Wayward Writer, The: Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar

By Ariel Gore

When your dream and creative passion is to write, how do you succeed without selling out or selling yourself short? Ariel Gore has spent her life trying to solve this puzzle, writing and organizing her way towards a creative utopian vision, where storytelling is a form of resistance and writing is an outsider art. In this follow-up to her national bestseller How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, Gore offers a lyrical call to literary revolution paired with practical exercises. Through her own experiences and interviews with other authors, publishers, and agents, she shows you how to chart your own creative education, vanquish shame and imposter syndrome, cast off oppression, cast a spell on your readers, step into your unique powers, and build your own literary community where respect and honesty reign and where you can be a writer and survive. Gore presents an alternative narrative structure to the patriarchal hero's journey, with a focus on tapping into myths and hidden places. She urges us to not be precious about where or when we write, or to apologize for who and what we are, or to stop short of telling the truth about our lives. The result is an impossible to ignore rallying cry for writing dangerously to create a liberatory literary utopia and a helpful guide through the thorny landscape of publishing your work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648411090

Ariel Gore

Ariel Gore is the author of seven books, including Atlas of the Human Heart, The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, and How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead. For more information, visit arielgore.com.

Book preview

Part One:

Doors

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from.

—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Outsiders Welcome

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

My writing utopia supports both introversion and community. It’s urban, but also oceanic. We heal our shameful histories with honesty and reparations. Everyone has a guaranteed minimum income.

In my writing utopia, we center creativity and joy.

We don’t bend to the needs of capitalism. 

We know that imperialistic story structures will never destroy the empire.

Conventions in drama and literature get presented to us as if they’re more than human inventions and therefore inescapable, like the divine right of kings, but many of the ways in which we tell our stories are cultural and subcultural constructions, bound up in economies and systems our writing will surely outlive. 

We seek new forms.

When I became a writer, I understood that writing meant a life and profession open to feminists and antiracists and queers and single moms—open to people who didn’t care if governments didn’t like them. The writers I admired were committed to their craft, to the poetry, and to the transcendence of language, but also to personal and universal liberation.

Writing—the kind I meant to do—was an outsider art.

Storytelling surely lives in our human DNA. We evolved to send each other words via simple warnings, cautionary tales, allegory, and the Blues. At the same time, it’s clear that some of the narrative traditions we’ve come to understand as inescapable are actually quite easy to escape. That’s because humans have also evolved as storytellers to communicate social norms, to encourage compliance or resistance. We can disobey. If we don’t like the myths we’ve been handed, we can re-author them. Some literary traditions we take for granted, as if their aesthetics are necessary to make our creations good or even acceptable, come to us from conscious post-WWII efforts to encourage compliance, strip the arts of politics, and re-imagine the writer as a professional in a world of elbow patches and superior smiles—to make the literary establishment very insider indeed.

I reject this insider/outsider binary.

I reject compliance, except when it’s freely chosen.

I reject elbow patches (but I do like sewing patches on my backpack.)

Certainly what we think of as the traditional canon of literature has everything to do with what governments and anti-creative parents wanted and still want on those lists. That doesn’t make the books in any particular canon bad, it just means that there’s a whole lot of rad literature from virtually every era, region, aesthetic school, and subculture that can teach us as much as anything we’ve ever been told is canonical.

What would it look like to completely decentralize the literary world?

Post-WWII American narratives emphasize the individual, overcoming hardships, and achieving against the odds. There’s nothing wrong with these stories. Anyone who survives amid global capitalism has had to do some achieving. That’s for sure. We all know real-life individual personalities who’ve changed communities—and the world. But what we’ve come to think of as the necessary arc of a story, one that traces the change this individual goes through as they conquer, is just one of many possible arcs. What if we could tell the story of a society that changed, allowing the individual to survive as they are? What if we began to see whole communities as protagonists? Would we structure a story differently if we wanted to show that the powerful could change in the face of a movement? What if we wanted to do that without centering the powerful?

