“When you’re good at something, you’ll tell everyone. When you are really great at something, they’ll tell you.” Walter Payton
My GrandDad was a Doctor in Encinitas, California in the 1920’s 30’s and 40’s. He opened his office, pharmacy and lunch counter on Pacific Coast Highway at a corner not far from Moonlight Beach. He was a Doctor and Pharmacist and also made an amazing Malted milk shake and hot dog for me at the lunch counter. Things were different in those days. The doctor’s office, pharmacy and lunch counter were all the same location.
I remember when they redid the sign outside his business, he insisted the sign should not be too big.
“It’s unethical for Doctors and Lawyers to advertise. It’s okay to promote the lunch counter though”, He said.
I remember asking my Mom what “unethical” meant. She explained as best as a seven year old boy could understand that it wasn’t professional or nice.
All life and businesses need attention of some kind to thrive. Plants, trees and green stuff need sunlight, not too much, but enough to grow.
Every child needs attention to live. Babies that do not get held and touched will die. The hospitals know this. Youth that are unsupervised will flounder in school, make it to prisons or worse. Attention deficit disorder is very often a deficit of attention for the child.
And as we know with artists, celebrities and politicians, too much attention can bring the destructiveness self-centeredness of perceived power.
Artist of all kinds, authors, actors, musicians, sculptors, painters, architects have had someone, and agent or publisher of some kind tell everyone they could how talented the artists are. And frequently, as with most forms of power, the agents or publishers will attempt to control and/or claim more credit for the work than is often warranted. The balance of appreciation for artistic origination and the success of selling is a fragile relationship.
Yet, both are required.
My GrandPa needed the town to know he was a Doctor and Pharmacist. And yet in some long ago forgotten sense of values attracting too much attention can bring a pathology to ego or being of service. This is not so much of a value anymore.
I have been writing something for over 30 years. Two of my favorite writers are Robert Burns and Herman Melville. They both spent the last years of their lives working as government clerks with little or no appreciation for their literary skills. They had some limited success with poetry and short stories. Their interactions with the general public and with publishers did not include recognition of the timelessness of their work.
So it might be an even bigger, pathological ego trip for me to consider my writing to be even close to Burns or Melville. Both of them did indeed send their work off to publishers and accumulated rejection slips. My hesitancy is more out of fear of failure, I suppose.
I always believed there was something unGodly about promoting myself. “The meek shall inherit the Earth” and all that. I do have a blog that has been up for years and accumulating fans, albeit slowly.
I am horribly afraid of success, riches and power. I believe I will get as corrupted as the politicians van be. At age 78 it may be appropriate to reconsider what I believe about myself.
Should I subject myself to an agent and or publisher I would also need to subject myself to editing and corrections. My gentle little ego can get ferociously protective of my point of view.
And yet the best actors I have studied always credit good directors with guiding them to moving, artistic expression. And most every book I have read will acknowledge and thank the many people that participated in the writing and assembly of the book.
“Course then, also what I believe is that I do not have anything worthwhile to say. Go figure, I may be all wrong. I counsel people in listening for the gold in what anyone says. We all have wisdom to share with each other. Probably even me.
And I hate, hate promoting myself. My worse experience in high school was a young girl I was infatuated with telling me I was “conceited”. This crushed me, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t look at her. I ran home crying and never told anyone. I also decided I would never, ever appear conceited again to anyone.
Now, 65 years later, I can see how deciding I would never be conceited again may the most conceited thing anyone could do.
I am in my office right now on my Macbook with several hundred words of various short stories littering up my computer desktop. I am dressed in my usual starched white shirt with the monogramed pocket, my REI casual gray pants, red and blue stocking feet and my dyed brown hair slicked back with goo that has been characterized as helmut head. At 78 years old, I am a closet conceited and fearful professional trying so hard to look and feel younger. Conceit sometimes looks good only to cover up the insecurities in my deepest feelings.
I have some flourishing hanging phytos plants in my office. I have learned that daily attention, weekly watering and monthly feeding keeps them happy and glowing with life. This kind of discipline for anything is new to me. Perhaps if I paid the same kind of regular attention to my writing and promotions I could have a new career that was happy and glowing.
So, I have researched how to send writings off to the New Yorker Magazine. I intend to ask for help from a partner or group that we can mutually support each other in sending material off to publishers/agents or magazines. Perhaps we could each put $500.00 into an investing account and as we successfully send our writing off then we get to maintain our share of the investments. If we do not send anything off on a predetermined schedule then we lose our percentage. Or something like that to motivate us. I really hate to promote myself. Maybe I hate to discover I am not worthy. Maybe I really hate to fail. Yet I know that the only failure is to stop trying. The Chicken Soup books accumulated 123 rejection slips before they found a publisher. I have yet to accumulate even one rejection slip.
When I say hate, what I really mean is fear.
And I have been delusionally hoping that someone else I could believe would tell me how great I am. Thank you Walter Payton.
So far I have been too conceited to accept anyone else’s compliments.
What do they know anyway?
