The Grasshopper Issue #75: Milestones

Feedback, with dates and deadlines

Photo by Rutu Bhavsar on Unsplash

Sounds a little boring doesn’t it? Goal setting, building habits, consistency, blah, blah, blah? Not for me*. I’m not owned by the numbers but I am definitely aware of them and how they help me understand my readers and the value of my work.

*This is a lie. I realized it when rereading before publishing. I work at all these things. The stuff you tell yourself!

Think about that. The value of your work. One of the most common complaints in modern society is the feeling that you are not appreciated, that your work is not of value to others. As a writer I know well the feeling of sending something out there and hearing nothing. Or publishing a book and hearing nothing except a quarterly royalty report, if you’re lucky.

Do readers like it? What do they like or dislike? Does anyone know I’m out here? Most writers know these questions pretty well but answers, historically, have been hard to get unless you hit a home run.

Home runs are rare throughout life. I’m happy to just get a hit. Or a shot on goal, or maybe just a thumbs up. We’re easy to please or we just don’t care, which is just a way of not dealing with things not going our way,

Which is why we set goals or milestone events. Maybe a hundredth subscriber to your newsletter, or reaching a thousand followers, or maybe just getting a few comments here and there. They all validate that we actually exist as writers.

I was going to title this post, Are You A Writer?, in part because I know writers are an insecure bunch, not sure if we have ‘qualified’ to claim that title. There are no certificates declaring you to be a writer, thank god. And, I’m sorry to say, that MFA in Creative Writing does not make you a writer.

I’ll be honest, you should have put that money away and just wrote your ass off for those years, but that’s my opinion. Writers write. 

But I have a personal criteria my readers here have heard ad nauseum (which means until it makes you throw up). Writers write, and publish. If you do those things you can call yourself a writer.

A good writer? That’s a whole different thing. But being a writer in your own mind is a useful first step.

So, how do I personally set and use milestones? I have an example I’m using right now. A few weeks ago I wrote about a life changing event and how it led to having to face some difficult facts about how I was living my life. If you read back a few issues you can learn about it, but trust me, it has been a huge deal.

But I decided The Grasshopper was not the best forum for me to share how this challenge has been affecting my life. This is because this newsletter is not about addiction, personal growth, or confessional writing except as it affects our existence as writers, as it definitely does.

But I had some really powerful and positive feedback from readers when I told my story, or at least its origin. And I thought other readers might find value in my ongoing story of dealing with a major life change, fortunately for the better, so far.

(Unofficial survey question: should I write about personal change and growth here?)

So, being a writer, I started writing about it on a day to day basis and I still am. But being me, I also from day one started thinking about what I can do with this thing growing in my Docs folder. Yesterday it was ten thousand words and they keep piling up.

It has a title, The Wake Up Call, and a theme which I’ll talk about when it is something. Something means when I publish it because that is what I do. I am not, as I have made clear here, a diarist or a journal keeper.

I’m a publish or perish guy.

So, somewhere in my head I’m formulating a milestone for this project, maybe it becomes a book. I could serialize it here on a Substack. Who knows and, honestly, at this stage, who cares. I’m trying not to, but my little brain just can’t write something I think has value and not think about getting it in front of readers.

In this case, the story that is unfolding may be useful in helping someone else deal with their own demons and addictions so I feel a responsibility to do something with it when it’s ready.

Which means my milestone now has a purpose, a mission. Whew! That’s a little scary, but also pretty cool.

And that milestone has become very important to me in my new, improved (I think) life.

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Quite a few novelists have admitted to writing the end of their stories first. I can analyze this but I’d rather not because I could never do that. It implies I knew all along how the story would end. That’s no fun, not even for the storyteller.

A good ending is great but an ending that you don’t see coming is more my speed. I’m a selfish fiction writer in that I love being surprised and finding a story has gone off on its own. What happens when we climb over that distant hill? One way to find out. Climb it.

