Tag Archives: writers

Writers Love Freedom, or: “Why AB5 Has To Go.”

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This is the text of my speech at the #RepealAB5 Rally on January 24, 2020, in West LA.

I AM A WRITER.

I grab ideas out of the air and pin them down, with words, in space and time.

And writing changes your brain.

I mean that literally.

One of my symptoms: I remember my dreams. Every night, at least three or four dreams. In complete detail.

And I know why I remember them.

It’s because dreams are the world of ideas, and archetypes, and symbols. It’s the world where time doesn’t exist. The past is now. The dead live. The dead are as vivid and real as you are here, now.

And I’ve worn away the veil between that world and this one. I’ve worn it thin, from a lifetime of moving back and forth between these two worlds, in my mind.

… Or maybe it’s not me, that does the moving.

Maybe I’m hitching a ride on Hermes. You know Hermes, right? He’s the Greek god with the wings on his sandals. His job was to carry messages back and forth between humans and the gods.

He carries messages to us from the world of ideas, and archetypes, and symbols, and the dead.

No surprise: Hermes is the god of writing …

Something else that is no surprise:

Writers love freedom.

When you spend your time flying with winged sandals and talking to the dead, you learn some interesting things about what it means to be free.

I have my story about AB5.

I’ve lost work because of AB5.

I have my story about freelancing.

About how I’ve always freelanced, because that’s what writers do.

About how when I walked away from full time salaried work and started to freelance full time, I tripled my income. I came into my own as a professional, respected working woman.

So yeah, the idea that words—some else’s words—can mess with that?

It pisses me off. It pisses me off!

But I’ve been listening, very carefully, to the people who support AB5. I’ve been listening as a writer. And I’ve read the bill.

#AB5 a piece of “writing.”

Quite the piece!

5896 words.

(By the way? The Constitution of the United States – which comes to us [thank you, O Hermes!] from the dead – is 4558 words…)

But why do I care about the length of AB5? Why mention that?

One of my favorite quotes about writing is from the historian David McCullough.

“To write is to think. And to write well is to think well.”

Hmmmm…

We all agree there are ideas out there—ideas related, somehow, to AB5—that are good ideas.

Nobody should be exploited.

That’s a very, very good idea. (“Nobody should be exploited” is four words, by the way.)

Everyone deserves fair compensation.

Also a good idea. (Also four words!)

Here’s a sentence from AB5.

In circumstances which are in essence the loan of an employee from one employer to another employer wherein direction and control of the manner and means of performing the services changes to the employer to whom the employee is loaned, the loaning employer shall continue to be the employer of the employee if the loaning employer continues to pay remuneration to the employee, whether or not reimbursed by the other employer.

What the fuck. (That’s the writer in me, talking…) What the serious fuck …

I said a minute ago: writers know something about freedom.

Because there’s nothing more free than darting around the world of ideas on your winged sandals.

But writers also know that, in this world, words are used to imprison people.

It’s no coincidence that writers are often on the front lines of wars. Or that they are often among the first to die.

Writers want to be free. Writers want YOU to be free. And when it comes down to it, to push and to shove, we will fight to keep you free.

But maybe you’re thinking, AB5? It’s not about freedom.

Isn’t it?

Let me put it this way.

Do you wish, sometimes, that life was simpler?

I do.

I think we all do. I think we all know, in our heart of hearts, that things really should be simpler. And technology. Globalization. All those 21st century “isms”?

They don’t change what’s real.

And in our heart of hearts, we know that. Because in our heart of hearts, we know that our true home is anchored in the world of ideas.

And that world resolves to only a few, simple things.

Love. Family. Peace. Joy.

Suffering … Redemption.

Longing … Fulfillment.

So why do we submit to so many complications?

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” wrote the poet William Butler Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst  / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Is that … us?

Have we abandoned the convictions that we, as Americans – as Californians – as humans – once held so strongly about the things that really matter?

