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Follow Your Dreams by
We the unpublished – under-published – must frequently address why we have embarked on such a treacherous endeavor as writing. Some of us want to be famous. Some have no other skills. All fall along a spectrum from inspired, to grandiose, to insane. Most adhere to the hallowed maxim: Follow Your Dreams. Saying the above statement aloud, or letting it flow mellifluously through your brain, ushers a warm, tingly feeling, similar to what Julie Andrews must have felt during her radiant twirl through the edelweiss in The Sound of Music. You are possessed by heady visions of stepping into an aesthetic parade, gamboling to upbeat music down a storied boulevard as flower petals and blown kisses rain down on your bold pate. Birds sing, the sun shines, and your clothes smell fresh and clean. Butterflies are everywhere. However. Dreams are ethereal, evolving, unreal; dynamic conceptions of what life would be under long-odds circumstances. They are shimmering castles under construction, floating majestically in the air. Dreams are wonderful to gaze at from a distance, a source of inspiration and resolve, but the real action is with the hardy, mercurial creature who leads you through the oft-forbidding terrain along the way. Like a sherpa trekking guide, it serves as translator between wild mind and tired body; grungy, wiry, odiferous, and short of tooth, only marginally fluent in your native tongue, urgently pointing towards the pinnacle of Everest as though tea, biscotti, and the editors of The New York Times Book Review await you. It scurries along forbidding synaptic paths, disappearing around blind curves, only to reappear on a switchback over your head. Thorny thickets are everywhere, as are deep holes, both natural and dug by villains, and attacks by large carnivores and disease-bearing bugs. There are rest stops and avalanches, scenic vistas and mud, rarefied air, sunshine, and storms. Your supply list is scribbled in some odd dialect; thus, you tote a heavy assemblage of items, from invaluable to useless, nourishing to past its expiration date. Nonetheless, you lope along behind your sherpa, breathless and a little afraid, damning yourself for deciding to try such an asinine stunt. Before embarking on your journey, it is apropos to articulate where you are going. At a cocktail party, graduation ceremony, or in a phone conversation with your mom, you declare, as boldly as you can: “I’m going to be a writer.” Your mom cries, then offers to send preemptive help. Your dad refuses to speak to you, and starts taking more naps. Others in your acquaintance are in medical school, working in banks, teaching, or starting their own business. You are a writer… kind of. You will either be relatively famous, the assistant manager of a Starbucks, or homeless. You brace yourself for the gruesome, cranially-attached, interrogative Siamese twins: Twin one, mostly harmless: “What do you write?” You look down, and feel yourself blushing, deeply. “Ummm…. fiction?” Twin two, the nasty one: “Really! What have you published?” You clear your throat, adjust your turtleneck, paw the ground with your thick-soled shoe. Does second grade count? Love poems to girlfriends? There was a letter to the editor that made it into print, an erudite rebuttal of proposed rollbacks in environmental regulations. An English professor once handed back an essay (A-minus), commenting rather nebulously that you should write something someday. “Well. Nothing… yet,” you manage. The Twins, together, averting their discordant eyes: “Oh. Right. Right.” Follow your dreams. You are a writer. You write. Author will have to wait, as will Novelist, and Literary Lion. Like your nineteen-page epic, you are a work in progress. In-training: Hi, Ma’am – I’m Student Firefighter Smith. Mind if I borrow your garden hose? When you make the fateful decision to attempt a longer, hopefully cohesive work, one common delusion is that the writing itself is the hard part – stealing time, moving beyond free-associated journal entries, using a thesaurus, adhering to, or defying, an outline. You imagine that when your work is finished, you will tie it in a little green bow and ship it to New York, whence book deals will inundate your mailbox like Preferred Customer credit card offers. Friends and colleagues laud you for your self-discipline, and foreshadow your fame. You are an early favorite to win the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Alumni of the Year from your high school. Oprah will