Identity, Transition, Fox Poo

If we’re being precise, I’ve been a trans-parent (someone with a transgender child) for over thirty years, but I didn’t know that until about twelve years ago.  The only amazing thing about my part in all this is that although I accept the concept, I still don’t understand.  I often create trans characters in my writing, but I can only write what I’ve witnessed, not what I’ve felt, experienced.

Big Nose Dog and I were taking the dull walk that day, a shorter trek squeezed in between rain showers.  The venture seemed ours alone – not even the buzzards had appeared.  While Big Nose sniffed every blade of grass in Yorkshire, I walked and waited and walked until my mind wandered to identity.

When I was in undergrad learning my developmental psychology, we were taught that identity was the task for the teen years.  If we think about ourselves as teens or about teens we know, it’s all pretty embarrassing.  You might be forgiven in feeling that adolescence should happen where there are no witnesses. 

But is that really about identity?  I don’t think so.  (And Erik Erikson rolls over in his grave.)  Teens know who they are (as much as anyone can know anything in only a dozen or so years).  They aren’t exploring identity, but how that person they know themselves to be will interface with society.  Which is why there’s so much rebellion about it. 

Anyone who’s lived through raising a toddler has witnessed their surprisingly strong personality emerge from what used to be a cute, burbling enfant.  And to be honest, when my son told me he was my son, not my daughter, I felt really stupid because it was so obvious that my child had never been a little girl.

And yet what many teens learn is how to subvert their identity in order to be accepted by the society that will sustain them for the rest of their lives.  We dole out pink passes to girls and blue to boys, put more money in military than education, reward beauty and athleticism over brains or innovation.

We all make compromises in order to get on, so why transition?  Why not just suck it up?  Transitioning isn’t an easy thing.  Not physically, psychologically, medically, socially, financially.  It can be dangerous.  It can be fatal.

So Big Nose has found something delightful to roll in, making little growly sounds of joy.  I let him, because he’s a dog, not because I appreciate smelling like fox poo.  That grey, solitary landscape around us is apt for 2014 as the Year of Rejection for my writing with the only reward, a dog who smells like shit.  For a brief moment, I think perhaps I should go back to my day job.

And then somehow all this connects me to my son, fiercely brave in his right to be.  Identity is the only thing we’re given to get through life.  A divine gift, perhaps.  Something brutally inevitable, the power of ME . . . well, a person just has to do it, don’t they?

Mad Farmers & Chocolate Pudding

Big Nose starts his walk.

So let me tell you about the Mad Farmer. Yesterday, when walking the Big Nose, we took the same path as always, but on the way up the slope in the second meadow, Big Nose got all excited. A long white leg had come through the hedge to touch him.  This long white leg was attached to a beautiful Brittany spaniel who was attached to a shouty man on a quad bike.  Mad Farmer.

Apparently Big Nose and I were on the wrong side of the field.  Rather than do a circumference of the field, we should have walked to the stile, turned and walked back.  The path isn’t marked in that way and to be honest, I didn’t consult any maps, just village advice when I started taking this walk.  In general, I’m quite open to correcting my mistakes if you’re respectful of my ignorance.

Mad Farmer began our relationship by screaming at me, soon followed by his female companion screaming also.  Someone who goes from zero to sixty in a fraction of a second, well he’s already made his mind up that I’m no good.  Worse, I couldn't see either of them through the bushes.  So I ignored them, walked up the wrong side of the field, quad bike and shouty couple on the other side of the hedge until I crossed the stile and went home.  I felt bad about their treatment of me for the rest of the day.

Big nose off the path.

I took that bad-feeling energy and wrote Mad Farmer into a scene in a humourous way, a little joke about what’s really a nasty piece of work.  That didn’t make the bad feeling go away, but it did do something productive with it.  And this morning, Mad Farmer & Co are another funny story.

Coincidentally, I’m at that point when a long term piece is being turfed out into the world.  There’s a whole lot of feelings balled up in that, but the icky one is, what happens if this doesn’t go anywhere?  What do I do next?  Is it time to give this all up?

The Butler said the most amazing thing to me.  You keep writing.  Isn’t he the perfect writer’s spouse?  Truly.  But his advice is perhaps the hardest in the world to follow.  Being a writer sometimes feels like swimming through chocolate pudding.  It’s a really big sacrifice to swim and not eat the pudding, cuz I love my chocolate.  By this I mean, the time I spend writing is time away from all the other wonders in life, with perhaps not all the gratification a lot of other jobs provide. 

I get discouraged, even with a Butler.  That discouragement more than anything else – poverty, colicky babies, a deluge of rejections coming through the mail slot – that will kill your writing.

The view

Earlier this week, I met a villager whom I’d only spoken to at a New Year’s Eve party.  She’s dog sitting and wanted to compare notes.  She knew I worked from home because I’m rather visible in my Writing Closet, but she didn’t know what I did.  I said, I’m a writer.  I saw it in her brain, the churning Do I Know You question.  That usually doesn’t turn out well.  So then I said, Not a very successful one.  I do it because it’s what I want to do.

