The Heroine’s Journey — or Yes I Have A Fucking Literature Degree
And no, just because I have to work constantly for cash doesn’t mean I ain’t got nothing to say in fiction
See that above? I saved money for quite some time to pay to professionally publish the best book I’ve written to date.
You can read an earlier version of the first chapters on Medium.
I’ll just leave them up because I no longer have any interest in any type of “traditional” publishing or marketing advice. I can’t do anything about it and my top concern, as any real writer’s should be, is the work on the page (or screen). My concern is my honesty, integrity, and my relationship to my work.
What I’m about to say about my writing speaks to feminism and it speaks to dismantling the patriarchy.
Back before my baby died in 2005, my former partner Alan Rodgers was coaching me to be a “bestselling above the title Big Sci Fi or Big Fantasy writer.”
Our culture’s “messages” and the patriarchy are so dominant that I would have to be a total dork and a complete and total egotistical asshole to be that type of writer. The biggest-selling fantasy writer of all time was just skewered by an ill-tempered, mean WIRED magazine editor/writer. It isn’t that Brandon Sanderson is an asshole (the article’s author? another matter). It’s that he is a specialized nerd who spends nearly every waking hour setting words to pixels of a very specific type for a very specific and well-defined audience —
This audience desires to escape the pressures of our daily lives in Westernized societies so very much that the fantasies Brandon creates in endless volume and variety fit this need. They name their children after his characters. They 3D print swords that they have created and named in honor of his vast, limitless fantasy …
traditional medievalistic worlds
The WIRED guy has a problem with Sanderson’s prose.
The problem I have? (and for the record, I disapprove of the negative, mean-spirited WIRED piece on Sanderson)
It’s not so much a problem but a recognition that this type of story is a very traditional tale upholding all assumptions and traditions of the patriarchy and extolling them. Its proponents wax eloquent in their praise of such tales, and this type of story also represents a large portion of what is filmed and provided via most streaming services.
Alan Rodgers (my former partner) was acutely aware of such things. He had picked various bestsellers off editors’ desks dating way back into the 80s. He was famous for having selected Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire for a hardcover release, which later resulted in many reprintings — after casually reading the first few pages on an acquiring editor’s desk. He supposedly recommended Dan Simmons’ Hyperion to be marketed as a “big sci fi book” when it was initially regarded as what it really is: a collection of related shorter stories and novelettes/novellas. On his own, he wrote two NYT bestsellers and one critically acclaimed book about the intersection of Voudoun and the blues, Bone Music.
A friend of mine once asked, “Why are you with him? You’re such a much better writer than him, Amy.”
This was a very intelligent and capable writer herself, who had been done to as all NY publishing does to any writer but the very, very, very, infinitesimal few, and those infinitesimal few serve the patriarchy harder and with greater fealty than GQ, Esquire, and Monday Night Football combined.
The answer? I do not have the ego that Alan had, much less the ego Brandon Sanderson has. Sanderson has not only earned $55 million in the past year through his high-volume fantasy production, he has a massive property in Utah with 3 homes, including one devoted to his family, one to himself, and one for visitors. It’s description reminded me of the superstructure that Scientology has built for the works of L. Ron Hubbard.
“As I build books,” Sanderson says, as I sit there, for once entirely enraptured, “God builds people.”
This is an interesting statement. It reminds me very much of Victorian pronouncements about “Man’s ability to create.” Or Hamlet’s soliloquy to the ill-fated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god.
Shakespeare meant this ironically, I believe.
It’s amazing how, to this day, so many people believe it.
I didn’t just read the dozen major bestselling sci fi and fantasy books that Alan told me to read.
On the side, I was making a 3-ring binder. The name on the spine of the binder was “The Heroine’s Journey.”
One day when Alan saw me working on it and I briefly explained that I wanted to write about female characters, but was having trouble locating a lot of models, he responded by screaming at me and knocking the folder to the floor.
Back to work with these big sci fi and fantasy books! he ordered. All were written by men, with main characters who were either … wait for it … men or “aliens” in some masculine form.
Eventually. Eventually.
I tired of wasting my time writing stories about men in the expected settings. That’s what all those big, bestselling books were. And, it was so very difficult to sell stories about any non-male character, especially any woman older than age 25. Right now, I write many forms of nonfiction and business writing for a living.
Thinking About What It Means to Write Again
For well over a year, Bruce and I have been playing music together. We have gone from being terrible to being okay. I’ve gotten back in touch with my youthful forays into music.
We’ve been watching music documentaries, including some made in the mid-2000s about The Who.
“All four were playing lead,” said one commenter.
But it’s Pete, of course, who interests me. And I have realized why I always liked The Who so much.