exhume her Book Club just to feature you. You will grant many interviews, and when asked how you managed to persevere, you will gaze through the artsy ether into the misty eyes of your Muse, and say: “I followed my dreams.” Such an outcome is rare. More likely, as in my experience, after an interminable time finishing the cursed thing, you spend a nail-gnawing month pounding out a disjointed query letter, then weeks transcribing uncertain addresses of people you do not know, scribbling SASEs, and stuffing envelopes. You drive to the Post Office on a drizzly Monday morning, and hand your bundle to a tired, dysthymic woman in a faded, blue uniform. She weighs each one with a series of sighs, applies postage, then tosses the lot perfunctorily behind her into a gray tub, causing several to crease. You hold your breath, your eyes set in an ocular scream, imagining a nattily-dressed agent maligning the carelessness of amateurs. The waiting starts, with more knots in your stomach than a four-year-old’s self-tied shoes. Your sherpa vanishes into a dark, impenetrable thicket. You revise nettlesome scenes for the twenty-seventh time, frenetically swapping “said under his breath” for “muttered,” “azure, heavenly expanse” for “deep-blue sky,” and subject your main characters to all manner of literary aerobics; sitting with knees together, standing with arms folded, pacing the floor in disgust, rifling through pockets for correct change. As days pass into weeks, you are asked by those privy to your madness: “Did you hear? Did you hear?” You look down, mutter, “Not yet,” then maybe make a joke: “Bidding wars, you know?” Secretly, you imagine a group of recent English Lit graduate staffers lounging on bean bag chairs, reading choice bits of your missive aloud and chortling uncontrollably as they wipe tears from behind rectangular-rimmed glasses. Your query is in the agency bathroom, comic relief from a pile of old New Yorkers. It is pinned to the corkboard in the lounge by the coffee machine, your plot distillation circled in pink highlighter, with the cruel caption: “This is love!” Follow your dreams. The fateful day arrives, and you stand at the perimeter of the thorny thicket, in an odd, swampy place. It has been raining, and the ground is slippery. A raft of home-bound SASEs docks in your mailbox. Many of them are of unnervingly equivalent thickness to your sent material, the address penned in your own hand, bulk-rate manifestation of self-loathing. In effect, you have labored to send yourself bad news. You open each one slowly, with tremulous hands, like plucking flowers of hope from the contorted branches of the damnable hedge, inevitably carving deep scratches into your flesh. Most are poorly-photocopied form-letters, with the occasional, scribbled, “Thanks, but not for us!” Not infrequently, you find your unmarked work ensnared by a serpentine form-slip three inches high, unsigned. You wonder why they don’t just send a pinch of cayenne pepper, a dead roach, anthrax. Your stomach sinks, and you absently thumb through catalogs that arrived on the same day, as though you care. You lope upstairs, turn on the computer, and appraise your so-recently promising manuscript with raw eyes. Grandiose filters have been stripped away, casting the awkward sentences, the interminable asides, the horrifying mixed metaphors, into harsh, unforgiving light. Your erstwhile career has regressed into a self-indulgent hobby, embarrassing evidence of narcissistic tendencies, a Christmas present for your mother, like one of those cat’s eye things you made in kindergarten out of Popsicle sticks, glue, and yarn. Do you stuff your work into the sentimental portfolio stored in your parents’ attic, alongside crumpled finger paintings and the vinyl comb holder you stitched at camp? Do you edit, struggling to fashion something of value out of such banal raw material? Do you dare start another project, despite your glaring lack of talent? If you are cursed with the self-propagating affliction where one writes to feel better from pain induced by their writing, you most definitely do. Follow your dreams. Writers typically labor in isolation, in cramped rooms wearing pajama bottoms and mismatched socks. They are ever vulnerable to the fiat of their delinquent imaginations. Accordingly, you follow the dim outline of your sherpa beyond the hedge, through a dilapidated graveyard of rejected and set-aside work, jumping at every noise, flinching at the mischief of the wind, tree limbs, and moonlight. You are prone to paranoia and conspiracy theories. You