Life Book (15)

Collaboration and Independence

“I want to know you’re there, but I want to be alone.”—Virginia Woolf

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(This week I’m merging Life Book and non-Life Book thoughts. It may be an awkward merger and may just last this week. Thank you for bearing with me.)

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A friend and I sat over coffee the other week and dreamed up a writing retreat, just a small one: 5-10 writers for a few days, or some other small amount of time that would allow people with kids to come. For years, two other friends and I met for what we called “DIY writing retreats.” We went somewhere for at least a few days, often an Airbnb or a friend’s home, and wrote all day in our bedrooms. We said vacant hellos over lunch, went for a walk or something similar, returned to our rooms, and wrote until dinner. Then we cooked, drank wine, chatted about our writing and the writing business, and some nights, we read aloud from what we’d written that day. Coffee friend and I imagined the same set up, and maybe a bonfire one night, a bit of critiquing and editing if anyone wanted, three days of rest and writing and cooking and connection. We could even add in yoga or hiking or whatever else people wanted. My energy level rose as we talked, and it appeared that hers did too.

Art may well thrive with more balance than many of us are able to achieve lately: a balance of solitude and community, quiet and noise, thinking and feeling, inspiration and calm.

My most valued memories of writing are those moments when I in fact forget that I am writing and lose track of time. When the writing seems to write itself. Those moments of flow. (Has anyone read Johann Hari’s very good book, Stolen Focus? I’m reading his thoughts on flow now.)

Other valued memories that pertain to writing are the moments of connection that I’ve been hugely lucky to forge with other writers, whether through writing, publishing, or my days as an acquiring editor, or working on The Best American Short Stories, with Plympton, or with HPE clients. I’ve been doing this stuff for so long that honestly, some days it feels as if I’ve met and even gotten to work with most longtime fiction writers in this country. Two writers who come together and are authentic and non-competitive can create a third entity, and that entity, that connection can help sustain and feed their art.

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I set out to write Life Book in order to understand my own changing views of independence, and how these have been informed by our national obsession with independence. We are a country that was formed in opposition to another country. In order to become ourselves, we espoused the value of individualism.

A trained Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted to develop and incorporate intellectual independence from Europe. This he knew would help cement our political independence. In 1832, he left the church. In 1834, he moved into a house called the Old Manse in Concord, and from here he could see the Old North Bridge, the location of the “shot heard round the world” that ignited the American Revolution. In 1837, he delivered his famous speech, “The American Scholar.” He said, “It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.” He demanded an American poetry and philosophy, one free of tradition (and even religion). Oliver Wendell Holmes called it “Our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” For Emerson, divinity could only be found through individuality within a free society.

After they met in 1837, Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who was 14 years younger, regularly engaged in heady philosophical discussions, served as readers for each other, and went on nature walks around Concord. Emerson educated Thoreau about Transcendentalism, and encouraged him to keep a journal. Thoreau eventually proposed that he clear a certain part of Emerson’s property (the “Briars”) and build a small structure there. This, of course, would become his shack near Walden Pond.

Concord literary history is a history of friendship and artistic collaboration. Emerson was what we might now call an influencer.

Emerson’s impact on Thoreau has been written about exhaustively, but less known is how Thoreau served as Emerson’s muse in writing “Self-Reliance.” Emerson often wrote down Thoreau’s casual asides and worked them into a lecture. Both men deeply respected nature, although Emerson in a more cerebral way.

Thoreau is often thought of as an oddball, a crusty man who hid from and had no interest in society. In fact, he was intensely self-conscious. In 1851, he wrote, “I lose my friends by my own ill treatment, and ill valuing of them, prophaning of them, cheapening of them.” Thoreau deeply valued friendship as a “glowing furnace in which all impurities are consumed.” He wasn’t, unfortunately, much good at it. “Would not a friend enhance the beauty of the landscape as much as a deer or hare?” In many ways, friendship undergirds Thoreau’s philosophies of environmentalism. “To insure health,” Thoreau wrote, “a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one; he must be conscious of a friendliness in her; when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap.”

Thoreau and Emerson’s friendship grew challenging by the mid 1840’s. Emerson could be competitive, Thoreau ungrateful. Emerson was perplexed by Thoreau’s earthiness, and Thoreau by Emerson’s pandering to the more famous. Thoreau died at the age of 44, and Emerson gave a 7,500-word eulogy that in part criticized Thoreau’s aloofness and lack of ambition.

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Is there a form of contemporary art that’s more independent than writing? One needs only a laptop and time. Writing is a lonely act. Living can be a lonely act these days, thanks to remote work and technology and social media, which is fast becoming anything but social.

There are more and more freelance editors, it seems. I wonder if this is due to a shrinking publishing industry. Some of the best editors in the business have turned independent (or freelance) after leaving their jobs or being laid off. And so many exquisitely talented mid-list writers (non-bestsellers) can’t earn a living just teaching and writing any more, so they turn to freelance editing. Not enough agents have the time or bandwidth to edit, and even editors themselves are relying more on freelancers. This tends to happen at newer, smaller publishers, but not always.

I have talked to countless writers who feel that their agents and even occasionally their editors don’t edit enough anymore, don’t offer the kind of psychic support and timely feedback that they once did or that the authors wish they did. But there’s a stigma still amongst writers, agents, and publishers that comes with a writer hiring a freelance editor. I sign NDA’s for so many clients. We are supposed to write independently, aren’t we? We are supposed to be enough, and if not, our agents and editors are supposed to be enough.

Lately being a freelance editor feels like the strange culmination of a career spent with Houghton Mifflin, which became Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which later became Mariner (HarperCollins). As an independent editor, I can choose my clients. And they can choose me. It is a more pure collaboration, less dictated by luck and the market and the industry. If only publishers could pay for freelance editors. Unfortunately, this burden falls on writers. It’s a reasonable investment, though, given how hard it can be to get a good book deal.

Now that HPE has existed for over a year, and now that I’ve been working on Life Book for five or six months, I find myself wanting a freelance editor, a built-in reader who is not a friend, partner, or relative, because that gets messy. Writers often say they wrote a particular book because they wanted to read it. Maybe I became a freelance editor for a similar reason.