One of my flaws as a teacher is my insistence on persistence. I like finishing things: I don’t like leaving them incomplete. It’s a problem for my classroom because it means that I don’t always adapt quickly to how my students are taking in the material, how much they are learning from it; I have, more times than I can count, stubbornly kept on reading the same piece, the same essay, the same story, the same book, even though my students have completely lost interest, simply because WE’RE NOT DONE YET. Maybe even worse, I have gotten irritated about reading excerpts, and have gone ahead and given my students the entire piece to read, just so we can do the whole thing; then, when they get tired of it — or, honestly, if the author gets out of their golden zone and drops down into less stellar writing — and nobody is paying any attention to what I am reading, I keep reading it anyway. Why? BECAUSE WE’RE NOT DONE YET. Again, this is because I was unsatisfied with an excerpt, and insisted on reading the whole thing. (This example, by the way, comes from my experience with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “On Self-Reliance,” which is a lyrically beautiful piece of writing, with amazing ideas in it — aaaaaand it’s also over 10,000 words long, which is about 19 pages of 19th century transcendentalist sermon. Most textbooks that cover the era or the genre have excerpts from it. I gave a class the whole thing and tried to read it to them. The excerpts were better.)

To be somewhat more fair to me, I love literature and words and writing and reading more than I can clearly explain; so for me, all of Emerson’s essay is beautiful, and essentially all of it can be inspiring. I also feel a sense of — duty, I suppose, in that I find it disrespectful to take only excerpts from a longer piece. If all Emerson had to say was the thing about trusting yourself, that’s all he would have said; obviously, he thought there was more that was worth saying, and since Emerson was an incredible genius with words and ideas, and one of my heroes and inspirations, I want to honor the man and his work by taking it in, and giving it to my students, in the form Emerson intended: all 19 pages of it. So I gave my students the whole thing to read because I thought, and I think, that it’s worth reading the whole thing, that reading the whole piece is the right thing to do.

It turned out they disagreed with me, and as always, the students win those arguments by the simple expedient of shutting down, no matter how passionately I read, or how carefully I point out the valuable material in the rest of the essay after you get past the “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Maybe there’s a way I could have maintained their interest as Emerson goes on and on and on — no, there’s definitely a way; I just don’t know that it’s worth it when there are other good things to read in the world, and limited time to do that reading. At some point even my desire to finish things caves in the face of continued passive resistance, and I do (I did with Emerson) give up and discard the piece in favor of something newer and more interesting for the class to work on.

Though if I think their resistance to the learning was because they were being lame, rather than me being lame in my choice of material or pedagogy, I will often re-inflict the same sort of thing on them. I mean, what if we move on from Emerson — and go straight to Thoreau? CheckMATE, teenagers! Transcendentalism IN YO FACE!

On the other hand, one of my flaws as a political activist is a distinct lack of persistence. Or maybe it’s a lack of focus: I don’t have a single cause that I fight for; inasmuch as I have a political side and a set of causes to fight for, I don’t push myself very far into that fight. I give up very easily. I will argue until the cows come home — and then I will argue with the cows — but I won’t go out and do things, won’t collect signatures or donations, won’t canvass or march, won’t join political action committees or grass roots organizations. It goes straight back to the same point I made with what I teach in my class: because as much as I love literature, I do not love being around people. I guess I won’t say I hate it, because there are certain people I like being around as much as possible; but I hate going out among strangers. It’s one of the things that makes teaching an acceptable career for me, as an introvert; because I get to know my students, in some cases quite well, and that makes me more comfortable being around them. I hate the beginning of the year, and I hate getting new students and losing old students I like; because new students in new classes are strangers, and I don’t want to be around them until I get to know them better. (I don’t have to like them, actually, but I still feel more comfortable and get along better with students I know and dislike, than with students I can’t even recognize or attach a name to.) But that same discomfort with new, strange people keeps me out of political activity: because a march is thousands of people I don’t know, and all other grass roots political activity is focused entirely on meeting new people and getting them into the fight on my side. And I don’t want to do that.

