Welcome to the B-team
Finding the flow you belong in
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. I scribbled notebooks full of stories, typed away my school holidays. I come from a family where people read voraciously whenever they had the time (for my parents this mostly meant holidays), and reading was always and ever encouraged. So I thought I would be fine when I went to university to study literature. Only I wasn’t, really.
By the time I left high school, I had read almost all of the children’s and young adult section of the library. Flanders and the Netherlands have a long tradition of excellent work in those genres. But the transition to adult literature was one I found very hard to make. All of a sudden a number of the things I loved about books seemed to have disappeared. Imagination. Hope. Warmth.
Studying literature at university opened up my world in various ways. I discovered authors and oeuvres I had never heard of before. My scholars introduced me into the various literary traditions, the work of contemporary authors, and most importantly: the analytical, structural way to read and understand a book.
But those years were not only a time of deep, useful instruction. They were also the moment I discovered that although I had been brought up to love books, I had not been brought up to distinguish quality. My parents, I found, weren’t exactly perusing great literature. And academia hammered home the message very clearly: there was ‘good’ work, masterpieces that had defied conventions, struck a universal chord and would stand the test of time, and there was — everything else.
As ambitious as any young artist can be, there is usually enough realism to know that aiming for admission into the literary canon is a tall order. But as they say you end up writing the sort of books you love to read, it’s very disheartening to discover that what you love is not considered quality work by those you have come to regard as experts.
For a full year after graduating from university, I was writing from a position of enormous doubt, unconsicously trying to please standards I couldn’t possibly meet because they didn’t agree with who I was. And what was worse: I didn’t read. I was fed up with reading books I had been taught were ‘good literature’ but that only depressed me because of their subject matter, style or take on the world, and I was afraid to enjoy anything that risked being considered trivial. This internal struggle trapped me in the corner where numbness and paralysis join at the hip.
The book that rescued me was The vintner’s luck, by Elizabeth Knox. There it was, all of a sudden: a book written in the kind of refined poetic prose I had not only come to appreciate through my education but genuinely loved, and at the same time a story as far removed as possible from the realistic cynicism so deeply ingrained in contemporary Dutch literary fiction. Knox’ novel on a French vintner’s love for an angel he met one night a year throughout his life opened a world of imagination, sensuality and emotion, written in language as beautiful and intoxicating as a heady wine.
It felt like coming home to the place where I belonged at last. Here was quality work that soothed my heart and soul. This was the kind of book I loved. This was the kind of work I would write.
Only then I tried publishing it.
My written texts encountered a similar sort of judgement as my reading preferences had met at university. Part of this was due to lack of experience and an incomplete mastery of skills, to be sure. It’s not because you are aiming for quality that you are capable of producing it. Debutants presenting masterpieces do exist, but they are few. But later, some of my more mature manuscripts would also get rejected, sometimes for as many different reasons as publishers I sent them to. Elements that one had especially appreciated would be the very reason another considered the text unfit for publication.
It would drive me crazy with uncertainty. Apparantly no one could tell me what was ‘good’ literature, let alone how to write it. All I knew was that I was apparently doing something wrong. Or perhaps I wasn’t, but they didn’t like my work anyway, and instead were publishing stacks of books I did not like to read and I could — would — not write myself.
Welcome to the B-team, Jurgen Walschot wrote to me, in an attempt to cheer me up with his usual cocktail of wit, cynicism and kindness, when I had once again hit one of my old perfectionist walls and was licking my wounds, fearing I might never amount to anything at all. Better a happy amateur than a discontented so-called professional.
He was right, even though both us were, in fact, professionals. But one way or another, you have to reach the point where you stop caring what people think or what category your work is being classified in. You have to stop worrying and start making it.
But it’s a slippery slope, for different reasons.
One criterion upheld by the Flemish Author’s Association (an organisation actively advocating authors’ rights with socio-cultural partners, publishers and the government, where I was on the board for almost a decade) for membership was that authors had to have at least two works published with an established publishing house.
This is the kind of measure aimed at seperating the writers from the wannabes. Publishers are considered the gatekeepers to quality: if you make it past their threshold, you have earned the right to be taken seriously within your genre.
But what if quality work doesn’t make it past the publisher’s threshold?
I don’t want to shoot the publisher, so to speak — give or take the one exception. Obviously they have choices to make, and a lot of them are doing a sincere and decent job. But the world of book publishing is ever more weighed down by the laws of the market, and a lot of excellent work is simply not being published for fear of commercial failure.
Understandable? Sure.
Regrettable? I shouldn’t even have to answer that question.
So enter the B-team, and the professional who will make the work he feels he has to make and who will bypass publishers to have it printed privately in circulation of a mere fifty copies, selling them through his website or to friends and relatives, like any amateur would.
There was a time I would have run screaming at the very thought. But when the invitation came, in the form of Jurgen’s extended hand, and the feeling of a collaborative creative flow so enticing and nurturing that it held the echoes of angels, I felt I was ready to turn my back on the old world.
In the course of the last month we have been finishing Stream, a 50 page graphic poem (for lack of a better word). We have sent it to several publishing houses in both Flanders and the Netherlands, testing the water temperature and the viability of our little project. We have received some uplifting feedback, and we are waiting for some definitive replies.
We are at the same time exploring the options for an English or a French version of the book. While we are patient, we are continuing our work.
And we know Stream will be published. In the A-league, or by the B-team. While one would definitely be a lot easier than the other, if only from a logistics point of view, in the end it doesn’t even matter to me anymore.
So how do you know you’re producing quality work? Perhaps the answer is simply you don’t.
The only thing you need to know, is whether you have found the flow you belong in.
I have.
All artwork in this post is taken from ‘Stream’, the graphic poem mentioned above, the booklet Jurgen Walschot and I will be publishing somewhere in the course of this year (or the next, should a publishing house actually agree to take it on). The Dutch version is currently on the table of a number of publishers. We will be exploring the options for French and English versions in the near future.