If we think about collective changes that have actually taken place in recent history, many were inspired by images, not individual personalities. Nick Ut’s photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc called The Terror of War or Napalm Girl is widely credited with ending the Vietnam war, also known as the Resistance War Against America. The first images of the earth seen from space and the mushroom cloud images of detonated bombs catalyzed the environmental and anti-war movements more than any individual. The images of the murder of George Floyd continue to change America. 

Less than a lifetime ago, reputable American writers would occasionally start fistfights, sleep in ditches, and even espouse Communist doctrines, Timothy Aubry wrote in The New York Times in 2015, Such were the prerogatives and exigencies of the artist’s existence until MFA programs arrived to impose discipline and provide livelihoods.

I’ve got nothing against MFA programs, discipline, and livelihoods. I’m actually a big fan of making a living. But now the publishing industry and academia have been vacated as sites of financial wealth, the Writer’s Guild and The American Association of University Professors report ever-dwindling median incomes, and late-stage capitalism has left writers with zero incentive to keep on pretending to be well-behaved. Whether we’re currently surviving inside or outside of academia and institutions of commercial publishing, it’s a grand time to experiment with the poetry of resistance, to sleep in hammocks, to hold power accountable, and to espouse anti-capitalist doctrines whenever we please. 

The opposite of compliant is wayward.

In my literary utopia, we all get to be ourselves and survive. In the meantime, in this world, we can create workarounds. If there are only two options and neither is ideal—selling out or selling ourselves short, for example—let’s figure out our third option as soon as possible.

Try This:

Write a story—fiction, nonfiction, or some hybrid—that traces a collective change in a family, community, culture, subculture, or society. (Extra credit if that change is inspired by an image.) While a community is of course made up of individuals, resist the urge to have a leader make the majority of the decisions that move your story forward.

Include something shiny in the beginning of your story that reappears toward the end.

Welcome Packet: Handy Tips for the Wayward Writer

1. Call yourself a writer. You’re a writer if you write things down. Spit sour lemonade at anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.

2. Don’t be an arrogant jerk. Just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean you get to tell other writers what’s important to write down. I mean, seriously—What do you know? You know everything and nothing. Your arrogance will never heal that inner void where you’re actually terrified you know nothing. That inner void was probably installed by capitalism or some traumatized ancestor, anyway. Only excellent salted chocolate caramels can heal that void. In the meantime, assume that everyone you meet—just like you—knows everything and nothing. 

3. Read and write the kinds of things you want to read and write and not the kinds of things anyone has made you feel like you ought to read and write. Love comics? Read and write comics. Get dreamy-eyed about travel blogs? Read and write dreamy travel blogs. Like scathing political radio commentaries? Read and write scathing political radio commentaries. Prefer high-brow poetry? Read and write high-brow poetry. Dig hard-boiled queer alien noir romance? Read and write hard-boiled queer alien noir romance. If you find yourself overly concerned with status, read and write in each of these traditions while wearing a soft pink onesie and a glittery orange cape and soon enough you’ll learn to take yourself less seriously and you’ll notice that all writing is uniquely challenging and requires a crazy level of self-acceptance and can still be a gas—or at least dissatisfying in a supremely satisfying way that keeps you coming back.

4. Don’t use so many exclamation points! Women have been taught to use exclamation points so we sound nice! So stop using them to act more feminist! But do we have to pick between feminism and exclamation points? Who cares what Cormac McCarthy thinks about punctuation, anyway? Do your own thing! Experiment with capturing tone and expression by breaking all the writing rules. Maybe you like exclamation points. I know I do!

5. Don’t be a voice for the voiceless. When I studied journalism in the early 1990s, my professors extolled the virtues of becoming a voice for the voiceless. I thought this sounded good—at first—but the more I let it sink in, the more it stunk. No one is voiceless. Some have their voices oppressed and ignored. It’s more inclusive, inspiring, egalitarian, and organic to publish zines and anthologies in which we can feature everyone’s work. Writers want to tell their own stories whenever possible. Ditto for people who aren’t writers. Voice your own vulnerability. And pass the goddamned mic.

