Being Gary Coleman: the Ben Tanzer Repetition Patterns Guest Essay

If you remember, I get to throw off my blogging duty...at least this one time...as part of This Tour Will Change Your Life, Ben Tanzer's virtual book tour for his new short story collection, Repetition Patterns, published by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Tanzer, of course, is the writer of the novels Lucky Man and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine and is now publicizing the story collection. So appropriately enough, his topic for today's stop is marketing yourself as a writer, which naturally he entitled:

Being Gary Coleman
by Ben Tanzer

People will not find your work. Okay, they might, and they do, but mostly they won't, because there is a lot of clutter out there, waves of good to great writers, making noise and publishing, and you need to somehow rise above that clutter, if only for a moment.

So, try the following: self-absorption, saturation, compulsion, repeat.

You must love yourself and your work. Your work is a product. Like Tide, but more interesting. Your work is also an extension of you, the best you, not necessarily the most attractive you, bed head is fine, even the occasional lapses in the brushing of your otherwise pristine teeth, but your writing must rock, you must hone it, get feedback, tweak and re-tweak, and keep writing, writing, writing until you have a voice, any voice, as long as it yours.

And then you must celebrate it, like your very own Technicolor dream coat. Now, am I implying that you should think of yourself as Jesus, well Joseph? Yes of course, and Spiderman, Iman, Yoda, President Obama, Elizabeth Crane, The Ramones, Viggo Mortenson, Tom Brady, Gandolf, and even Gary Coleman if it helps. You are your brand and you must love your work. Love it so much that you want it out there because you know without question that people, some people anyway, will love it as much as you do. How do I know this? Because I do, this is how it works, even when it doesn't, see JT Leroy or James Frey.

Now saturate. And no, that is not the same as exfoliate. Well, it's kind of like that. Still, now you must blog, twitter, blog about twittering, update your Facebook status, more blogging, more twittering, get out, share links, blog about your links, make friends, shoot a video for YouTube, link to other blogs, leave comments on people's blogs, make more friends, be funny, swap books, be engaged, and available, and blog, schedule a reading, shoot another video for YouTube, twitter, Facebook, do interviews, ask people to do interviews, twitter about interviews, do more readings, blog more, be interesting, support your friends, join Goodreads, go on a virtual book tour, blog about that, and then twitter some more.

Do this compulsively.

And then repeat.

Any questions?

What You Talking About, Poe?

So I’m researching epitaphs. Why? Because it beats the hell out of writing. Some of course are amusing:

Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go.

Heather tells me, by the way, that NPR told her that the bananas we eat will disappear in 30 years due to Panama disease. I miss them already. She further tells me that bananas are sterile and so are essentially clones of one another. We are all eating one banana. I have to quit talking bananas with Heather because she is blowing my mind.

But getting to the famous epitaphs I find Poe’s: “Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.” Why does that make me so sad? Am I the only one who had a morbid teacher who made us play the come up with your obiturary? I can swear the same teacher made us draw a tombstone and write our own epitaph, but you know the betrayer memory…tricky bastard. I was both frightened out of my mind my these exercises in mortality and offended that I could (at some insanely young age) sum up my life in a sentence.

And that’s Poe’s: Quoth the Raven, Nevermore. It’s perfect, some would say. Fitting. But my problem is that it’s cliché. I know you can’t judge that time then from the standards of now. But I can only react now and that’s like Gary Coleman’s epitaph being “What you talking about, God?” Wait, is that his epitaph? No, that’s right, he didn’t die recently…he got married—totally different. Unless you were in a Poe story where death and marriage might be something akin.