Every so often, an eminently practical writing-related book will bash me on the head at just the right moment.I may have that somewhat backwards: it's actually the timing of my exposure to it that makes a book personally practical. Even if the book is full of fabulous wisdom, without some sort of immediate application to my creative life it often becomes theoretical, something that I might use when I'm in a better position to apply its ideas. But the right book at the right time leaves a lasting and valuable impression, like Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. I was a lot younger and a lot more stoned when I read that, and her mixture of writing instruction and Zen teaching was just what my freaky long-haired mind needed at the time.
This week, I'm rapidly absorbing the contents of Jeff VanderMeer's Booklife (recommended by the unintentionally hair-flippin' Justine), and it's already made that kind of impression.
I've written that it's pointless to figure out how to sell a book before you've figured out how to write it, and I still think that's true. Booklife is different. It's not a book about how to write or how to sell what you've written, although it does deal with those subjects. It's a strategic primer about how to create and nourish a writing career, written with a long-term perspective that focuses on maintaining creative balance in your life. Yes, it explores 21st-century marketing and the publishing industry. But instead of dealing with explicit tactics such as polishing up an elevator pitch for the novel you're building at the moment, it places self-promotion within the more holistic contexts of maintaining public and private boundaries, identifying and nurturing your strengths, and protecting yourself from the overt vagaries and subtle hazards of a writing lifestyle.
One of the ways that a book like this can set off nice tingly harmonics in my little corner of reality is when it explicitly endorses actions I've either been considering or am already undertaking (in other words, it's fantastic because it agrees with me and thus makes me right). But no matter what your career plans are, if you're in a place where you're mostly comfortable with working on the continuous refinement of your writing craft, this is a fine long-term vision to feed your mind.
There are other books that claim to be about Building Your Writing Life and other, similarly pithy phrases, but for some reason VanderMeer's book resonates with me now in a way that others haven't. This isn't really a review, because I haven't quite finished it yet and I haven't fully identified what the reasons behind that resonance are. Call it an enthusiastic mid-read endorsement. Unlike a promising novel where there's always the possibility that the author will wreck the ending in an orgy of infuriating screwed-poochery, I'm confident that Booklife is going to keep delivering useful insights and that I'll be revisting it to gain more in the future.
You can find Jeff VanderMeer and various guests over at Ecstatic Days.
UPDATE
Read a proper review over at Simon's Groove. [Via Tribal Writer.]
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