6. Don’t be a gatekeeper. Support other writers. If you’re able to open a door in the literary world—even if cracking it took a lot of effort and cost you anxious tears that you’d like to get some credit for—don’t lock that door behind you. Refer other people to your agent. I mean, unless they’re real clowns. If you find yourself wondering about another writer, Who do they think they are?, try writing a short story about a character much like yourself who has had to work too hard in this shitty, gate-kept world. A character who’s terrified that there isn’t enough literary love to go around and who feels like they have to keep gates and hearts and everything in between locked and system-supporting. And don’t even try to make that story end all happy rainbows, because it doesn’t.

7. Read outside your genre and your subculture. Historians of creativity trace an excellent connection between urbanity and explosions of culture-progressive art. This is because people from all over gather to make unlikely communities in cities, and when we start communicating with people not like us, we start blowing each other’s minds. Reading across genres and literary schools of thought and works in translation turns our imaginations urban. Let other people’s creative output engage and ignite your own visions, then make something yourself.

8. Don’t worry if your path as a writer isn’t linear. A lot of folks imagine toiling in unseen story-writing brilliance until one magical day we break into publishing and everything’s honey and money from there, and sure, that happens in some people’s lives, but for most of us the path meanders. We scribble poems on bar napkins, then we write a couple of novels that end up kind of gooey and unfinished in the middle. We get a rad commercial publication on some topic we never thought would be our topic, then maybe we have our 15 minutes of fame and we waste it getting super drunk because we don’t know what else to do with the attention. We start self-publishing cool pink-covered novellas, then get a job in academia we think will give us the health insurance we need, then get in a fight with the dean and seethe and feel trapped, then maybe have a baby or get into a relationship with someone who acts like a baby and lament how anyone who ever had a baby wrote anything, only to discover there’s a centuries-long literary tradition grappling with this very question and we immerse ourselves in it, then we figure out how to go on a road trip by ourselves, then we write a play that meets with grand community success, and then we keep writing.

9. Buy from booksellers and publishers and writers you’d like to see thrive. Support small presses that publish interesting experiments. Bring your dollars to the brick and mortar bookstores with their hardwood floors that smell of tobacco. Amazon isn’t going to smash itself.

10. Develop a real practice with your writing—showing up for it with all your fear and joy. It doesn’t matter if you show up at the same time every day. You don’t have to be a member of the leisure class. Writing invites you to be yourself and survive, but it’s always going to be like Borges said, If I don’t write, I feel, well, a kind of remorse, no?

Gather Sparkly Supplies

As a kid, whenever I got ready to start a new writing project, I’d empty out a binder and fill it with clean paper. I’d gather colored pens, a few pieces of orange construction paper, a little project-specific good luck charm, and my puffy, googly-eye stickers, and then I’d get to work.

Even if you’re grown, you can get yourself a binder and some bright gel pens and maybe some orange or purple paper and watercolors and tape with flowers printed into it and a big pack of pale green notecards and feathers—bright blue feathers, I hope—all the inexpensive book-making tools of childhood.

Remember: It’s easier to practice taking ourselves lightly when we’re working with a pink glitter pen.

When the tools of your craft bring you feelings of calm and curiosity, the process becomes the destination.

You’re probably going to write on a computer or whatever your preferred device, too. I get that. But in your binder and notebooks, you can collage mood boards, map the territory of your stories, jot notes, organize and rearrange print-outs with rainbow dividers, highlight emerging themes, compose secret letters to your characters—one of whom might be yourself at some other age—and generally begin to establish a tactile relationship with your project. 

The writer of the future reinvents the creative environment, each to our own liking.

