The Florida Department of Transportation has talented writers. “Camp in FLA parks,” a message on I-95 advised this spring, “not in the left lane.”
But the department needs editors. A current message reads: “Revere rode fast so you don’t have to.” Huh? Replace the “so” with an em dash and the sentence is just as strong and no longer confounding.
I finally read “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” the New Journalism classic by Gay Talese (included in the book Literary Journalism that I picked up at Big Apple Books the other Saturday). It lived up to its billing, capturing the mercurial singer who was warm and generous to his friends and cold and unforgiving to his enemies. And, of course, the piece is full of great lines. Listening to In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, Talese writes: “it was, like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac.”
My favorite Jan Morris passage is from Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (I used as the epigraph for A Way to See the World):
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or0 Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know that you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if only they knew it.
A fellow travel writer recently wrote about the decision he made years ago to go it alone, i.e., to stop sending his work to newspapers and magazines and to publish it himself in newsletters and blogs. Back then he could see, he wrote, where mainstream media was headed.
I admire people who possess the entrepreneurial skills to make a go of it by publishing themselves. Though I sometimes wonder if their dissatisfaction with mainstream media, their frustration with editors, their desire to “take control over their work” were all caused by a poor success-failure ratio when selling their work. One never sends rejections to oneself.
When you self-publish, you are a true independent, which means you miss out on the thrill of getting an acceptance from an editor at a magazine. And the delight is tied to a feeling of accomplishment that, no matter how proud you are of the piece you’ve written, doesn’t come with self-publication. No writer goes out for a celebratory dinner after appearing in his own newsletter. Also, publishing in a magazine, especially a general interest magazine, gets you “accidental readers” who would never have found you on the internet because they had – or thought they had – no interest in your subject.
And then there are the economics. To make a go of it as a writer/publisher, you have to appeal to a large audience, which in travel means focusing heavily on information and tips, the practical stuff that the majority of travelers want. The writer referred to earlier has been very successful since going independent. “Sponsored posts and brand deals have been flowing like a wide-open faucet,” he wrote, “and I'm having trouble keeping track of the orders. I'm actually glad I'm not traveling this month because I've got so much content to crank out that I'm getting paid well for.”
There were words and phrases in that passage that gave me pause. “Sponsored posts” and “brand deals” suggest corporate partnerships, which are probably a necessity in his chosen field but smack to me, an old newspaper guy, of a conflict of interest. So perhaps he’s not that independent after all. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not all that eager to read the “content” that any writer is about to “crank out.” When I was a travel editor, I used to complain about the freelancers who took free trips and then “cranked out” articles that all sounded the same. Ah, but I was an editor, the stickler this writer no longer has to deal with.
Czesław Miłosz famously said, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Blake Morrison, in his new book On Memoir: An A-Z of Life Writing, has a different and brighter take on it: “When a writer is born into a family, that family will have an afterlife.”
I’ve been cleaning out the closet in my office, which means going through letters, manuscripts, magazines, newspapers – all the detritus of a life, as they used to say, in letters. And I’ve been struck by how much has shrunk since I began my career. I’m finding New Yorkers that ran to over 100 pages, New York Times Book Reviews that were thick with ads, newspaper Travel sections that featured not only travel stories but reviews of new travel books. And not that long ago. My second book, which came out in 2003, got mentions in the travel sections of the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. This would be OK, sort of, if everything that used to appear in print now appeared online, but it doesn’t. Of course, I knew there was a diminution in the world of books and literature, but seeing it so starkly, in the recesses of my closet, is making house cleaning all the more unpleasant.
(Note: My computer has been so unreliable I bought a new one, which is going to be installed on Thursday. So if there are no blogs next week, you'll know why.)