But the result is, I don’t do much to make the world a better place, even though I want to, even though, knowing my abilities, and ignoring my personality and preferences and comfort level and anxieties and everything else apart from my abilities, I always tell myself that I would be good at politics. And I would: I think well, I listen well, I speak well; I’m very good with people. But also, there’s simply no way that I could be happy and comfortable being surrounded by strangers all the time, which is essentially the life of most political activists. Certainly the life of politicians, which I have also thought (And continue to think, in my less self-aware moments) that I could be successfully. I could give a speech. I could draft a law, and argue for it. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to make and maintain the friendships and alliances that would be absolutely necessary to get anything at all done in politics; I’d always want to just go back to my office, sit by myself, maybe read something; but that doesn’t matter, right?

Thinking this way has always had me considering whether or not I should start running for political office. (Also my students frequently tell me that I would be a good candidate and they would vote for me. It would mean a whole lot more if they voted. Or knew anything about political candidates beyond the most superficial information. Hey, they’re kids; what do you expect? It’s nice to hear, which is actually their point anyway.) I could start small, maybe a local school board; then something like a state representative, and then who knows? Congressman Humphrey? Why not? I wouldn’t want to go much farther than that, since greater power requires greater compromise, and I wouldn’t want to sell out; but I hear about congresspeople like Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who do the work of the Congress, who do the research and write the bills and all the behind-the-scenes grinding that is required to get stuff done. I could do that, I think. It would be useful if I did that. And I would give a good speech, and I would be awesome in a debate. Which makes me think I could get some useful things done, if I could go that far.

It struck me hard in this strange, idle ambition of mine when I heard that Mitch McConnell, whom I loathe more than most politically opposed people in this country, but who is unquestionably one of the most effective politicians of the last half-century if not more, absolutely hated working with Barack Obama: because Obama wanted to explain the ideas behind his political goals and actions, wanted to get into the philosophy and convince McConnell to work with him on the merits of the thoughts and his ability to communicate them; and McConnell just wanted to do a fucking deal. Because that would 1000% be me, trying to get into the underlying morality and the cause and effect of any legislation or policy I wanted to pursue; and the other politicians, the deal makers and negotiators, all those goddamn extroverts, would just roll their eyes and say they had another appointment.

So no. I should not go into politics. I should not run for office. If I could just jump straight into the role for which I am suited, I would be a real asset to the country or the state or whoever I worked for — I would make a hell of a speechwriter, I think — but that’s sort of like the ambition I had when I was a kid, to work my way into the NBA by becoming a 100% never-fail flawless free-throw shooter, who they could substitute in whenever a foul was called, and then I could calmly hit all the free throws and help win the game, despite being 5’10” and essentially unathletic. The problem being, of course, that the game doesn’t work that way. To become a speechwriter for a political campaign or organization, I would have to work in the field, and especially network in the field, for years; and I would have to do all the things I don’t want to do in order to do the one thing I want to do.

This same persistence makes me a good author, because I can keep working on one story until it is a whole book. And the same lack of persistence makes me an unpublished author with five — almost seven — genuinely good novels sitting on my computer, and not on bookstore shelves. The contrast, and what seems to me to be fairly extreme opposite traits, is difficult to wrap my head around sometimes: because how can I give up so easily on some things, and fight so goddamn hard and so goddamn long on others? If I’m willing to put in so very much time and effort to write a novel, to the extent that it takes over my life at times, and becomes one of my defining attributes, that I am a writer, that I am a novelist: why on Earth won’t I fight to get my books published? Do I just want to write, but not have other people read what I write? Why would I want that? And yet, that seems to be exactly the life choice that I have made: I’ve been writing novels for almost 20 years now, and have not published a single one, other than through self-publishing. (I know, I know — hang on, I’ll come back to it.) But you see, I know, with a bone-deep conviction of total understanding, that writing is communication, and therefore requires an audience for the writing to be anything real. I want people to read what I write. I am happy that people came and read my blog two weeks ago, when I posted the chapter from my novel Brute, and I am disappointed that fewer people read the one from last week, about Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. (That combination has contributed significantly to this topic, by the way. I’ll come back to that, too.) I do want readers. I want my work to be published.

So why do I give up?

