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Write Every Day: 21 August 02019
Aug. 21st, 2019 06:49 pmGreetings! This is the Write Every Day Check-in post for 21 August 02019.
This is going to sound so much like inside baseball, and I'm sorry about that, but not sorry enough not to subject you to it, because I think there's some relevance involved to the art and craft of writing.
So I peruse In The Library With The Lead Pipe on occasion, because there are times where I need a Clue about what goes on in the library world on topics that don't normally get covered by academic journals that talk about libraries and librarians. I've been mulling over “All I Did Was Get This Golden Ticket”: Negative Emotions, Cruel Optimisms, and the Library Job Search in my professional capacity, and I think it speaks a lot to the way that people get into school and look for library-related jobs, the promises they're sold about how many jobs will be available, and what kind of jobs they will be. Librarians are over-saturating their available job market with graduates and others, and it really makes me think that my employment was a lot less about having the skillset that my employer was looking for and more about being a body with the necessary credentials who could relocate to a system that had just passed a major funding increase and could afford to hire more people. I got lucky by being a person in the right place at the right time who could at least halfway-decently tell a story to children.
Which, if you think about it, is hell on your self-esteem and your conception of your skills. Like, that's the kind of combination you want to put together if you want to firmly ingrain impostor feelings in someone for the entirety of their career. And might be part of the push and drive that employed professionals have to constantly adding more and more things to what they do, because if you're not convinced that you're qualified for the job and have the requisite skills for it, trying to make yourself more indispensable to your employer and the public is one way of going at it. (That libraries are repeatedly being asked to do things they are not equipped, funded, or trained for is also an important factor in fostering impostor syndrome.)
Add into that mix the problem that a lot of the job of public librarianship is done to a public that will thank you for the information or technique that you provide for them in the moment, and then will use it, presumably, in their own lives, but only a precious few of them ever mention what came of it (and fewer still do it in writing).
So, as it is for writers, librarians' kudos and comments depend on other people. We put our work out there for everyone, because we think it's good work, and then we have to wait and see whether anyone leaves feedback. And while there are days where we go "hot damn, I am a badass at this work" (but those days are few and far between), much of the time we're all eyeing each other and going "why did that person get all the kudos and comments?" Because, as many professional writers have mentioned, being popular or getting super-popular is often a question of getting lucky and being in the right place at the right time. (Those same pieces of advice often then say "So, because you mostly can't control whether you're going to hit it big or not, keep writing, keep submitting, and set reasonable goals, like 'I'd like to be able to take a VIP tour through Disneyland once a decade' instead of 'If I don't make as much as that Fifty Shades of Trash did, everything will have been an abject failure.'"
Which is to say, from one who deals with these anxieties both professionally and in their spare time, solidarity.
I got ambushed by my WIP today, where I looked at a thing, at pacing, at a lot of other things, and realized I need to add a character having a minor major freakout over what happened because of the way I've been portraying them. Which adds words, and also another scene, and also messes with my already planned-out gimmick. Thankfully, I had been wondering what I was going to do with some of that gimmick still left to go, and by dint of awesome (or my brain deciding to work with me when it waylaid me), it looks like I'll be able to reset the chapter break and pull all of this new information in in such a way that it will ultimately end up being way more helpful at achieving my ends. Excelsior!
( It's tally time! )
This is going to sound so much like inside baseball, and I'm sorry about that, but not sorry enough not to subject you to it, because I think there's some relevance involved to the art and craft of writing.
So I peruse In The Library With The Lead Pipe on occasion, because there are times where I need a Clue about what goes on in the library world on topics that don't normally get covered by academic journals that talk about libraries and librarians. I've been mulling over “All I Did Was Get This Golden Ticket”: Negative Emotions, Cruel Optimisms, and the Library Job Search in my professional capacity, and I think it speaks a lot to the way that people get into school and look for library-related jobs, the promises they're sold about how many jobs will be available, and what kind of jobs they will be. Librarians are over-saturating their available job market with graduates and others, and it really makes me think that my employment was a lot less about having the skillset that my employer was looking for and more about being a body with the necessary credentials who could relocate to a system that had just passed a major funding increase and could afford to hire more people. I got lucky by being a person in the right place at the right time who could at least halfway-decently tell a story to children.
Which, if you think about it, is hell on your self-esteem and your conception of your skills. Like, that's the kind of combination you want to put together if you want to firmly ingrain impostor feelings in someone for the entirety of their career. And might be part of the push and drive that employed professionals have to constantly adding more and more things to what they do, because if you're not convinced that you're qualified for the job and have the requisite skills for it, trying to make yourself more indispensable to your employer and the public is one way of going at it. (That libraries are repeatedly being asked to do things they are not equipped, funded, or trained for is also an important factor in fostering impostor syndrome.)
Add into that mix the problem that a lot of the job of public librarianship is done to a public that will thank you for the information or technique that you provide for them in the moment, and then will use it, presumably, in their own lives, but only a precious few of them ever mention what came of it (and fewer still do it in writing).
So, as it is for writers, librarians' kudos and comments depend on other people. We put our work out there for everyone, because we think it's good work, and then we have to wait and see whether anyone leaves feedback. And while there are days where we go "hot damn, I am a badass at this work" (but those days are few and far between), much of the time we're all eyeing each other and going "why did that person get all the kudos and comments?" Because, as many professional writers have mentioned, being popular or getting super-popular is often a question of getting lucky and being in the right place at the right time. (Those same pieces of advice often then say "So, because you mostly can't control whether you're going to hit it big or not, keep writing, keep submitting, and set reasonable goals, like 'I'd like to be able to take a VIP tour through Disneyland once a decade' instead of 'If I don't make as much as that Fifty Shades of Trash did, everything will have been an abject failure.'"
Which is to say, from one who deals with these anxieties both professionally and in their spare time, solidarity.
I got ambushed by my WIP today, where I looked at a thing, at pacing, at a lot of other things, and realized I need to add a character having a minor major freakout over what happened because of the way I've been portraying them. Which adds words, and also another scene, and also messes with my already planned-out gimmick. Thankfully, I had been wondering what I was going to do with some of that gimmick still left to go, and by dint of awesome (or my brain deciding to work with me when it waylaid me), it looks like I'll be able to reset the chapter break and pull all of this new information in in such a way that it will ultimately end up being way more helpful at achieving my ends. Excelsior!
( It's tally time! )
