Acknowledging You’re a Number is the First Step to Becoming More
I do well with bratty children, mostly because I am one.
Also because I’m good at arguing.
While teaching acting to six-year-olds a few years ago,
there was one boy who proved a huge problem. He was unfocused, selfish (even more
so than most kids that age), and spoiled. I liked him. We had a good
relationship because I could be honest with him, and he liked that I didn’t
talk down to him.
There was a crawl space in the corner of the black box
where the light booth sat. One class I let the kids take turns going up there,
looking around, using the light board. They had a blast, but it was hectic,
many kids trying to take several turns, the shier students almost getting
bulldozed and forgotten. If I had been actually trying to get back to a lesson,
it would have been impossible, but it was the end of the day and I could focus
on making sure everyone got a turn.
In the following weeks, some asked if they could go again,
but I said no and they accepted it.
This boy, however, liked to push his luck. I said no once
and he asked again. I continued to say no and he begged and pleaded.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because it will set a precedent.”
(Sometimes at the sight of a big word they’ll clam up,
not wanting to admit they don’t know what it means, or thinking they can figure
it out. Brats are too smart for this and tend to be confident in what they
should or should not know.)
“What’s that?”
“If I let you go up there, all the other kids will ask,
and I don’t want to deal with it.”
“Just tell them no!”
“How about I only have to say no once to you instead?
Seems easier.”
“Just let me go and no one else.”
“If I let you go, I would be doing you a favor and
causing more problems for me. Why would I do that, for you out of everyone, the
kid who doesn’t try to help me when I
ask him to stop talking?”
“Because I’m your favorite!”
“Try again.”
He was one of
my favorites, mostly because he kept it interesting. But what I said was true.
I didn’t think it was fair to let one kid do it, and I didn’t want to deal with
another episode of making sure everyone got a fair turn.
Most importantly, saying no to any other student would
have been just as hard. I hate disappointing them. And it would have been even
more difficult to explain why when someone else was doing it. Plus, let’s face
it, if I was to favor one of them, he would have been the last kid I would have
chosen. I liked him, but he hadn’t earned it. He hadn’t done anything to make
me want to go out of my way for him. If it had been the girl who learned all
her lines, was constantly engaged, coming up with new ideas, and attempting to
make the class period go smoother for me, I might have considered it. For one
thing, I could have cited her perfect behavior to anyone who wanted to know why
she was the only one who could do it and enforced the merits of not being a
butt.
Yet, he truly believed that he should be allowed to do
something the other kids weren’t. He didn’t really understand where I was
coming from—as kids often don’t—when I reminded him that I had to think of
everyone and that his needs and wants were of the same level of importance as
anyone else’s needs and wants.
He was one student in a sea of individuals. I loved each
kid, I cared about their feelings, I wanted to help them, I wanted them to have
what they wanted. But sometimes I have something that everyone wants. I have to
give the lead part to only one actor. I have to choose which kid gets to have
the giant pencil for a prop. I have to decide who gets to be the Narrator in
Mafia. Sometimes giving that something is a lot work for me. If they want me to
read something they wrote, I have to do it on my free time. If I take one of
their ideas, all of the sudden everyone starts talking. If I agree to go
outside, I find myself arguing with them about why I don’t want them jumping
off a ledge. Students have a hard time
compartmentalizing that, that for every joy I give you, I could be
disappointing someone else, including at times myself. When I make this random
student happy, I turn around to see someone else asking the same thing of me.
It’s no big deal to read one play, but it is when I have to read twenty. While
the individuals of the group need to fend for themselves, there are those of us
who have to sometimes sacrifice the desires of the one for the good of the many.
Fairness, necessity, or even the question of personal cost factor into how much
I can do for you.
Even though maturity tends to quench this feeling of
entitlement, there are still people who grow well into their 20s, 40s, 60s, and
still don’t understand that they are just a number equal to every other
stranger on the planet until they do something to earn it.
People pitch their books by saying how hard they worked
on them. They don’t understand why readers write off typos and bad covers so
quickly. They expect you to not judge their book before you read it. “It’s only
a dollar,” they insist. They are upset at the level of apathy others have for
their writing. They give you suggestions on your work without any sort of
explanation (demands with expectations of obedience), they just don’t
understand why you can’t take a little bit of time out of your day, spend a
little bit of money on their book, why you can’t just give it a chance.
The truth is, I want to. When someone posts their book in
a status, I want to buy it. I want to take a few minutes to read their blog. I
will like your page and follow your Twitter. I want them to feel accomplished,
I want to support them, I want to do for them what I would hope people would do
for me.
And if it was just one person, I would do everything that
was asked of me. But it isn’t.
People try to sell books to me every single day. Because
I click on the links when shown to me, Facebook’s algorithms show more of these
types of pitches in my feed. (I initially wrote “bitches” here which I suppose
is the most Freudian thing I’m going to do in my lifetime). I have near 3,000
friends on that site, probably 80% of whom are writers with books for sale.
Think about that; if I bought one
novel from each person, that would be over 2,000 dollars, and that’s not
including books that go for 2.99 and especially not those for seven to ten
bucks.
My Twitter page is even worse. I would argue between the
two sites alone I get at least ten new titles exposed daily. Ten dollars a day?
And that’s not including the ones I find that are reviewed in blogs I follow or
posted in Facebook groups I frequent.
Let’s say they’re free then. If a book is offered to me
and I don’t have to pay, I try to download it. I think of the thrill that
helping that little number go up is worth having my kindle filled with hundreds of books. I do try to read them, but let’s
face it, if I read one book a day every day for a year, I might be able to go through the number that I have now only if I
didn’t add anymore.
I have to vet my books, especially the ones I pay for.
