rachelmanija | Success

Success

Apropos of discussions going on in the journals of

sartorias, and others, regarding what defines success and failure as a writer, how to manage failure, and how to know whether to persevere or give up, I thought I'd mention a conversation I had with a friend the other day on a related topic.

I was grumbling to her that I kept having "big breaks" that ended up being not quite as big as I'd hoped: a play off-Broadway-- that no one saw; staff writer on a TV show-- that was ignominiously canceled after no one saw it; sold a book-- that did not hit the bestseller list, and so did not cause all doors to be opened to me.

There are levels of success: first publication, regular publication, full-time writing (not now, but I have been there in the past), and-- the great, elusive goal-- to be able to write whatever I want and automatically get it accepted, as long as it's good. And I mean in all the media I write for-- not just books, but comic books and articles. For movies, TV, and plays, which operate under different constraints, the ability to at least automatically get it seriously considered. Offhand, the only people I know personally who have reached the Big Goal are Neil Gaiman and perhaps Holly Black. I know plenty more who would count if I knocked off the "all media" requirement.

But I think I'm closer to that goal with the latest "big break" under my belt. So it seems that my career, at least, is not really about waiting for the big break that will catapult me to where I want to be, but more like a ladder with some broken rungs, where you periodically slip down a few, but keep going up, and cannot just fly to the top.

And by "broken rungs," I mean things like literally thousands of rejections, getting my TV show canceled, and spending seven years writing a novel that I still haven't finished.

I manage failure by thinking of it as the possibly temporary failure of an individual project, not the failure of my life. Projects can always be revived and recycled. And if not, there's always something new.

Now, I suppose I was always talented. In fact a way with words is really my only talent, if you define it mean "something one has always been good at, and which gets better than most people can make it when you work at it." By "most people" I mean "most of the population," not "most writers."

But whether other people should persevere or not, I really can't say unless that particular person asks me. And even then I can only comment regarding how much talent and skill I think they have. Whether it's worth it or not to them is something that they know better than me. Whether they mind a lot of failure, which comes with the teritory; whether it bothers them that they probably won't feel like writing a lot of the time; whether they want to have a career that frequently consists of enacting my icon; whether they'll be content with the odds that they will never be able to give up their day job; that's not something I can determine. I can't even say, "Don't do it if it doesn't make you happy," because it might make you happy later, not everyone has happiness as their highest goal, and maybe doing something else would make you even more unhappy.

All I can say is this: I see a lot of talent on LJ, I've seen a lot of people here publish for the first time in the last few years, and I'd like to see more of you get your writing out on the shelves. So if it's really what you want to do... I'm rooting for you.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It did strike me how many people (not sparing myself here) seem to equate "success" with "published," "best-selling," or even the Neil Gaimanesque level you mention -- maybe it's unfair of me, but it seems sort of particularly American. I mean, I hate the Romantic myth the artist has to starve in a garrett, but you know, _most_ writers don't get that kind of name recognition during their lives. And even authors who are v famous in their own time -- George Sand, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fitzgerald's bestselling bete noir Bruce Barton -- are sort of fringe at best after a lot of decades, or even unread. (That list of bestsellers from decades past someone linked to really struck me, as well. How many of _those_ are being read now?) It just reminds me....partly of Hoop Dreams, where the kids are trying to get into the NBA so hard, and it's like winning the lottery. -- I mean winning the lottery applies to that kind of Gaiman/King/Dickens/Rowling-sized success, where you are a cultural phenomenon. I've read a fair number of biographies of artists over the years, and I think it's pretty rare most of them received what was due in their lifetimes (Melville comes particularly to mind), much less being v well-paid and feted for it.

I wonder how much of this is due to studying authors in college....I mean to a person educated beyond a certain level, James Joyce, say, is _everywhere,_ he's in the Pantheon, we have his letters and biographies and novels and short stories and his awful awful poetry and all that. And yet if you read his letters he's always borrowing or begging money from somewhere or other....there's this weird disconnect that if you are an Author that Really Matters, everything of yours will be in print and readily available and selling like hotcakes, even tho that's not how most bookstores are set up now (weekly new arrivals, midlists not usually kept in stock, chains and suppliers battling over discounts, &c &c).