And the larger problem is, how do I get myself to change? If I can’t understand my motivations, the causes of my actions, I can’t address them, can’t change them; self-awareness is the most important factor in self-change. How do I tell myself to keep fighting for the things I give up on, when there’s no simple explanation for why I give up on those things and not on others? I’m neither 100% stubborn, nor 100% (Hey, what’s the opposite of stubborn? Wishy-washy? Flimsy? Weak-willed? Maybe adaptable.) adaptable, so I can’t just point at my nature and say “That’s just who I am, I never/always give up.” At the same time, if I’m willing to give up on things because of inherent or essential aspects of my personality — I am not going to stop being an introvert, which means I’m never going to be a good political operative — why do I keep persisting in the areas that are just going to keep hitting this wall? If I’m never going to be a good political operative, why do I keep trying to get involved in politics? If I’m never going to push myself to publish a novel, why the fuck do I keep writing them?

This is where I come back to self-publishing, then. Because honestly? It’s the perfect compromise. I have printed and sold somewhere in the hundreds of copies of my three published novels. (One has never been printed because it’s only available as an ebook. But there are a fair number of people who have read it electronically.) That means I have an audience: I have readers. The feedback I have gotten from my readers about my novels has been almost entirely positive. (Some people think I’m too wordy. No, sorry: EVERYBODY, including me, thinks I’m too wordy; some people think that’s a problem with my books. Mostly agents and publishers.) It also means I don’t have to do all the shitty things I would have to do if I were to become a professionally, traditionally published author, namely: I don’t have to compromise. I don’t have to edit my books to someone else’s standard, which standard would be almost entirely derived from what the market research said would be most profitable. Why didn’t my first novel sell? Because it was too long: it’s a young adult fantasy novel, based almost to the point of plagiarism, on Harry Potter, and it’s 600 pages long. And sure, the last HP books topped 600 pages — but the first two did not. After those first two became the most popular YA fantasy novels of all time, Rowling was able to write whatever the fuck she wanted and sell it to anyone, which is how we got The Cursed Child. (By the way, I liked parts of that. But not enough of it. And there’s no reason on Earth why it is a very short play, rather than what would likely have been a very good novel, other than Rowling decided she wanted to write a play, and was arrogant enough to think she had to be right because she’s JK Rowling. Which is also how we got this neverending TERF bullshit that has tainted the entire franchise. Sometimes persistence is not a virtue.) So once again, I want to skip all the difficult stuff and just go right to doing whatever the fuck I want to do, namely writing the very long books I enjoy writing.

However: let me also point out that the book is so long because it’s actually two and almost three books combined into one: the character has a life in the “real world,” a second life in the world of dreams which is the main fantasy aspect — and a third life in a role-playing game he runs, which I narrated as a real story, lending the book an element of swords-and-sorcery fantasy which I think is a real strength. Telling three stories means a lot of pages. Also a lot of work. But even writing this paragraph out here is making me excited about the concept all over again; maybe it’s time to go back and write the sequels I never wrote. Because I gave up on that series when it didn’t sell, even though I loved it and loved where I planned to have it go.

So maybe I do give up on writing sometimes. Well, like I said, I did eventually stop reading “On Self-Reliance” at my students. I don’t like doing things that don’t work. I don’t like wasting time. I have too much other stuff to do. More productive stuff.

More productive stuff like publishing my own books. Another accomplishment I am very proud of. And even though I don’t like being around strangers, I have, twice now, been very successful at selling my novels to strangers at a booth at the Tucson Festival of Books. Which I’m going to do again this year. And that’s an area where I actually like interacting with people: because they are book people, and I get to talk to them about pirates and stuff. And then they give me money, and they take my book away with them, and hopefully read it and enjoy it. A couple of them have told me they did read it and enjoy it, so I think I can assume that other people did, too. (I know for sure that several of my friends have read and enjoyed my books, and I’m grateful for that, and for them. I’m just saying that of the strangers who bought my books, most of them probably read the books, and some number of them enjoyed the books. A couple of those strangers have told me so.)

So then, why, if I’m happy self-publishing, if I get an audience and also a sense of accomplishment, and freedom as a writer — why do I still want to publish with a traditional legacy publishing house?

Because my other dreams and aspirations persist, too. I don’t just want to write: I want to get rich from writing. I want to be famous because of my writing. I want to be invited to speak on a panel at a convention, where I can see people dressed as my characters. I want people to write essays about my books like I have written essays about the authors whose works I admire.

