Booklife | Reviews

Booklife

'The question is, how do I as a writer make all this work for me rather than being swamped by it.'

'To achieve a sustainable career success, the writer needs vision, centeredness, adaptability and honesty, and to be capable of taking risks..'

'This is, as has already been noted, not a how-to manual for writers but if you want to more fully understand the commitment you make to yourself and to others as a writer, this book is essential..'

Indeed, what is a ‘book life'? VanderMeer sees the ‘book' as any creative project requiring text, be it a traditional print book, an e-book or a podcast. The aim is to do things that support that book life in a positive way rather than undermining it. And the point of Booklife is to provide a strategic and tactical guide to being a writer in contemporary times. It is not a how-to guide to creating a blog or website, nor is it an instructional manual about writing. Instead, Booklife is a more subtle examination of the business of being a writer, intended to help the reader to create a modus operandi that works for them. It is a very personal engagement; no two people will come up with the same plan for a fulfilling writing life.

Undoubtedly the most powerful element of Booklife is the division between the Public Booklife and Private Booklife. The aims and goals for one are not always the same for the other and this needs to be carefully addressed. VanderMeer stresses the point that the arrival of the internet has irrevocably changed things for writers; they are now closer to their readers than ever before. Likewise, the internet has changed things for publishers as well. For both publisher and writer, ‘the traditional career and promotional models that once helped you to brand and leverage your creativity often don't work today'. The difficulty lies in understanding how to use these new tools to one's advantage without alienating potential readers and colleagues along the way.

To achieve a sustainable career success, the writer needs vision, centeredness, adaptability and honesty, and to be capable of taking risks. Beyond that, the writer needs to map the future, to have goals. This may be difficult for those who regard writing as an entirely organic creative process, but as VanderMeer shows, without forward planning, it is all too easy to not only lose sight of what you really want to do but to waste time on peripheral matters. Thus, effort put into thinking about how you present yourself publicly as a writer can never be wasted if it helps you to get it right from the very beginning. VanderMeer touches on a broad series of issues, from choosing the right channels for interacting with the world to understanding how the publishing world works, and learning how to carry out PR successfully, working with publishers, booksellers and the online world. VanderMeer draws extensively on his own experience to give an honest if sometimes painful account of how to get it right and how easily it goes wrong.

It's all too easy to devote so much time to maintaining one's public life as a writer that the actual writing itself can be overlooked., hence the need to maintain a Private Booklife. As VanderMeer puts it, the Private Booklife is ‘the engine that drives your creative life'. For this you need curiosity, receptivity, passion, imagination, discipline and endurance. Maintaining the private booklife might seem more mysterious because it is less easily quantified. In part it is to do with allowing oneself the space in which to think; in other words, eschewing those activities which constitute the public booklife, or else knowing when to put them on the back burner for a while, to concentrate on the writing.

Writing, as VanderMeer makes plain, is not about having the right notebook, the right pen and the right place to sit; these are mere distractions from what he calls the tactics of writing, thinking about prose, about structure, about the business of revising one's work, and about scheduling that work. It is also about habit - that is about doing what has worked so far over and over, and process, about seeing if these habits do actually work. Just as important as establishing a private booklife is protecting it. Threats come in all shapes and sizes, from simply not being able to go away from the internet to dealing with rejection and envy to one's own personal despair at not being able to make things work the way one would like them to.

Booklife is by no means a typical guide for writers and in that lies its greatest strength, I feel. Rather than worrying about plotting and dialogue and the usual concerns of authorship, it addresses fundamental issues concerning what it means to be a writer in the twenty-first century; what others expect of you and what you should reasonably expect of yourself. It counsels professionalism and courtesy and advises on how to make a good job of being a writer. It reminds writers that that they have responsibilities to others but also to themselves. It is filled with solid advice on negotiating the most worrying aspects of publishing a novel or story and explores various issues in a straightforward, down-to-earth way. This is, as has already been noted, not a how-to manual for writers but if you want to more fully understand the commitment you make to yourself and to others as a writer, this book is essential.