and kicked things up a notch, productivity-wise.

It’s okay, though. Each year is going to have a least productive month. And it’s not like I don’t have good excuses. My trip to California kicked my whole system out of joint for a week and then my wisdom tooth extraction killed another week. I’m only just now starting to regain my equilibrium.

I mean, I don’t want to write off a whole month as unproductive. That was still a month of my life. I met new people and went to new places. I wrote my first book review (to be published in Strange Horizons sometimes in the next few weeks). I got serious about driving traffic to my blog and creating a social networking strategy. I started strategizing for my next novel. Things happened in November. It was not a bad month.

And, when I look back on it, I can see that I’ve even written a fair amount of fiction. I’ve made slow and steady progress on revising my novel (I’m a third done). Nowadays, even a low-productivity month is more productive than most of my months were in 2009 or 2010. But, I definitely could’ve worked harder.

Still, what can you do? Obviously, I believe in hard work and discipline, and I don’t really believe in things like breaks or vacations. You can always find a reason for going easy on yourself. And no one’s ever going to blame you for going easy on yourself. But, at the same time, there’s no reward for having a good excuse. I know that my dreams for myself can only really come true if I push myself.

And yet, at the same time, I also believe in forgiving myself. You know, there are whole years when I did barely any work. Some writers push themselves monomaniacally, like, age 14 onwards. If I’d done that, I’d probably be publishing novels by now. But I had other things to do; at age 14 (or 18 or 22) I wasn’t really capable of working like that. The last decade of my life has basically been about learning how to do the work that I need to do. And that’s not a terrible way to spend a decade. It’s the kind of journey (guys, I used to be sooooooo lazy and apathetic) that not many people get to experience.

And in the course of this journey, one of the major things that I’ve learned is that shame and anxiety are not very useful emotions. People use them as a goad to motivate themselves. But, for me, they are not very good motivators. They’re all stick and no carrot. A cessation of anxiety feels like nothing; there’s no pleasure there except for the absence of pain.

Furthermore, shame and anxiety drive people into these defensive postures. People quit pre-emptively, in order to drop that daily load of anxiety. People set insane, impossible goals in order to make up for having been unproductive in the past (and then feel shame because they fail to meet those goals). People don’t submit their stories because it’s easier than the anxiety of waiting for a rejection.

I just don’t see the point of punishing yourself. Punishment is something you level upon dogs and children, because they’re amoral, irrational beasts who have no sense of what is good for them. But there’s no need to do that to yourself.

Shame is for people who don’t really know what they want: people who are just sort of bouncing through life without a clear sense of where they want to go or what they need to do.

For myself, I found that once I started to enumerate clear and achievable goals for myself, then my sense of shame dropped precipitously. There isn’t (and shouldn’t) be any shame in not meeting a goal. If you don’t even come close to meeting it, then it means you need to set a more achievable goal. If you come close to meeting it but don’t quite make it, then you just need to try harder next time.

So, yeah, next month I am going to try harder.

*In contrast, I was super productive in October: I wrote for about 61 hours in October, as compared to 20 in November (thus far)

Posted in General Principles | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

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