9/15/2023

Its Own Kind of Ambition

There’s a concept in advertising that tik-tak’d its little chitinous legs all the way up my spine and wrapped itself around my brain like the monster in the Vincent Price movie The Tingler. It’s called “extension” or “blow out” meaning any good idea needs to be blown out into an omnichannel message that has bespoke activations across its various platforms. What does this idea look like in social? What about on the website? This has so rewired my brain that I see everything big picture now.

There’s an anecdote I heard about the novelist David Morrell negotiating the movie rights to First Blood: Completely clueless about the process, Morrell got an entertainment lawyer on referral from a friend. Immediately, this lawyer includes sequel rights and merchandizing rights into Morrell’s contract. Morrell calls this lawyer and complains. “Sequels? He dies at the end. And he’s a murderous Vietnam vet, who’s buying lunchboxes of that?”

“You never know,” said the lawyer and, sure enough…

It’s fucking Rambo. You know the punchline.

This is a story meant to make the audience chuckle knowingly. To wipe their brows and phew for Mr. Morrell who almost missed the gravy train. I hear the story and get nostalgic for Morrell’s mindset. I miss when ideas were ideas and stories were stories. My brain too easily plays the lawyer, slickly looking at every idea and seeing lunchboxes, sequels, series, action figures.

I tell people that I started taking poetry “seriously” when I was a teenager. That’s when my normal weekend habit of going to my local coffeehouse open mic opened its trapdoor and dropped me into the competitive slam scene. At that age, the challenge of competition pushed me to write more creatively, more boldly, and more honestly. I wrote pieces with complex choreography about my parents’ divorce. I wrote poems about my very complicated relationship with masculinity (hold for laughs) and, for the most part, was rewarded for it. 

Poets at every bout had books and CDs. I wrote enough poems to fill an album, a book, a “feature” at a coffeeshop or venue. I didn’t feel any internal charge for these parts of the process, I just noticed other poets doing it and, like smoking cigarettes and writing dirty haiku, I figured it was something I ought to be doing. Poets started talking about “publishing” and “submitting” to literary magazines and websites and prizes. I did that, too. Poets started slamming, competing with performances of their poems for randomized panels of judges for scores from 1 to 10. I did that, too. Ironically, this hobby rooted in authentic self-expression was pushing me to express myself in ways I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. This all eventually culminated in me writing myself into a burnout and a seven-year hiatus from writing poems. 

I couldn’t sit down and write without, if you’ll pardon me for torturing the metaphor, thinking about the price of lunch boxes. How does this fit in a book? How does it sound live? What kind of scores would it get in Minneapolis? I was advertising years before I ever went to ad school. Since going to ad school, as explained above, only made those instincts sharper. Nowadays, whenever I flex my creative muscles, I risk cutting them on those instincts.

It’s only recently that I’ve been making a more concerted effort to break that habit. Writing for fun, writing only when I feel compelled to write, and writing without a long-term plan. It takes more effort than I’d like to admit, but I enjoy the process more. I have friends who I share things with. I have a community I write for. I no longer feel quite as hungry for recognition outside of myself. 

I’m sure a lot of this new push has to be laid, like everything lately, at the altar of my transition. The hollow of my heart no longer seemed to plummet quite so deep once I figured out the fundamental wrong of my body. The hole used to rumble for things like recognition, validation, acknowledgment, striving for fulfillment. Now I realize all it needed was the truth, and the understanding that I was a woman.

The craft still matters. Every piece and thing I write still has to be good by my own metric. I am simply more gentle with myself. I submit to journals when I feel like it. I perform when I can. I no longer eat until my teeth break. I know longer write with ambition.

Save, of course, for the ambition to simply be happy.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B