Ever since I read Brenda Ueland’s classic, If You Want to Write, when I was maybe 19 years old, she’s been standing here next to me in spirit, whispering in my ear, I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten—happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Most days I can’t ask for much more than to feel happy and absorbed, stringing words like beads.

Not all of us wrote as kids or had access to binders and gel pens or puffy, googly-eye stickers, but it’s never too late to be the kindergartener who did—happily crafting her first book, her only book, never wondering who cares, or is it good enough?—never questioning her right to tell the truth, magical or stark.

Put a unicorn sticker on your notebook. Or, you know, some excellent band patch.

Try This:

Write a scene you’ve tried to write before without great success and, this time, write it by hand with a green felt pen. (If you haven’t tried to write any scene before, just write the story of what happened the last time you talked to a stranger.) If you get stalled, draw a little monster sticking its tongue out. Then go back to your writing.

Dear Ariel,

Do I have to move to the cool new city to write?

Sincerely, 

Packing Up in Podunk

Dear Packing Up,

You don’t have to live in a cool or expensive or literary place. Every place has the potential to hold the art of words. Sometimes, the more unlikely the better.

Some areas do feel stifling to me. I try to leave those places. Cool new cities excite and inspire. But mostly I make home where I find myself, where I can afford to stay a while. I create small havens of community and avoid overly taxing social situations. I create strategies to share my work. Every community, every valley, every city has the potential to cradle a writer. 

And here’s the secret: As creatives, we are the cool new city—wherever we go. We’re the cool new place to be.

See you on the road,

Ariel

Don’t Worry About a Fancy Writing Space

Maya Angelou famously used to rent herself a motel room to get started on a book. She didn’t want the household distractions. I used to think that sounded so extravagant. Now I like to do it sometimes, too—leave town for a week and check into a pink motel in some dusty town and see what comes of it. This is the kind of thing we get to do as writers. All of our eccentricities and dysregulated flight responses can become part of the process. Then we just have to figure out how to build lives that work around our own needs, peculiar as they may be.

Joan Didion wrote in a basement at UCLA.

I’m writing in the dark on a couch right now. My spouse and kid have gone to sleep.

The poet Marcy Sheiner writes in laundromats.

I favor writing in a particular laundromat on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. There’s a good coffee shop on the same block. Also, sushi.

I once wrote the better part of a book sitting at a red-painted coffee table surrounded by red-painted books inside an all-red installation at one of the art colleges in Portland. My daughter was taking glass sculpting classes upstairs and it was quieter in the installation than at the corner café. So, that red room became my office. I made a point of wearing red, so as not to interrupt the aesthetic. 

My stepdad used to write his sermons in his head while he rode his bicycle home from his day job at Printer’s Ink Bookstore, then he sat in his claw-foot chair in our living room and expanded on his memory-notes. I still have that chair, but one of the kids busted the springs so it’s not quite the comfortable writing throne it once was.

Gertrude Stein preferred to write in her Model-T Ford.

Your writing space doesn’t have to be the same every day—writing is one of the creative practices quite open to travelers.

Langston Hughes circled the globe for a year in the 1930s, hauling his typewriter and his victrola and his jazz records on trains and ships.

I write wherever I find myself—in hospital waiting rooms, on airplanes.

Your space needn’t cost much or take time to put together. You can sit or stand. Near a window if possible, with some daisies growing outside. There. That’s all. A laundromat or a red art installation or a desk in a basement near a window and some daisies. Beautiful.

Try This:

Go someplace you’ve never written before—a different corner in your home or a park bench or small-town library or train station—anywhere unfamiliar. Set your timer for ten minutes and write an instant beginning of a new story or script or song featuring a character with a secret life.

Invoke Psychic Protection

Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me.

