Keeping Your Soul Work Alive:

A Meditation on Writing and Self-Publishing

by D. Patrick Miller

Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords

© 2010 BY D. PATRICK MILLER

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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See all of D. Patrick Miller’s e-books here:

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* * * *

I make most of my living these days from editing, critiques, and

publishing consultations – and less of a living from publishing my own

books. I’ve been editing from the beginning of my alleged career, when

double duty as a typesetter and reporter at a weekly newspaper necessitated

learning the skills of copy-editing and copy-amputating along with the craft

of writing. Since then I have critiqued hundreds of manuscripts and edited

many books bound for publication, along with co-writing, ghostwriting, and

working with editors on my own books. I’ve helped prepare books for a

well-known New York literary agency, as well as a number of major

publishing houses, including Viking, Doubleday, Crown, JP Tarcher, and

John Wiley & Sons.

Thus I’ve had considerable experience dealing with the tempestuous egos of

writers who are determined to defend their awkward sentence constructions, florid

overwriting, and clichéd expressions almost to the death. When I am edited by someone

else, I will likewise defend my own stylistic weaknesses nigh unto the bitter end.

Whether I am dealing with my own protests or those of my clients, I still marvel over the

remarkably thin and transparent skins of all writers. Why, I’ve often wondered, are we

so goddamn sensitive?

The cynic may answer that all of us ink-stained wretches (including the hip,

contemporary species of digital wretches) are just that: hopelessly neurotic folk trying to

sort out their hapless, unworkable lives through endless writin’ and ruminatin’, and

coming up with so little that’s truly defensible that the mere writing becomes more dear

to them than life itself. My own take is more charitable: I believe that most writing done

for creative purposes is truly soul work, the attempt to render in visible words the

invisible essence of our root consciousness.

Because all but the most formulaic or technical writing has a deep and

mysterious source, we tend to equate whatever we put down on paper or

the screen with our very soul. So when some smart-ass editor comes along and

suggests that what we have written isn’t very easy to read, or doesn’t make sense, or is

just plain stupid, we naturally take offense. The deepest, truest, purest part of ourselves

has just been attacked for no good reason, and we owe it to God and Cosmos to take up

arms against the infidels.

What I often have to remind myself — and gently suggest in various artful ways to

my editing clients — is that while our writing may indeed be inspired by the deepest and

truest parts of ourselves, those parts don’t get put down on paper in their pure form. The

mystical, creative oomph we feel in the gut has to rise up through countless layers of

thinking, feeling, word-associating, conscious and unconscious censorship, and sheer

egotism before it can find expression in words. Not surprisingly, this baroquely complex

translation process can too easily result in a hideous disguise of the original soulful

impulse.

If we recognize the hideous disguise and toss it in the real or electronic trashcan

before anyone else reads it, we’re lucky. That means we’re on the way to developing

some craft, which is the responsibility we owe to our soulful impulses. What hurts more

than anything is to mistake a total mistranslation of our soul for the soul itself, then

hand it over to an impartial reader — whom we naturally expect to collapse in grateful

tears upon the first reading — only to have our masterpiece handed back with a quizzical

look and the inquiry, “So is this supposed to be funny, or what?”

That said, a miracle still happens sometimes: we manage to write words that

shine like a dazzling facet of Truth itself, and our lives and those of others are changed

for the better because of it. I suspect that most writers take up their craft because they

have read such an illuminating fragment of soulfulness put down by a great poet,

novelist, or essayist, and then make the fateful decision: “I want to write like that

someday.” Of course you never do learn to write like that exactly; you may write better

or worse, but because your function is to translate a different bit of human soulfulness

for a different audience in a new time, you will always write differently than your heroes

or mentors.

If you are wise, you will remember that you are nothing more or less

than a translator of the collective human soul. Whether you sell a million copies

of a book or labor for a lifetime in obscurity, you are just the intermediary between the

giving aspect of your own spirit and the needs of readers who may be able to learn

something from you. Those who don’t need to learn anything from you never will, so it is

no use trying to convince them of your skill or sincerity. And the fact is that most people

will never even encounter your work, regardless of how wildly you succeed. Believe it or

not, the New York Times bestseller list means nothing to billions of people across the

world.

I mention that deflating fact because the soul work of writing needs an almost

constant infusion of humility to keep it focused and true. Because soul is a sort of

psychic ether that everyone shares, it is all too easy to globalize the significance of your

soul work in your mind. You know when you’ve just written down a gem of universal

truth (that is, until you show it to an editor) so you sensibly conclude that it should be

read and appreciated by the whole world. Right away! And you naturally expect a

magazine or book publisher to do that instantaneous worldwide distribution for you.

How it might get done is not your business, but theirs. After all, you’re working on a

higher plane — or is it a deeper level? At any rate, you’re a soul worker, not a

salesperson.

When you become your own publisher, you swiftly become aware of

the whole world’s stubborn resistance to hearing your soul messages. Even

with years of experience packaging, producing, and promoting my own books, I was still

shocked to discover how little response I would get from finely-crafted advertising and

publicity, tastefully placed in just the right media with exquisite timing. I was stunned to

witness how the shrewdly-executed launch of my latest title resulted not in an

overwhelming flood of orders, but an entirely manageable trickle. And though I had the

good fortune of working with a reliable national distributor, I was always disheartened

when that distributor’s statements regularly showed significant numbers of my books

coming back from bookstores after just a few months of shelf life. Books that

horrifyingly come back like that are called “returns” in the trade; many a carcass of an

independent publisher has been crushed under the smothering weight of returns.

There are other spine-chilling aspects of the book business that I could relate

here, but I don’t want to scare off potential self-publishers who may be among my

audience at the moment. For publishing is truly a hero’s journey that should not and

would not be undertaken by any sensible person who was properly forewarned. Like

Jonah, Odysseus, or Gilligan, you have to sail into the breach yourself and face the killer

whales, perfect storms, and situational comedies of such a voyage without a decent inner

tube, much less a lifeboat. There’s no point in being prematurely frightened away from

this risky undertaking when you will learn so much more from being maturely

frightened once you are too far gone to swim safely back to shore.

But the enthusiasm of would-be-published writers is virtually impossible to

dampen. And I believe that ever-upwelling enthusiasm has as much to do with the

natural impetus of soul work as it does with mere egotism or wishful thinking.

In fact I have come to see the struggle to write well and share one’s

writing as a spiritual path in its own right — a path in which disappointment

and exasperation teach the seeker just as much as vision and inspiration. To

stay on the path means that you must increasingly become both tough and forgiving,

hardened and softened, skeptical and idealistic. As you mature, you will increasingly

appreciate the joyful hardship of writing for its own sake, and worry less about whether

you make a fortune (or even a living) by it. That means you will become an ever more

effective medium for your soul’s timeless expression while becoming less attached to

your personal, temporal stake in it.

This ennobling process is rarely pleasant, and one doesn’t usually feel or act very

spiritual as the raiments of pride and self-esteem are progressively shredded before your

very eyes. But if you are a serious writer, you’ll have to endure this process of internal

purification regardless of your degree of external success. Publishing may be an

especially insane and unkind business these days, but I cannot imagine it ever becoming

perfectly ordered and fair. If so, those of us working hard to convey the very stuff of the

human soul in mere words would have to go elsewhere for the karmic kicks in the teeth

that serve to make us eloquent, insightful, and maybe a little bit wise.

See all of D. Patrick Miller’s e-books here:

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/fearlessbooks

And his website: http:// www.fearlessbooks.com