Part of me said, what are you apologising for?  I don’t apologise for my gardening efforts or my knitting efforts or the fact my outfits never match.  But, I’m glad I said it because a really neat thing happened next.  All the muscles in the woman’s face opened up and she smiled.  She made some comment which said, that’s really wonderful that you’re doing what you want to do with your life.

It’s really wonderful and brave that you’re writing.  If this is the only sentence of this blog you remember, then keep it close.  Just that sentence.  Because it’s true. 

Long distance swimmers have people in boats to protect them from drowning, people shouting from the shore that yes indeed they will make it.  And if they get attacked by jellyfish, they get medical care.  Writers, some days all we have are Mad Farmers on the other side of the hedgerow screaming abuse.  The people on the shore tell us to get a real job.  The ones in the boats laugh at us.  When we get stung by rejections, no first aid.  Just those looks which say, you should’ve stayed out of the water.

The goal.

Think of the hardest thing you’ve ever done or had to endure.  Not something small.  The BIG one.  Think of that right now.  Think of the strength it took you to get through that.  You’re pretty remarkable, aren’t you?  You are.  That quality alone is something you should share.  And you do that most effectively through your writing.

Don’t let them stop you from writing, those Mad Farmers of the world.  Write.  Write.  Write.  And keep writing.

Ditch the Snake Oil

In order to be accepted as the creative genius that we are, we have to prove ourselves a top notch snake oil salesperson first.  Marketing, on the other hand, silences the writing demons.  It’s counter-intuitive to the work, yet, if a writer has a problem with using all her fingers and toes to create, network, market and have a personal life, there’s something wrong with her.  

For fecksake, of course there’s something wrong with me.  I spend nine hours a day writing to an invisible ‘friend’.  Disparagement isn’t much of a deterrent to me pointing out that the emperor is in the buff and his butt cheeks sag. 

Ever go to one of those Meet the Agent gigs?  A group of us were taken to London but before we went, our sponsor gave us a type of Writer’s Deportment Class.  I dutifully learned the Elevator Pitch, kept my doubts to myself.

We go to London, are crushed into an historic but down-in-the-heel pub with unlimited drinks and no food.  I stood helplessly by while one of my colleagues marched up to an agent, introduced herself and gave her pitch.  The agent’s smile took on a bit of rigor mortis, eyes rolled back in her head.  As soon as my colleague paused for breath, the agent turned to me.  I hadn’t a clue what to say but I certainly wasn’t going to give my pitch.  The agent wandered off to join a clutch of other agents with their backs to the writers in the room.

The evening progressed with agents in retreat, writers getting drunk.  When I did manage to talk with an agent, I went into therapist mode, asked how they got into their field, what it was like, what they were looking for in a book.  If they mentioned a genre that one of my colleagues wrote in, I introduced them.  I ended the evening with ten queries and never once had to expose a bit of my dramatic arc.

I suppose my problem with this system is that I used to have a normal job.  I went to uni, got several degrees, passed the licensing exam, did my CPD’s, developed a specialty, took home a pay cheque.  Nobody waited until I had an internet following before they took a chance with me.  When I was still green, they threw me into the deep end.  Sink or swim, off you go, the psyches of the traumatised in my care.  If I screwed up, a client’s suicide could be a very real consequence.

If a writer screws up, it’s bad reviews, poor audience turn out, low book sales.  Pft!  As if that were on a par with a client’s death.  But as a writer, I have to prove myself a hundred times more than I did as a trauma therapist because we’ve put the money people in charge of the creativity. 

When I worked in mental health, my boss was someone with a degree in mental health.  The finance people were kept in an office with a bar across the outside of the door.  They didn’t make the big decisions.  They balanced the books and moaned a lot.

However, until our creative people take charge of the money or our society values the creative arts as much as we do paying the expenses of our politicians, this is the system we operate in.  So, here’s my advice:

•           Do what we do best.  Communicate with honesty.  Someone once asked what I wrote and I said, in the Nobody-Wants-To-Publish-It genre.  I was the eighth person in the group to be asked that question; my publishing credits wouldn’t have been remembered.  My honesty was.
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•            Be a huckster with people skills.  Not manipulation.  People skills.  You’ve been observing people all your life.  Writing about them, creating them, putting them in tight spots, getting them out.  You know how people want to be treated.  Treat them that way. 
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•           Expect to be treated with respect yourself.  Evaluate your rejections.  Don’t interact with people who don’t respect you.  I once had a  session with an agent whom I found so rude, I wondered why he’d been allowed to live.  At the end of our meeting, he asked me to submit something.  When I did, he wrote the most scathing rejection of my thirty year writing experience. 
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•           Surround yourself with writers who support you.  Writers, mentors, tutors who read your work only so you’ll read theirs (or worse, never read yours), tell you that what you write is too mad to be in print, are intimidated by your work, steal your ideas, who have no sense of humour, are not going to help you no matter how much prestige they have in your literary community.  Dump their sorry asses.

When I was a trauma therapist, my most important tool was myself.  The writer’s most important tool is the same.  You’re not selling snake oil.  You’re a creative genius with an honest core.  Hold it as precious.