know that agents have a regularly updated list of miscreant, unpublished writers, like a flip display of mug-shots at the post office. Regular warnings flash from their proprietary, nothing-new-allowed database, to insure that only established authors, self-help charlatans, or celebrities make it into print. Agents eat children. Their first scores were seven-figure deals with the devil. They secretly resent you since you know how to write, while they barely manage three terse fragments on a form slip. Their vision has been snuffed by cerebral glaucoma, whence they would likely send unsigned form slips to Steinbeck and all three Bronte sisters, too, if they had the chance. Worst of all, they do not read what you send them. They don’t even know how to read. Follow your dreams. Perhaps your sherpa emerges from the thicket, and instead of hiking through the graveyard, leads you to a less-dingy-than-usual boulevard. You look around, and notice that the terrain has morphed from third-world slum to decidedly upper-class. Gated estates line either side of the street, and traffic is light. An agent, perhaps in the throes of malaria, has agreed to review your manuscript, even expressing unbridled enthusiasm. They want an exclusive. You are a genius. God is not dead, after all. The clock ticks loud and fast, with a sense of urgency. After another reworking of chapter one, a few impulse corrections you later decide are inconsistent with the plot, and one last spell-check, you put your printer through its paces, likely running out of toner or paper with maybe ten pages to go. You dash to the store for supplies you can barely afford, complete the print job, apply large rubber bands, remove and reprint whatever pages were damaged by the rubber bands, then carefully pack and send the titanic tome. You pony up for Second Day Air, since you don’t want to seem overly eager, but don’t want to wait too long, either. You tell the dysthymic woman at the post office to be careful. Pulitzer Prize winners are heavy. There’s a lot of metaphor in there. Mountains, rivers, oceans, the cosmos. Waiting takes on an entirely different tone. You are almost published. You feel a twinge of guilt for accusing all agents of being crack-addled, borderline retarded, cultural eunuchs. Yours is most definitely an exception, a devoted maverick carrying the torch of good taste. You are smitten, envisioning a long, glorious life together, imbued with royalties, movie rights, and children named for one another. You will have dinner in hip New York restaurants, and wax nostalgic about your climb to the top. You are in the gatehouse of Hardcover Heaven, the most expansive estate on the exclusive drive. The gate is open. Your waiting is a formality; the butler will arrive soon. You have told a few select friends about glimpses of its opulent façade in the near distance, omitting the part about the electric fence, the armed guards, the vicious dogs, the owner’s prized collection of piranhas. Your friends remind you that they would like an autographed first edition, and jockey for inclusion on the Acknowledgments page. You vacillate between rapture and wanting to vomit. Follow your dreams. You receive word somewhere between three days and ten months. The envelope is thin, yet with a proper return address, not in your hand. You open it with a vague sense of maybe not. There is a flickering scotoma in your mind’s eye, possibly fireworks of elation, yet typically preceding migraine. You avert your gaze from the body of the text, urging the euphoric feeling to linger a bit longer, clinging to its pants leg as it drags you across the floor. Ultimately, you acquiesce, and read the elegant letterhead, noting the date, your address, and “Dear _____.” The opening words, “Many thanks,” are polluted by a lachrymose, “Unfortunately,” followed by more thanks. The agent – a sightless retard in savant’s clothing - has declined your manuscript, encouraging you to look elsewhere so that you do not escape. Though not stated explicitly, instinct tells you that the fraud police have been called. Stricken with panic, you look around, and the tony estates suddenly appear forbidding, the recently-open gate closing with a loud, clang. Sirens wail in the distance. As a break from the rain, it starts sleeting. A frigid wind howls, akin to breathy laughter of a gaggle of malicious gods. Clutching the letter in your clammy hand, you run haphazardly away, slipping on patches of ice and slush. Follow your dreams. You look everywhere, yet the trail eludes you. You imagine your sherpa