Schmoozing and Boozing

Every career has its distinct sinful predilections: politicians have hookers; bankers have embezzling; musicians and moviemakers have imitations and outright theft of ideas. (What else can explain two movies this spring season about "friends with benefits"?) But for the publishing world--for writers and editors alike--it's always been the cocktail hour, the three-martini lunch, and the long whiskey hours of creation. Yes, booze has always had a central place in the world of literature, and not just for the writer pouring over manuscript pages late into the night.

In his Townies column today for The New York Times, writer and former editor at Harper's Magazine Theodore Ross delves into the rituals of the office cocktail, and how alcohol acts like a lubricant when it comes to talking shop, and making books. "The past few weeks the better part of my social life has revolved around drinks," he says, as he looks back on his last days in the office. "Publishing tends to liberally grease the runners of those it transports out the door." He's not wrong: whenever someone departs our offices, we often salute them with Dixie cups full of champagne, and then follow them out of the office with a happy hour nearby. But the tradition applies beyond farewells: Fridays at Five, chats with agents and authors outside the office, schmoozing at book parties and literary events. After a while, you start to feel like an extra on "Mad Men," even if you don't have a bar cart of mixers in your office.

Of course, this trend in the literary world is also famously destructive. Dozens of history's most brilliant writers, editors, and agents have been documented as alcoholics and party people. When you look back at their names--John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and so on--it's impossible to separate their reputations as artists from their reputations as drinkers. Some say it's the process of creation that makes them hit the bottle--after writing his masterpiece In Cold Blood, many said Truman Capote was so devastated by what he'd experienced in his bond with the executed murderer Perry Smith that it drove him to drink, and he was never the same after that. One has to wonder if it was the mood of the time to drink and socialize--the cocktail parties of the Paris Review back in the day were infamously debaucherous--or if it was the condition of creation. Is it an indispensable part of the life of the written word, to soak oneself with a bottle of gin?

But I don't mean to get too down on your social lubricant of choice--because alcohol does have one very good impact on the writerly experience: for those that can hold it and not fall asleep too quickly, it has a great reputation for making writers bolder, speaking their minds. (This was parodied to hilarious effect on a recent episode of Glee, in which the club's main diva readied herself with a glass of rose as she prepared to call someone to ask them out--the idea being, if she experienced more heartbreak, she'd have something worth writing songs about.) I'd heard multitudes of writing student friends talk about throwing back a martini before sitting down to write, to quiet the editorial voices in their head. Yes, this is psychosomatic drinking, but it can have real-world benefits every now and then. At the literary event I attended last night, the booze made sense: it was a Q&A at Powerhouse Books with Gabrielle Hamilton, the brilliant chef from Prune who has just written her memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter. I devoured a rough copy of the manuscript several weeks ago, and haven't been able to stop raving about it since. As I sat in this Q&A, listening to this funny, humble, beautifully unpretentious woman talk about her career in cooking, I sipped a complimentary cup of wine and felt emboldened to contribute to the discussion. The wine did much more than taste good, it may me brave enough to talk to a writer who had inspired and moved me through her work. If there's something to blame on the alcohol, I'm glad it was the chance to participate in a conversation about how we make books that make us better. And then we go home and throw back a few in anticipation of the work ahead...

To Blog or Not to Blog

A few days ago, a story was publishing in Chicago Business about bloggers quitting their web gigs. The bloggers interviewed had a handful of reasons for abandoning their web writing: too little public recognition, too much time required, and too small a chance of going viral and becoming profitable. (Millions of blogs go unrecognized every day, and the ones that do go viral--Stuff White People Like, The Julie/Julia Project--usually have very, very commercial appeal that helps them move beyond the online community.) Some of them have moved their writing to Facebook and Twitter, which require less of a word count but can have exponentially more readership. Raanan Bar-Cohen, vice-president of media services for the blogging platform WordPress, says that for the blogs that end up becoming big, "the feedback is as or more important than the actual posts.” In short, who reads the blog is far more important than what they're reading.

This story wasn't completely surprising to me--I've seen too many of my favorite blogs go silent or mostly mute after the lucky blogger gets a book deal. And that's not necessarily bad: shouldn't an unpaid online writing gig eventually be abandoned in the pursuit of a paid, more commercially legitimized opportunity? But what's interesting to me, as a blogger not only for TK, but also on two separate blogs of my own making, is the question of which is more valuable for the development of a writing career: writing every day, or writing really well? Are these contradictions in terms?

Successful writers report a multitude of techniques for getting their work done. Some have to set clear hours every day, often in cafes or restaurants that let them sit for hours nursing a cup of coffee. Some rent offices outside of their homes, creating workplaces of their own. Some turn off Internet access and unplug their phones so there's no chance of being disrupted. (Jonathan Franzen said, "It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,"; Jonathan Lethem has gone so far as to disable an old Mac laptop so it functions like a typewriter, and Etsy sells typewriters that connect to computer harddrives by way of a USB port.) The monastic techniques that a writer has to use to get into a perfect creative state of mind are admirable...yet there are a multitude of budding writers all over the world who have to fit in time for writing while working their desk jobs. Carving out ten minutes here or there, churning out blog posts on their lunch break, these writers don't have the luxury of spending the day in a coffee shop spinning stories as pleasantly unobtrusive music plays in the background. As the saying goes, "Don't quit your day job." When asking a friend of mine how she manages to fit writing in with her office job, she says that she stays up until two in the morning almost every night just to get a few extra hours of writing time. "Coffee," she said. "Coffee helps a lot."

But does writing every day, making the time however your life allows for it, really make good writing? Can you force the work to just come to you? Some writers take as long as 10 years to develop a novel, some even longer. (J. Franz, Junot Diaz, Toni Morrison, and many, many more.) Great pieces of non-fiction seem in constant genesis, marinating through years of research, their stories changing dramatically as the results come in. (My two favorite pieces of non-fiction from last year, The Emperor of All Maladies and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, made the writing of the work as major a plot point as the work itself.) Many writers claim that they had to have been at a particular point in their lives to write certain stories, experiencing a burst of energy and passion that forces the book into existence. Could that same result have been reached if they were simply trying to sit down every day and produce 10 pages of copy, no matter what the results? And furthermore, could they have produced something of true quality if it was always going to be published day-of-genesis, as is the way of blogging your work?

I've started to believe that in order to achieve your dreams, you have to both work the job you want and the job you have at the same time. Blogging gives writers the opportunity to find an audience immediately, virally, making their work available for anyone who wants to read it. You don't have to quit your day job to be a published writer, and assuming you can make the time to write regularly, it can become a real passion, hobby, and career opportunity. And it is immensely gratifying to get comments on your work from your web readers--I know us at TK are thrilled whenever we find a new reader has come to the site, or commented on a particularly difficult post. But you also have to wonder how the writing would change, the quality and the quantity, if it was done at a distance from the digital world. Perhaps one of us has the great American book criticism in her after all...