Getting Your Parables Published

Because we all know that’s what Jesus was thinking about

I was at a birthday party last Saturday and I was talking to a nice girl named Merle.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I write.”

“Amazing. What kind of stuff do you write?”

“Humor.”

“Humor. Like David Sedaris?”

“Like David Sedaris.”

“I love David Sedaris. I’ve read every one of his books. The stuff’s like candy. I could lie in the bathtub with a stack of his books and a glass of champagne and do nothing else but read. He’s so funny.” She started telling me various details of David Sedaris’s life, the same way when I’m out at the pub with my friends someone will start saying, “Do you know Brian has two sisters? And a brother? And his mother used to do stained glass?” and I think, “When did I ever tell this person my mother did stained glass?” and then I remember my blog. But that’s not the point. The point is that this girl, Merle, she absolutely loves David Sedaris, and she would automatically buy any book he ever wrote and read it cover to cover. That made me think, even if I write the most amazingly hilarious and insightful stuff and get it published, most people who read my stuff, the most it will ever inspire them to do is: buy another one of my books. The Merles of the world will feel like they know me that much better (“Did you know his mother used to love Phantom of the Opera? I had a friend whose mother was the same way. She saw it three times, twice on tour,”) I’ll have no idea about the inner lives of any of these Merles, and the wheels of the publishing economy will keep on spinning.

What I’d like is for someone to read something I wrote, and based on my articulations of my own tomfoolery he decides to live a more meaningful life and connect more with the people around him. A couple of months ago a friend of mine quit a job he hated and moved back in with his family so he could work full time on his novel. Only after he had moved back home did he tell me that he did this because he was inspired by me. The thing is, he’s read my stuff, but just my blog posts, not my manuscript of “Four Generations a Griffin: A Memoir” or whatever other outrageously ambitious intellectual enterprise I’m undertaking. That got me thinking, my goal as a writer shouldn’t be to get published, it should be to live my life as an example.Part of that is telling stories—something I’ve been doing for free for years at dinner parties—and the most I should hope for is that my five best friends and eight nuclear family members who are close enough to me to hear how I work and live and love, that it somehow influences their lives for the better.

Jesus, back in the day when he was wreaking havoc knocking over money changers’ tables in the Temple in Jerusalem, it’s not like he was worrying himself all the time about getting his parables published: (“Oh gee, the man with a hundred sheep, or the woman with ten coins, which is more likely to appeal to a mass audience?”) He gave his stories away for free—the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Plain—and he built up a mass following. Then what happened? His fans up and got him killed. So much for mass appeal. But his work went on, and good for him that he was able to rise from the dead and show that even if the person dies the idea doesn’t.

So if I ever get massively published like David Sedaris (or the Bible for that matter), let it be. I want my goal to always be the same, which is to live and write what I believe is right. The worst that happens is the Merles of the world eat me up like candy. The best is one of those Merles gets up out of the bathtub and does something more.