Holyoke Dear Miss, You have wondered whether becoming an artist is worth it. Why devote your life to making stuff that doesn't really matter, that isn't going to change the world, that only the tiniest fraction of the population will ever even hear of? Especially considering that many (most?) of the artists you have encountered are bitter about the fact that they're stuck teaching Sam Shepard plays to teenagers while the privileged snot down the hall back in college turned out to be David Foster Wallace or Charles Foster Kane or whoever. You may also have heard dire reports about what it's like to deal with the creativity industry, whether it be publishers or record labels or museums or what have you. Relatively speaking, Starbucks is not looking so bad as a career option. There are those who will argue that one should not even think about the reception of one's work, that if one is a true artist, one creates because one is compelled to, because one has no choice. There is some merit to this, but then again bite me. (As someone I know is wont to say.) In my own experience, yes, it's true that a big part of the reason I make things is to get them out of my head, so I can go back to thinking about pie or whatever without having fictional characters wandering around my brain reciting their lines. But obviously that's not all there is to it or I could just throw everything into a trunk like JD Salinger supposedly does between swigs of urine. Of course, I am no Salinger, and that is actually the reason why I feel that I can write this. Had something I had written become a huge success, I wouldn't really have a useful message for you, because even though you are a prodigy I can't guarantee you'll have a show at the Whitney or become a regular on the New York Times bestseller list. But what I've discovered is that even if your work draws a very modest audience, seemingly miraculous things will happen. Take IF, for example. Interactive fiction has a tiny audience. The number of people who follow IF is somewhere in the same range as the number of people who read "Daria" fanfic or collect WWI helmets. We're talking about maybe a couple hundred people on the outside. You would not expect writing an IF program to make a huge difference in one's life. But you would be wrong. It is funny. As late as 1999 I thought that of all the projects I was working on, the band would be the most likely to have a dramatic impact on my life, since way more people (or at least way more young people) listen to music than read books. The book was second. IF, whose audience would fit comfortably into a midsize sedan, wasn't even on my radar screen. But here are the returns I have received on my work in this extremely obscure medium. First, there is my social group. I probably don't have to tell you that when you are not like most people in your culture, and also not like the people in the usual roster of subcultures, it is difficult to find people you have much in common with, especially if you are an introvert. You are not going to run into them at the movie theater or on the BART train. You are probably not going to meet them at school, at least not en masse. I didn't. Sure, Cal's admissions standards established a reasonably high baseline intelligence level for the people I met when I was there, but "you're not stupid" is not really sufficient for making a connection with someone. It is not surprising that after I left Berkeley I pretty much immediately lost touch with the vast majority of the people I had hung out with — ultimately, they had just been acquaintances randomly assigned by the housing computer. A couple of years later, I started cranking out these little IF stories. I knew I was working in a medium that only a handful of people even knew existed. But it turned out to be the right handful. Getting into IF has introduced me to people much more on my wavelength than my former classmates were. Not all of them — not even most of them — but quite a few. And while we may not be the closest of friends, singing Rembrandts lyrics to one another and so forth, the conversation is usually pretty good. Also, it was through IF that I met my collaborator on ACX, allowing me to try my hand at writing comics and fulfill a dream I'd had since 1983 or so. It was receiving a random email about Photopia that led to one of my closest friendships. And it was through IF that I met the woman I've been living with for the past three and a half years. There's a troll named Jacek on the IF newsgroups who recently wrote, "Writing interactive fiction won't make you rich and famous and it's unlikely to improve your sex life." I'll grant the first part — there aren't too many paths to riches in most of the arts, and even in the more lucrative ones fame is relative. (Stand at a freeway off-ramp and ask the drivers waiting for the light to change if names like Dave Eggers or Ed Ruscha ring any bells. If the positive response rate is even one in twenty I'll be surprised.) But "unlikely to improve your sex life"? I mean, yeah, it probably wouldn't improve Jacek's. But I can think of at least six couples who met through IF. There are probably more. And I imagine the same is true for any medium, from poetry to videography to encasing things in blocks of resin. But enough about the joys and advantages of a medium that you, like six and a half billion other people I could name, don't much care about. Let's talk books. My experience with the publishing industry was pretty lousy. My publisher flat-out lied to me — the sort of institutional lying in which Person A promises one thing and then Person B takes over and says A's promises don't count anymore. My book was orphaned before it even made it to stores — from what I've seen publishing involves a lot of fighting for resources, and without an editor to stake a claim, R,O! didn't get any. Promotion was close to nonexistent and the few events that did happen were pretty embarrassing. Not too many people read the book and one of the few who did was a creep who harassed me for months. But as discouraging as this all was, a big exclamation point appears over my head whenever I think about the neat stuff I can ascribe to this obscure little book, in print for less than a year. Sure, making the sale allowed me to retire in my mid-20s, at least for a couple of years. But that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about things like the time I wrote a quickie Amazon review of a monograph by one of my favorite artists. A year earlier and clicking on my name would have done nothing, but this time my book popped up and he was curious enough to get a copy — and liked it enough to invite me over to the house and look at a couple of decades' worth of unpublished work. That all by itself was worth all the crap. I'm talking about having a grand total of one review appear in a daily newspaper, and it just so happens to catch the eye of someone I'd known over half my life ago and had been unsuccessfully trying to track down for a dozen years. The odds of this seemed so slim that I was boggled by my luck. But that's what art does. It changes the equation. When you think about it, isn't that really the main reason people make art — to make these kinds of connections? I mean, yeah, you'll hear many an artist in various fields say "I write for myself" or "I paint for myself" or "I make music for myself," but they're usually not just tossing their work into the garage once they're finished with it. What they mean is, they're not entertainers, figuring out what the audience wants and then supplying it. "Writing for yourself" means you're capturing something you want to share — and releasing it means you're hoping it strikes a chord with someone. Reporters used to ask the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" crew about all the obscure references — why include so many jokes that almost no one's going to get? Their answer: the right people will get it. When I was working on Ready, Okay!, I had one of the aforementioned housing-computer friends read each chapter as I finished. When I was done with the whole thing, she asked what my goal had been in writing it and what I was trying to achieve by getting it published. I said that mainly I was hoping that the right person would get it — that somewhere out there would be some kid of an uncommon stripe who would relate to it, that it'd become part of her life the way certain treasured books had been part of mine, and that maybe she would even write to me sometime and I would get to watch her grow up into this amazing person. Well, the book tanked. But I still got my wish. I don't know about you, but I think that rocks. So, yeah, maybe a career in the arts inevitably includes its share of occasions for bitterness, and certainly most art doesn't cause the world to spin off its axis. But it can still do some pretty cool stuff.
(with apologies to Rainer Maria Rilke)
When we first learned the story it went like this: a guy on United Flight 93 calls home to tell his wife the plane's been hijacked, and when she tells him terrorists have been crashing planes into landmarks, he tells his fellow passengers they're going to have to take back the cockpit. He leaves his phone on, and his wife hears him kick off the counterattack with the words, "Let's roll." Pithy. Macho. The phrase captured the imagination of the public. Bush started using it in speeches and stuff. But now we learn that this may not have been exactly the way it went. As the 9/11 Commission released its report, it was reported that audio from air traffic control revealed that what this fellow seems to have actually said is, "Roll it." As in, roll that food cart into the door. It doesn't mean the passengers were any less brave, but it doesn't quite have the same ring to it and people seem disappointed. So imagine how they're going to feel when the analysts finish enhancing the tape and it turns out that what he really said was, "Autobots, roll out."
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