It’s the same thing with politics: I don’t want to be around strangers and I don’t want to compromise; but I do want to make a difference. I do want to make the world a better place, to make people’s lives happier and more fulfilling. And sure, I’d like to be famous as a politician, too. As someone who made a difference. (Also, if I was a politician then I could get my damn books published.)

I meant for this topic to be just a brief introduction, a lil hook, to my intended goal with this post: to finish talking about Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. There’s a whole second half, more than half, of that essay which I left off, last week. I talked to my brother, who told me the interesting truth that Martin Luther King Jr. Day is his favorite holiday: that the ideas and values represented by the holiday, associated with Dr. King, are closest to him, most important to him, compared to those associated with other holidays. And I told him that I had just written about Dr. King that weekend, about the Letter, and he asked which piece by Dr. King that was: was it the one about the long, slow arc of justice that bends towards freedom? No, I said, it was the one where he said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Oh,” my brother said, “the one about white moderates, about how he was disappointed by the white moderates.”

“That’s the one,” I confirmed: and immediately felt guilty. Because I left that part out. I stopped before that section of the Letter, which goes on for many more pages, covering many more ideas — and continuing to be brilliant.

I should have kept going, I thought. I didn’t finish the piece, and I left out important parts of it.

But then again, my wife, after reading the post last week, said it was good — but also that it was long. And my WordPress stats counter told me that not very many people read it. (Actually, my most popular posts continue to be my old book reviews, a couple of them in particular, and some of my essays about novels — especially the one about The Lord of the Rings and Gollum, and The Metamorphosis and Gregor Samsa.)

Regardless, though, I thought this week, I would finish analyzing the rest of the Letter. For Dr. King, another of my ideological and wordsmithing heroes; and for my brother, and for the sake of getting to the powerful statements the Letter makes in the last two-thirds, particularly about just laws and unjust laws, and about white moderates. Because, first, I want to finish the piece; and second, I worry that I am one of those white moderates who would have disappointed Dr. King. Because I don’t keep fighting for justice, don’t maintain my persistent participation in the political struggles that affect people in this country and in this world.

And thinking about that got me to here. On a subject about which, apparently, I have a lot to say. (I think I will probably finish analyzing the Letter next week. But we’ll see.)

I don’t want to be one of the white moderates who disappointed Dr. King. I don’t want to be wishy-washy, and tell myself that I’m being adaptable, when the thing I am adapting to and accepting is failure to do what is right, what should be done. If I should get my books published, I don’t want to be a coward who gave up and failed simply because I didn’t have the strength of will, the persistence, to keep fighting. If I have a role to play in achieving a more just world, I do not want to be the person who backed away from the fight simply because I don’t feel comfortable around strangers.

But the answer to this is not what I am implying there — what I frequently catch myself saying to myself, as a criticism, until I remember that it should not be a criticism, not even of myself. The answer is not to never give up, ever, for any reason under any circumstances ever ever ever. The answer is not to become a zealot who never compromises, to become an extremist. (Though Dr. King makes a wonderful point about extremists in the Letter, calling himself an extremist for love, and for freedom, and for justice. I could be that kind of extremist, I think.) Dr. King himself was a moderate: he wanted change to come without violence, without tearing down the systems and institutions that were tainted with intolerance and injustice. He wanted this country to be better: but he still wanted it to be this country.

I’m reading a book, currently — Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein — that is about extremists who were willing to do anything to achieve their ideological goals: they recognized that the only way to really achieve the change they wanted was to create a crisis, a shock, that would set a people back on their heels, and while the people were all reeling, the changes could be implemented because people wouldn’t be able to resist. And those people? They’re evil. Not only because their ideas were wrong and bad for humanity (The specific group Klein is focusing on is the neoliberal economists of the University of Chicago, under their prophet Milton Friedman — and fuck that guy), but because they refused to accept anything less than everything. They were not moderates. Their economic theory requires absolute purity, not a single element of compromise; and so they are zealots. And because Friedman was himself a zealot, who spent his long life fighting for this one cause, for this one idea, for the supremacy of his theories and the absolute elimination of all else, he did incalculable harm to this world. And it stuns me, and I’ve commented to myself in my annotations in the book (Of course I annotate books I read. Don’t you?), that Friedman and his colleagues and disciples could have such complete courage in their convictions, such unwavering confidence in themselves and their rightness, and their righteousness. Such complete, perfect, persistence. The ideology and Friedman’s example both lend strength to that tendency; but I think that’s a sign of zealotry in all cases, that absolute unquestioning confidence. And zealotry, in all cases, is bad.