They somehow managed to tell the story of working class young people in Britain after the second World War. None of them were “rich.” But they all went to art school.
I said to Bruce, “That’s funny — I was never that fond of The Who Sell Out but … it definitely was Art School Confidential and … I went to art school.”
Skewering advertising and marketing is how The Who started on their path away from making catchy pop singles to creating the first rock opera and a later, even better one. And, their unique sound.
We hear things about cultural appropriation: many of the “British Invasion” bands were heavily influenced by American blues. So were The Who. But unlike the Stones, who covered Black American artists without credit or payment, The Who managed to make songs that sounded different, but which related to the emotional space that the blues are about. To me, that’s not appropriation, it is inspiration.
One commenter pointed out how a simple song like “Happy Jack” was completely British-sounding, and yet fit in with the other blues-influenced early 60s hits of the day.
I’ve been writing so long and even if everything I write sucks rocks and sells zero copies, I feel confident that I am not appropriating any other writer’s work or any other cultural tradition that is not my own.
This is what I believe the job of the real creative artist and the real writer should do.
And — I’m pretty sure that the entire structure I came up in, from Alan’s instructions for me to read all those books and note down the themes, characters, and structure so I too, could be a bestseller —
to my
literature degree
screenwriting classes
mentorship from older writers
“story models”
market research
It’s all designed like the human chute at Golden Corral.
It’s all made to funnel us all into somebody else’s world.
Either to funnel us away from our real world as in big European medievalistic fantasies like Brandon Sanderson’s, or into the type of worlds I consider very sad—
“We would all like to read stories about the struggles of Disadvantaged X” in dealing with “Fucked up social Problem Y.”
Children, I know NY publishing people, a shit ton of them, and they are to a person, just as unimaginative, a-creative, and stuck in restricted power-worshipping mindslavery as the crews at NYT, every college or university, and just about every publishing and entertainment company. .
I told my friend yesterday, “I don’t care if I sell a single copy.”
Because writing Like Fire, and anything I may do in the future:
It really is about me. Something I write, that comes out of my own background, my vision, my feelings about myself, this world — my imagination about any other — it’s about me.
It wasn’t the Sanderson article that crystallized my thoughts, though it certainly reinforced them. It’s obvious that he creates detailed and intricate fantasies that he is compelled to write, that he must write, and that the patriarchy makes it possible for him to not only do this, but to become a very significant multi-millionaire in doing so.
It was Pete.
Pete Townshend, for whatever one may think of him, is an honest artist. His creativity does come from inside. He is endlessly inspired by others, but he does not copy others. And he broke musical and verbal (poetic) ground, and themes, in so many ways.
I’m not saying everyone who writes or does music needs to do this. I am saying that it would be very good for everyone if it were not quite so appallingly difficult for people who aren’t the Brandon Sandersons or Alan Rodgers of the world to do their own thing.
It’s as if, in one last gasp, the old medievalistic, patriarchal world is forcing itself upon us.
Billionaire worship. Blind followership of male leaders with precious little to offer beside platitudes and aggressive attacks on opponents. Terrible soul-killing television, awful, a-nutritious addictive food, medieval-spirited medical care.
MEET THE NEW BOSS SAME AS THE OLD BOSS
Maybe people like me do not want to endlessly address the miseries of our youth or the degradation of daily life for the overwhelming majority of our 8 billions.
Maybe once upon a time, like Ray Bradbury said while visiting my hometown library in Redlands, California when I was growing up, it really is about a child’s innocent imagination. Coming to a story like a little child. Believing in magic, believing in endless potential.
One unspoiled by the endless marketing messages, by the rules, by the strictures, by the bestsellers of the past and the servants to empire and patriarchy.
I know that in so many fields, younger people are working hard to forge new paths, make new discoveries, and work better together.
I lost my house and all my money when I tried to start a diverse publishing company in 2014 and 2015.
My house was real, but money — as I now know — shouldn’t be allowed to direct every aspect of our lives. And as to what money can buy, such as the adulation and massive properties afforded to someone like Brandon Sanderson —
Well, we can’t take those things with us, either.
I’ve changed so much, and healed, that I can hardly imagine what type of stories I might want to write, or how I might continue the story of Like Fire. It does end on a “cliffhanger.” Sorry — I had to finish it somehow. I was going to meet Bruce the very next day.
And now we’re happily married. I have the life I always wanted.
The benefits of truly honest work are amazing. Honest. Not hard work to benefit a master — whether it be an institution like patriarchy or a billionaire — as John Graziano said to me several years ago: “We all work for a billionaire.”
Yeah, maybe so. But I live for myself.