Have we let “the worst” wear us down? Confuse us?

This is not about politics.

This is not about the left, or the right.

In 1981, in his introduction to Unamerican Activities, a compilation by the PEN American Freedom to Write Committee, PEN coordinator Geoffrey Rips wrote about writing and freedom and control. “A government intent on controlling the economic and social realities of a country,” he said, must manipulate the written perception of those realities.

And look at us, 39 years later.

The worst, with their passionate intensity, are burying us with crazy words.

They’re dumping this crazy pile of words on us. And we’re scrambling to try to understand them. To make sense of them. To react to them.

What an awful thing.

To go from what we once were, to a people governed by awful, mixed-up, crazy words.

To wake up one morning and learn that some rough beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward us to be born. That because of some word salad written by lawyers, that living you were earning? That business you built?

Disappeared.

I had no interest in becoming political. I had no interest in becoming an activist.

But writers? We know what freedom is.

We know that freedom begins with ideas.

Clear ideas.

Ideas truest to your heart.

My story is only one, small story.

But AB5 is not small. AB5 is monstrous.

It is government overreach.

It is the opposite of freedom.

It is unAmerican.

AB5 has to go.

writers, writers, an ungovernable bunch …

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Megan McArdle has a column up about the meltdown at The New Republic.

It’s an interesting read in general for anyone in the writing or publishing business.

But in particular, I chuckled to myself when she began describing some of the reasons running media companies presents special challenges. “You’re not running a normal type of organization,” she writes. “You’re running a professional group.”

And so you encounter a number of problems:

… the difficulty of getting creative types to produce great stuff on demand; the astonishing amount of autonomy that journalists need, because it’s impossible to write hard guidelines, and too expensive to supervise long hours of reporting and typing; the fact that great writers are frequently terrible managers and editors, which screws up the normal management pyramid; the simultaneous need for speed and accuracy; the fact that media employment selects for a cluster of personality traits that resists closer management; the professional ethic that will stymie you when you decide to make a different set of trade-offs between competing priorities such as speed, accuracy, and the need to monetize your content; the fact that writers, especially in the digital age, frequently take their audience with them if they leave, making it even harder to impose discipline …

As someone who has earned a living as a professional writer for many, many years: yep. That pretty much sums us up :)

To blog or not to blog . . .

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If you’re a writer-o’-books, the answer to this question is “depends on who you ask.”

Miss Snark has recommended that novelists be cautious about blogging — because when you’re blogging, you’re not working on your novel. But she also wrote, once, that a “well-clicked” blog can be a plus when you’re querying agents.

Late last month, John at Romantic Ramblings recounted the advice he got from his last agent, who told him a blog was practically indispensable.

But John also found a warning on Agent Query that a blog may be a liability rather than an asset for writers looking for representation. (What they are really trying to say, I think, is that a poorly written or presented blog can be a liability. Which is true, I’m sure.)

So now, to add another twist to the conversation, comes this: Joe Garofoli, in the San Francisco Chronicle, reports on how political blogger Glenn Greenwald was able to coordinate online publicity for his non-fic book among his like-minded blogging buddies. The resulting burst of orders pushed his book to number 1 on Amazon.

Granted, Amazon is only one reseller, so if your book is ranked high there, but isn’t selling anywhere else, it doesn’t really mean much.

Except that you get to say your book is a number 1 Amazon best-seller. Certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

So what’s the verdict? I’d say it’s something like this. Don’t blog if you tend to use it as an excuse to avoid doing the real work of writing. Don’t put up a sloppy blog, or a cheesy blog. Don’t present a virtual persona that comes across as loony or raises red flags about your people skills. (Of course, if you have people-skills problems you probably don’t know your blog comes across that way but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.)

And last but not least, remember that blogging is really a type of networking. If it’s going to help you sell books, it’s because of the relationships you’ve built, not because you’ve mentioned your title and now it shows up on Google.