curled up in a fetal position in bed, dead from a stroke, rooting in the liquor cabinet, or waiting for you at the employment office, where you are to apply for steady work mowing grass for the highway department. You find temporary shelter, and re-read the agent’s words, in a strict ratio of 1:50,000 of your novel. Though the conclusion is clear, motivations swirl like cigarette butts in your life’s toilet. Pithy platitudes express regret at the state of the literary market, punctuated by disclaimers about the subjectivity of taste – implying in a rather offhanded way that either your work tastes bad, or the agent has bad taste. The agent goes on to wish you good luck with someone else, akin to the heart-shattering inscription in your high school yearbook from a crush, proclaiming you to be such a great friend. The initial rush of excitement at having someone of such power and prestige even wanting to consider your work is supplanted by a disturbing sense that you have shown an expert your baby, and they have handed it back at arm’s length, hoping to never see such disfigurement again. Follow your dreams. You bury the malevolent missive in the burgeoning file with the others, and remember to breathe. You have no choice but to trust the funky foreigner, leading you along this cruel path. Your sherpa might not protect you, but you will surely perish without him. Maybe you go for a drive, reminding yourself of the common experience of so many authors you admire. Years of thankless, fruitless labor. Scathing self-doubt atop existential gloom. Boxes stuffed with rejection slips. Crates, really. And, yes, ultimate ascension to the pinnacle of the published. Genius often goes unrecognized for many years. Then again, so do heart disease, learning disability, and depression, factoids you would rather not consider. You go to the bookstore and flip through the opening pages of whatever drivel is displayed in the New Releases section. You scoff: How do these hacks make it? Misery enjoys company, yet thrives trashing the efforts of others. You feel a little better. You get drunk. Eat junk food. Chain smoke. Channel-surf. Follow your dreams. It is easy to become bitter, or jaded, when your dream eludes you for longer than your endurance readily allows. You doubt the reliability of your sherpa. Gasping for air, sweating, bleeding, stricken with dysentery and lung disease, you pledge to kill the bastard the next time he shows his goblin head. Your trek becomes a safari of sorts, where you stalk your dream, determined to take aim and fire a single bullet through its aorta. To mollify your anger, you imagine unsheathing a Bowie knife, slicing its head off, and mounting it on the wall. Maybe you wonder if you’ve really been chasing the dream of another – an old girlfriend, overbearing parent, the chorus of inadequacy babbling in your ears for you to show them – a bloodthirsty fiend more likely than not to turn and kill you first. Follow your dreams. The path your sherpa chooses is often dark and claustrophobic, a cliff-edge labyrinth. You have no choice but to feel your way along, clinging to slippery toeholds of process. You are a literary writer, devoted to your craft like a gallant knight in the bloody crusade against dullness. You promised Vonnegut, or Austen, or Faulkner, or Woolf, that you would not let them down. You write because you love it, hate it, and love it some more. Writing is a four-way intersection between heroin addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, meditation, and kaffee klatsch with the saints. If you do get published, it will be on your terms. You shut the door on the existential wind howling from your superego, sit, and write eight pages. Follow your dreams. Dreams are dynamic. We do not arrive at them. They are ideals which inspire us to follow whatever guide resides in our souls, through a sequence of grueling internal and external trials. Thus, getting published is not a dream (nor fame and fortune), but an awake approximation of the dream. Sometimes it is better, sometimes worse, always real. Of course, I haven’t made it that far yet, so this is speculation; my castle, my air, my sherpa. I leave it to more seasoned travelers to fill in the details. Regardless, I surmise that after a time in the sun for those of us so fortunate to make it through, another castle will appear in the distance, with an intervening expanse of uncharted, forbidding terrain. Our sherpas will urge us after it. Dress warmly, and wear good shoes.
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