L. Neil Smith

L.Neil Smith is the libertarian movement's most prolific author, with more than twenty books to his credit. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

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Scattered Thoughts on the Life of a Writer
by L. Neil Smith

I'm between book contracts right now.

This is a very bad time for any professional writer. The poor guy is totally free to think about anything he wants, which is a situation fraught with danger. He's also usually broke, from paying the bills that accrued while he didn't want to think about anything but the book he was writing, so his thoughts tend to flow in certain unhealthy directions.

Somebody -- a bookseller in Long Beach, California, I seem to recall -- once noted that it doesn't matter what a given writer's politics happen to be. He can be a Republican, a Democrat, or even a libertarian. The moment he starts talking about his profession, he sounds like a Marxist, with phrases like "exploitation of the worker" and "seize the means of production!" constantly on the tip of his tongue.

I suppose it's true. I started out in this business, 25 years ago, grimly determined not to be a typical "artist," but to cooperate as fully as possible with what I saw as my partners in the business of creating books. However it soon became clear that everyone else in the business -- agents, publishers, editors, lawyers -- makes more from a writer's labor than the writer himself does. My editors, when I was a
fledgling novelist, could take their families on vacations once (or twice, or three times) a year. So could my agent. When I first heard that major New York publishers send their salesmen on trips to Bermuda to try and persuade them to do their jobs, it changed my attitude forever.

Nobody ever tells a writer anything. Good news or bad news, he's always the last one to know. For the most part, he sits home alone, way out somewhere in Flyover Country, preoccupied with his work, and at the same time, trying to make plans and decisions that may change his whole life, and the life of his family, forever, on the basis of microscopic scraps of information he's gleaned (or possibly imagines he's gleaned) from letters and telephone conversations with his book editor.

On top of that, if writers aren't crazy to begin with, they soon get that way, simply from sitting still indoors making tiny, precisely controlled, savagely restrained movements with their fingers and wrists, when what they so badly want and need to do, if they have any convictions at all, is to go outside, strangle everyone around them within reach of their hands, and bludgeon everyone else to death who isn't.

Instead, they have their characters do it in a book.

Over the years, it comes as less and less satisfaction that, while the writer is at the mercy of everyone around him while he lives -- spouses, children, parents, agents, lawyers, publishers, mailmen, internet service providers -- each and every one of them will someday live in the world that the writer has created. I made this point once to a police officer, who knew I was right, and who very nearly clubbed me to death because of it. What I told him, as I recall, was that it didn't really matter whether he agreed with me or not, his _children_ would.

I know. I'm lucky I lived.

There are other peculiarities.

Of the dozens of individuals I've worked closely with over the years, I've only met two of my editors face-to-face, one from Tor and the other from Marvel Comics. I also met the editors of two of the publications stories of mine appeared in. The rest are all disembodied voices on the telephone, or intellects cooler and more distant, over the internet and in meat-mail. I've co-authored two novels with a man I've never met, but have come to value like a brother. (As a matter of plain fact, I get along with him a lot better than I do with my own brother -- who happens to be the cop I annoyed a couple of paragraphs ago).

Robert Heinlein pointed out somewhere that most writers are broken in some way. He himself suffered tuberculosis, but many are just nasty little kids scrawling dirty words on the walls of somebody else's property. For the most part, in the western world today and possibly for the entire run of its history, writers and intellectuals have been traitors to their own species, delivering to humanity the worst advice they can possibly think of, because it pleases whatever demon within them that drove them to become writers and intellectuals in the first place.

I can't do that. My self-respect won't permit it, and I can't afford it in other ways, even if it means living in a tiny shoebox of a house and driving an 18-year-old car. Unlike other writers who claim that they enjoy writing for its own sake, I started writing with an ulterior motive. Several, actually. I don't like living in a police state. I want more freedom, not less. I want less government, not more.

I'm unwilling to sacrifice the minutest fraction of that freedom for the "safety" -- even if it were real, which it is not -- that the government wants to trade me for it. I understand, despite saturation level propaganda to the contrary, that it is government, not freedom, that poses the greatest threat to the life, health, and well-being of every single individual on this planet. I also understand, in the final analysis, that all taxation is theft and that all government is evil.

Those opinions, and others like them, have cost me considerably over the past 25 years, but I've tried and I can't imagine what I might have done differently. ("Dear Mr. Rockefeller," the imaginary letter goes, "I've heard a lot about your conspiracy, and I'm very interested in joining it.") One of my publishers once told an agent of mine that, "Neil could be a great writer if only he'd give up this libertarian nonsense." I suppose she was right, at least in terms of support from my publisher. The trouble is, what would I write about then?

Although I often rave and rant in the privacy of my own home and sometimes make life miserable for my wonderfully understanding and supportive wife and daughter, although I've striven for liberty for a quarter of a century and things have only gotten worse, making me feel, at times, like an utter failure and a buffoon, I probably won't change. I'll go on being a writer who can't help but write of things that New York publishers and salesmen don't seem to want written about, and won't give their wholehearted, enthusiastic energies to selling, the way they would, say, to another autobiography of Teddy Kennedy.

What's left is to step forward into the future, in the happy understanding that, just as the new technology has revolutionized the reporting of the news, freeing us all from attempted mind-control by the three lapdog networks, so it's going to change the life of a writer.

There's nowhere from here but up.