When I read a story solely because I like the author, it’s much more likely to
be disappointing. The unfortunate truth is that those superficial methods we
use to “judge a book by its cover” aren’t inaccurate enough to discredit. The
self-published novellas with typos in the first few pages and a homemade cover
don’t prove to be a genius in messy clothing, they usually prove to be exactly
what you’d expect. I have second guessed myself because of an excellent hook or
a particular fondness for the writer as a person, but I have to be honest, I
have never read a book that didn’t care about looking professional to be
spectacular in some other area. I know they must exist, but they are the
exception, not the rule. If it looks like the author doesn’t know what she’s
doing, she probably doesn’t.
(I’ll admit that sometimes a crappy cover has been
misleading. I have picked up some stories that I enjoyed which had the typical
papyrus font and stolen internet image, but even in those cases I felt that the
story could have been pushed a little further. Partially, this can be
attributed my distrust based on the unprofessional cover—it’s difficult to know
your reaction without the bias. In all fairness, many excellent covers can be
on top of awful stories. Yet, obviously homemade covers do have a least a
moderate correlation with inexperienced writers.)
This is why those “I worked harder than anyone I know,”
and “It’s only a dollar!” posts don’t work very well. Unless you’re a good
friend of mine, you are no different than any of the other people who insist
they work hard and deserve some sort of acknowledgement. You do, but I need
more than just that to go out of my way and give it to you.
I need to be sold on story. If it was just the issue of
one person asking me to do them a favor, sure, I could buy your book for a few
bucks, sure, I could spend a few days reading it. I could bear through the pain
of a bad story simply because you’ve worked hard and I want to support you.
But I know a lot of people who’ve worked hard. When it
comes to writing a book, I have worked hard too. I am fully aware of how much
effort goes into writing something—even something crappy, unedited, and unread
by even me. I do think that work is worth something, and if I could reward
everyone, I would. Yet I can’t spend the money on helping every single writer
out there. There’s a lot of them. I have to have some other reason to make you,
out of all people, the one I single out to support.
Why would I force myself to read a book ridden with typos
on the uncommon chance that the content is good enough to make up for it? Why take
a risk on a banal summary simply because they author worked hard when I have
another book that I’m more likely to enjoy written by an author who also worked
hard?
And let’s face it, sometimes saying you’ve worked harder
than anyone you know might be more of an opinion of ignorance rather than
reality. Or an outright lie. A post went around about a man who claimed he had
100-hour work weeks. Fourteen hours a day of just writing, no days off. Even if
ten of those hours were spent researching and on lunch breaks, he still should
have had a higher output than one book that lacked copyedits. If I wrote
fourteen hours a day, I could finish a full-length novel in a week. I could
read it once a day, seven drafts before half the month was up. I guarantee that
if I have seven drafts of something, there would not be a typo on the very
first page. Not unless I was completely ignorant of a rule, which grows less
and less common every year I’ve been writing.
If you truly work hard and it isn’t apparent in any of the results, then maybe you’re
putting your effort into the wrong area. Sure, good research and in-depth world
building should be subtle, but I just
can’t imagine a person who holds himself to high standards, puts in the
necessary time and money, has a good amount of experience and/or taste, and yet
still doesn’t know or care about basic grammar, a good hook, or what the most
intriguing thing he can say about his story is.
Because, let’s be honest, some writers are lazy. Just
like the boy who didn’t seem to realize just how bad his behavior was, who
didn’t realize that his talking in class, his refusal to do assignments, his
constant unmotivated arguing hadn’t earned special treatment, it’s possible
that a writer didn’t put in any real effort at all compared to some of his
counterparts, but still expects a reward because the project was time consuming
and more work than he’d like to have put in.
Keep in mind that I can’t tell the difference if I don’t
know you. You might be the exception. You might be a genius. You also might be
a delusional liar. I haven’t met you; I don’t have the wherewithal to know
whether or not to trust you. You shouldn’t expect me to. You shouldn’t expect
me to immediately recognize the difference between you and every other writer
out there, especially not without considering the little information I have at
hand.
“Entitlement” is an insulting phrase commonly used for my
generation, but we have to admit the label needs to be analyzed. It’s not just
what people in their twenties have. Everyone gets a feeling that strangers from
all places expect things from them at one point or another.
But what do we actually owe each other? What is
entitlement? What is earned? How much should we expect support and the benefit
of the doubt from people? Should results mean more than effort? Some people
believe that they’re not obligated to give anyone anything. Some people believe
we are meant to take care of each other and never be selfish. I personally
believe in a balance—take care of yourself first and help others when you can.
It’s perfectly acceptable to spend three thousand dollars on your own book
rather than on someone else’s, but sometimes we should say, “You know what? I
want you to feel good,” and spend the buck on a random stranger’s love-child
just because.
The trick isn’t to stop asking for what you want. It
never bothers me when a student finds the nerve to request a favor. Entitlement,
I believe, isn’t about the idea that you are valuable and deserve more than
what you have, it’s refusing to understand the other person’s perspective, to
realize that a teacher has to consider all students, that a reader can only buy
and read so many books, to care at least a little about the other person’s
needs before suggesting they consider yours. We have the right to pick from the
masses the book that seems the most enjoyable to us, to spend the money and
time on something that catered to the things we cared about, to trust the story
that looks better made than to give a chance to the one that seems like it’s
never been read by anyone before publication. We get to trust our instincts
over the word of a stranger when it comes to making decisions. We get to decide
who we want to help and who we don’t. A writer must consider his audience if he
wants his audience to consider him, otherwise we have no reason to trust he is
more important than any of the other millions of people who also want to be an
author. Assume that you are a number first, and then prove you’re not.
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