The Writer in the World
I put off studying this chapter in my course. Turning over the practicalities of publishing has a rather … desiccating effect on me. Is it because I find it so enormous and intimidating – or just stultifying? This is not promising for a writer. I think it’s those words; ‘marketing,’ ‘acquisition,’ ‘schedule’ that make my neck disappear into my shoulders in spasms like I’ve been shot. They are so removed from what I do in the blackness of early morning, at my desk with the window cracked open to hear the first trills of a robin, with an idea, with an image, something I find beautiful.
That sounds very high and mighty, doesn’t it? We both know that the truth is probably more that if I dismiss the whole publishing process as hyper-commercialised, soulless wank, I can excuse myself from trying – and failing. Which is cowardly.
I liked the interview with Linda McQueen. She said ruefully (in impossibly clipped vowels – which brought me back to Alexa Von Hirschberg’s comments about the industry’s lack of diversity – also spoken in impossibly clipped vowels) that people don’t like copy editors. They come in with their red pen and split hairs over free indirect thought vs speech punctuation. Well. I was a teacher. I am not afraid of the red pen. She talked about being freelance, because her section of the process is often so discreet that she can slot in and out, then buzz off. No conversations for her about events and articles, prizes and shortlists, contracts and edits. Her concern is the work itself.
I like that. All the rest is just noise, isn’t it? I’m not so naïve to not understand that promotion and sales and advertising are important; it is not all mindless selling. They have the vital role of carrying important words further, so they can reach someone sitting alone on a classroom desk, swinging her legs, or on the carpet with his back against a radiator, in a café, on a bus, at a bar, in bed, and fling them up into rarified space. From the interviews with the commissioning editors, that was certainly what they told themselves. Important work. But Linda McQueen, the ‘midwife to other people’s creativity’ as she so beautifully put it, just gets to focus on that flinging.
Travel Writing and the Leisure Gap
Well, then I had to research an author’s journey to writing and their process. Wanting someone up to date (Jean Rhys’ experience is probably not going to be a helpful guide for me), I went for Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path and Landlines.
Her topic is probably better known than her style. She famously hiked the Southwest Coastal Path right after she was made homeless and her husband was diagnosed with a terminal illness in the same week. Lovers of her books enjoy the story of her journey out of adversity, the relationship, the triumph of hope over despair. Relatable stuff. I discussed this with my best friend. We talked about women and male travel writers, and I think there tends to be a difference. My best friend suggested women writers tend to focus on the personal, the inner journey. Male writers might focus more on the landscapes, the history and absent themselves somewhat from the text. It is not about them.
Ah yes. The invisible white man. Invisible because his subject-ness is the given, the standard. While I thought my best friend’s comments certainly applied to Winn and MacFarlane, in all the many travel books I’ve read, male writers (and there are more of them) go off on journeys as a frivolity, or an intellectual passion. MacFarlane hunts down old pathways. Haywood alternates between his narrowboat and Triumph, MacKinnon fancies rowing himself from Wales to Serbia.
When a woman travels, it’s more often out of necessity. Winn certainly wasn’t on a jolly. Here is the disparity, and perhaps the reason for the inner, personal focus of women travellers – or maybe those women writing about a merry trip don’t get published because – I’m getting carried away – perhaps all of a sudden this sort of thing seems too frivolous. And how could she leave her family?
Here we have the leisure gap.
The Commodification of Meaning
Alright, alright, I’m clambering down off me soapbox.
So I researched Winn’s journey to publication. There’s not a lot: she wrote the book, then after being persuaded by her daughter, she sent it off to agents. Then – I don’t know, underpants or something, and: world domination. Or bestseller list domination. But I thought, surely, she can’t live the life of a writer in the professional sense. She looks after her husband, she goes for a walk when he needs it. And it helps. She’s not hunting for things to write, she’s busy caring about nature.
Then I read an interview where she talked about a big project coming up. It was the walk from the book Landlines.
And suddenly I went cold. In the book, the walk is approached in cautious terms, after weeks of watching health deteriorate, then back and forth with guilt and persuasion in equal measures. To talk of it as a project, like it was work, like something to map on a Gant chart, when it was someone’s life, a human life, a person who needed to move so it would genuinely save them – I didn’t know where to put that.
And it frightened me. Because what Raynor Winn’s writing offers her readers is Ideas with a big I. Love, endurance, hope, the enthralling power of nature.
And those ideas are exactly what are for sale.
Branding is a horrific thing. I read Naomi Klein’s No Logo back in the early 2000s – weren’t we all on board with the idea that brands are evil? They’re just made up concepts created to persuade people to part with money. Straining to convince us that this product is not just a radio speaker, a detergent, a drink, but a whole lifestyle that they can have if they just buy this thing. Obvious bullshit. But right after that, social media accelerated and we got into the habit of curating our online image that has eventually warped into a kind of eternal self-branding.
Reviews of Winn’s work celebrate her ‘resilience,’ her observation of landscape, her ‘empathy and integrity,’ her ‘compassion.’ These beautiful notions are what are packed up and sold on the publisher’s memoir/nature writing List. We are building our list of titles about resilience. Send us your manuscripts that have empathy. We are looking for empathy to sell. We are selling integrity and compassion. That’s what our customers expect from us. In the market of ideas, we offer connection-with-nature. It is our niche, our USP.
People aren’t brands. Ideas, feelings, aren’t brands. Wilderness is not a brand. Brands are lies. Brands aren’t real. Trees, rocks, rivers are real. Everything else, and I mean everything else that we have layered and lacquered on top of our forests and mountains are the things that aren’t real, that will all be washed away. Feelings, the ironic anthropomorphisation of nature, love, art, are all ephemeral things, but they are the one thing humans have that is uncomplicatedly pure. And making these experiences, these feelings into commodifiable consumables is … fucked. Really fucked. Selling and buying transcendence is a betrayal of the human spirit. And I am afraid that when Raynor Winn is feeling transcendental on the peaks and thinking about how nature heals, and the imperative connection with our landscapes – she is actually just at work. Turning beauty into neat little packages to sell us on Instagram on her way to the next speaking engagement.
Resist
I am being pretty childish, aren’t I? I’m quite sure I said similar things when I was nineteen. I’m forty soon, but I never did get the hang of the difference between realism and cynicism. But it’s the shock – suddenly having the Beautiful Idea illuminated by a bright torch and there’s the project and the spreadsheet and the timeline – and it’s reduced to project management. And so, while I get over the initial shock, I am having a bit of a sulk. Without publishers, I would not have the luxury of reading transcendental ideas at all. And Raynor does a lot for conservation, and her writing makes people care about it more. That’s essential.
But I do urge us all to resist commodification. Resist the reducing of our selves and lives into brands. Resist the depletion of spirit as we move through the world. If we reach out and make connections, let’s make them meaningful. When we act, let’s act with meaning and intent, act with love. Walking in a forest is an act of love – a painful one. This is also why I am in a sulk. Winn’s book beat me round the head with climate decline and environmental degradation, and darl’ I was already converted. You see, if we’re too busy working on our brands, and buying and selling our experiences; when we turn back to the real world, we’ll find it all gone.
So resist. Resist.