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Because American politics is one of the topics I write about regularly, I can’t help but think we are entering some very dark times, if you can imagine that. And the temperature of the times always affects the writing of those times. After all, how many dystopian stories did we see coming out of the Covid lockdown? (Too many, imho)

But when the outside world seems to be collapsing in on itself, as a writer you have lots of choices. Write about personal change. Write about how distant events like a government shutdown are filtering down to daily life. Find the mysteries in your neighborhood; believe me they are there.

Writing, to me, is the sign of an active inner life. Right now, I’m personally seeking to expand that inner life outward after years of building unconscious limits, fences around my life. Those got blown away recently and that is amazing, to say the least.

It’s why I shifted gears and find myself writing about those inner things more than I have in the past. To be honest, on some level it’s all material. Experience informs our ability to light up the world with words, which is what I believe is at the core of why we write.

Not money, not notoriety, not a side hustle. Those are material things and all material things start falling to pieces as soon as they are new. It’s called entropy, the universal tendency of things to fall apart. But good writing seems to resist this, at least until it is no longer relevant.

I’ve been writing The Grasshopper for quite a while and the words add up. All in, at least 100,000 in the past eighteen months, probably more. It’s been useful to me as a writer as a way to muse a bit about this strange thing we do, to assemble words and convey feelings and ideas with a group of strangers who have seen something in it enough to give me permission to keep going.

That’s all a subscription is, permission. If it is paid, it’s a vote of ‘keep it up’, which is always amazing, but just having permission to keep sharing is pretty cool. Thank you.

Because I am experiencing accelerated change right now, you may see me moving rapidly from topic to topic. My mind is a bit on hyperdrive these days so…I know this will settle and new focus will emerge. But that’s why we do this, right?

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75 issues. I suppose that’s a milestone of sorts, but that writing and the time involved went by in a whirl. Some day I’ll go back and see if I see any pattern changes in what I wrote about, the voice, and if this writing has reflected the extremely complex eighteen months it covers for me personally.

I keep talking about the changes I have found myself immersed in. After a gradual withdrawal from society, unintentional, I have plunged back into the beautiful messiness of life it appears I was avoiding. As a result, my writing is changing, I believe for the better.

It’s natural for a newsletter like this to be somewhat inward focused. It always seems to me like a one on one conversation with readers, although it’s really one-sided with me gabbing and rambling about a bit.

But, I’m thinking I need to expand the perspective here. So watch for some changes ahead.

The Indian writer Gita Mehta died last week, age eighty. Her late husband Sonny Mehta, was a legendary New York book editor, but I knew her from a novel, A River Sutra, I probably read thirty years ago. It is one of those books you find yourself circling back to over the years.

The story, and it is told as a classic oral story in the first person by a retired Indian government official who has been given a government traveler’s house to manage in his retirement. These homes, a remnant of the pre-British Raj period, were used by travelers on tour or following a spiritual path.

The house, on a bluff overlooking the Narmada, one of the sacred rivers of India, is a witness to the holy history of the water and the pilgrims and other travelers who stay there.

For me, an armchair traveler who has not made it to India, the interwoven stories the narrator tells are an intriguing combination of the spiritual and the modern world. The main character is the river itself, always there and always passing by, a classic metaphor in Hinduism and Buddhism, for both living in the present and the passage of time.

It’s a wonderful book and a masterclass in storytelling.

I have to believe that writing this kind of story, when everything seems to naturally progress and encapsulate the mundane, the mysterious, and the ecstatic, may be a one time gift to a writer. I think of a classic like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, a short novel unlike anything else he wrote.

Hesse’s other novels, like Demian or The Glass Bead Game, were dense, Germanic stories about characters seeking enlightenment but wrapping it in intellectual gobbledygook. When I was younger, post beat era, they were the rage, but they have not aged well.

They hinted at and circled around inner meaning and an expanded life, but never got there for the reader. Great when you are on a quest, but not so great when you need the real stuff. Oddly enough, Siddhartha delivers the real stuff in a simple fable as old as time.

I still get that from A River Sutra after all these years. Sometimes, as a writer, you tap out a story and it is just right. Stick with it because if this happens for you, everything becomes worth it.

Did you write today?

Martin

1957 words

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