I don’t want to be a zealot. Not even for a good cause. But I also don’t want to be weak, don’t want to give up when a fight is worth fighting.

So the answer?

Compromise.

Self-publishing my novels is the right thing for me to do. It’s where my focus and my energy should go. I may send away queries to agents, sure, and I may even hit the lottery and get published; but otherwise, I should compromise between what I want, and what the reality of my strengths and weaknesses dictate. There’s no point in wishing I could network with the publishing industry and get published that way; it’s not who I am. Sure, self-publishing means I am unlikely to ever get rich and famous from my writing; but that’s the idea of compromise: you don’t get all of what you want. But you focus on the main goals, and you work hard to get those, even if you have to give up something else.

My main goal has always been to be a writer. To create worlds. Part of that means I need to have people read and participate in my writing. That’s the main goal. That’s what’s important. And if I have to give up fame and money in order to achieve that? Fine. Probably better for me, even if it doesn’t feel like that.

Another of my main goals has always been to help people. This one, like the goal of becoming a writer, is essential to who I am, and who I want to be. If I want to make a difference, it doesn’t have to be a difference that affects the whole world, or even the whole country or the whole state: making a difference for one person is making a difference in the world. And I do that: for my family and friends, for my readers, and for my students. And since I’ve had thousands of students, I can actually say that I’ve had a pretty strong impact on the world around me, because I have had an effect on a pretty big number of people.

And I did it by staying true to who I am, and knowing what I can do and do well, and then doing that, exactly that. Not by wishing I could do something else, or be someone I am not. I do wish, sometimes, that I could do or be more than I am — I wish I was more tech-savvy as a teacher, and more organized, and better about using different styles of teaching and learning; and I wish I could be more of an extrovert when it would be useful to interact more with other people — but I have my strongest effect, and make my greatest progress, by doing what I do well, and persisting in that. Knowing what is actually important and what is actually good — and knowing, on the other hand, what would be nice, but isn’t necessary. And also, in contrast to Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys (And if you want to know why I will continue to say #FUCKMILTONFRIEDMAN, read Shock Doctrine, or listen to Unfucking the Republic.), being open to the idea that what you think is the most important thing, and what you think is true, may not be — and being willing to learn what is true. That is also part of knowing what is really important, what is really good. I believe that reading is vital for everyone, that to be able to have a full and valuable life you must be literate: but I am coming to accept the idea that people don’t need to read. It’s still good and always will be, and for me personally it is vital; but not everyone needs to read. I can accept that. Because I’m not a zealot. And I’m not an asshole.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have some confidence, some persistence in believing that what you think is actually true: you need some. I have to believe my writing is good enough to publish, or I would never put it in front of any audience, and then I would not be a writer. It’s important to believe in yourself and your decisions, to trust your decisions about what is important, which means you need to trust yourself; but the best way to do that, in my experience, is to trust your process whereby you came to the decision, and to base it on good processes: gather information, verify the information, draw conclusions from what you know; be open to newer or better information, even if it contradicts what you used to believe. As long as you are willing to abide by new information (also, good information), then what you decide based on what you currently know is the best you can do: and that should be good enough. Trust yourself — but verify your information. Friedman never questioned himself, not even when other facts interfered with his conclusions; he had an explanation for everything that showed how his theories weren’t flawed, it was the world that was wrong. That’s too much self-confidence. That’s arrogance and zealotry. But also, when I ask why I never got published, part of me wants to think it is because I’m not a good writer: and I know that isn’t true. I am a good writer.

What I am, is someone who has read Emerson’s “On Self-Reliance,” the whole thing. I understand what he meant when he said “Trust thyself.” And I know that his point rests on an older commandment, which is even more important: Know thyself. Know what you can do. Know what you should do. And when those two streams converge, when the two strings vibrate in harmony: keep going, keep fighting, and never give up.