—Anaïs Nin

Idreamed I visited Anaïs Nin, the mid-century diarist, in the garden of her mid-century home in Silver Lake. She floated in her pool, waved at me. She took her time getting out. She put on a black robe and tucked a stray lock of hair into her bun. She didn’t speak to me out loud, but she grabbed my hand like an old friend. She wanted to give me a tour of her gardens. She led me along curved dirt paths, past rose bushes planted in labyrinthian patterns, past stone benches and fountains. This is where I write, she told me in silent gestures, but more importantly, she wanted to introduce me to something. She flourished her arm like I might meet her muse, and here was . . . a skunk?

Yes, dream-Anaïs had a pet skunk—cute and shy with its big skunky tail, patrolling the back fence of her mid-century digs.

She explained—again, kind of telepathically without spoken words—that we all need a skunk guarding our writing space, a stinky little buddy to keep us safe. 

I thought that sounded like a fine idea.

As writers in every genre, we bring forth vulnerable parts of ourselves. We tell our secret stories or share awkward new ways of describing the moon that other people will mock. We strive to be generous with our dreams, but we live in a mean world that loves to critique and ridicule. We live among thoughtless friends, sometimes. We live connected to complicated relatives who may not be able to support our creativity. I work to change my worlds, but I also like to think about my dream-Anaïs in her pool sometimes, focused on taking care of herself, relying on a magical smelly pal to protect her from all the meanness and all that feels complicated and silencing. 

Try This:

Draw a picture of the metaphysical force that protects you—or will from now on. If the force seems to have something to say, listen, and write it down as a caption.

If You Want to Be Like Audre Lorde, Do What You Are Afraid to Do 

Interview with Audre Lorde Biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Open an Alexis Pauline Gumbs book and prepare to be captivated. In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, she writes, What does it take to go deep, below the surface of current events and social media reactions? What would allow you to look at what is under your actions, and under that, and under that? Sperm whales dive a mile deep. Maybe they can give us some advice. And the ocean itself has so many depth lessons, when you think you’ve reached the bottom, there is sometimes deeper to go. Take a breath.

The North-Carolina-based author was the first scholar to research the papers of Audre Lorde at Spelman College, June Jordan at Harvard University, and Lucille Clifton at Emory University during her doctoral work. 

I cheered when I read she was writing a biography of Audre Lorde.

Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, Afro-futurism, biography, editing, teaching . . . you seem to do it all. How do you pick what you’re going to work on next? Is there a guiding principle to all of your literary work?

I love this question, because I used to not have a guiding principle to my work. I’m a workaholic in recovery and it used to be that I would say yes to every invitation to work just to avoid my fear of the silence, the empty space, and most importantly the messiness of being available to the people in my actual life. (By the way, it turns out that the messiness of not being available to the people in my actual life is worse.) And so for a month, after saving up for most of a year, I said no to every invitation. (Actually I committed to say no, and then I said yes a lot and then I had to go back and say no, it was really hard.) It happened to be the month of No-vember. At the end of that month I could feel the difference between the yes that came from love and a sincere opening to my purpose on this planet and the more common yes that came from either a need to prove that I could do what was being asked of me, or the simple use of work to fill up the scary gaps of time in every day. Now my guiding principle comes from a studied examination of my yeses. Why am I saying yes? What is my body saying yes to? What is my spirit saying yes to? Or is it only my frantic mind saying yes? That last yes, is a no. 

What I found during that Month of No is that what I said yes to with my spirit every day was writing poetry. I have been writing poetry every day since. In some ways, everything I say a sincere yes to, regardless of the form, feels like a poem to me. 

How can Audre Lorde inspire us as writers and publishers?

One of the things that is most inspiring to me about Audre Lorde is that she was deeply in touch with her fear. Deeply. She had consistent nightmares that started when she was a child and she learned to turn her deepest fears into forms of guidance. Her nightmares are the sources of some of her best poems. Many of the things she wrote and said out loud that we quote today, were things she was afraid to say out loud or to write down. I find that inspiring because fear shows up to sit on my shoulder every day, but as Audre Lorde teaches by example, that doesn’t mean I can’t write or speak