The thing is, though, there is no objective measurement of artistic worth. I'm always tremendously reassured by those bestseller lists of the past, but on the other hand being unappreciated in your lifetime doesn't mean you're necessarily good either. Maybe you're unappreciated for good reasons. (I probably should say "I" instead of "you"). And it's desperately hard, having a career where there is no reliable objective measure of achievement. If I _knew_ my books mattered, I wouldn't mind that I have no money, and am nearly unemployable due to having spent most of my life writing books rather than acquiring useful skills and experience, and am known only to a tiny circle of people mostly made up of other Canadian writers. But I am haunted by the idea that I have more or less screwed up my life and my family's lives so that I can write mediocre unimportant books. And really, there is no way that I can reliably know.

That's why even those of us whose real core interest is in writing something artistically important do find ourselves obsessing over things like sales -- because it's the closest thing to an objective measurement that there is. (It may also be the case that, as things are now, a book needs to achieve a relatively higher level of commercial success in order not to disappear into an absolute void, regardless of artistic quality; I'm not sure about that. But I'm pretty sure, regardless of the quality of my books, they will vanish if I don't manage to achieve US publication ... yes, we all bow before the superpower in the end ...)

Stephen King. That man could write a Saturday-morning cartoon about talking kitties, and they'd make it.

Of course, the kitties would probably feast on the flesh of their murdered owners. In which case, sign me up. :)

Interestingly enough didn't his attempt at epublishing -- "The Plant" -- flop? I've always wondered about that -- certainly, if anyone has the number of readers to make a success of that....

I've been watching this and not really weighing in on it, not really having the experience to, you know, say anything.

People comment on the different meassurements of success, mostly involving publishing and payment, and others mention artistic importance and success.

I...well, I must have the lowest bar for rating something successful in writing history:

I just don't want to suck.

It would be fun if the thing I'm writing got published, hell yes. And getting money for it would be icing on the cake. But mostly I'd want it published so I could send nifty copies to my friends, and they could all giggle over it, because it's supposed to be funny.

For me, writing is like acting, my actual long term talent and skill. I'm good, very good, on stage. But basically, I have no illusions that I'm Ian McKellan (I've met and seen him live, so I KNOW I am no Ian McKellan); I just want the people who come to see the show I'm in forget that it's me, and enjoy the performance.

And in the book thing, it's much the same way. Everyone who's beta reading the MS is havin a hoot of a time on it, and is really enjoying the thing. They all want the final chapters. And frankly, so do I. And I'll be able to finish within a relatively short time.

So. I'll have written a full book. And people will have liked it.

I will have succeeded.

In fact, I've already vastly exceeded my expectations on this project; so I've already succeeded.

Six years ago two friends of mine were riding back from a choral recording session we did at Lucas Ranch, for the SFGMC. We had stopped at the Marin Farmers' Market and bought fresh grapes, cheese, smoked salmon, and crackers, and were driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, eating them as we went.

One of my friends said "This is how I want my life to be someday. I want to be driving in a BMW, eating brie and fresh grapes with my friends, and just having a great day."

I looked in the mirror and said "Sweet? That's your life today. Why not enjoy it?"

Again, I guess I set my bar low, but I've already succeeded at this writing thing, to a large degree, and each word I put down towards finishing this MS makes the success even greater.

I am all about the Ooo Cool Factor. I don't much care about what field I work in as long as I enjoy it, get paid well enough to survive, and have people go "Oooooo, that's cool!" when I tell them. It's the same for my art and my comic art - I don't have a drive to be a best-selling comic artist, what I have is a desire for people to go "Ooooooo, cool!" :D

Whenever I IM or talk with my sister or certain friends, I'm very much "Okay, enough about day to day stuff. Let's gush about The Cousins".

They are very patient and obliging. I'm sure they want to beat me with a brick. A great, big, mortar encrusted, nasty BRICK.

I think the fact that I'm stuck in working a Real Job (tm) by massive student debt is one of the best things that could happen - I can't improve at my art as fast as I want or devote as much time to it as I would like, but I don't have to get it published, and I don't have to make a ton of money at it. I can take some small contract somewhere and use that as a small stepping stone, because I won't be investing 40+ hours a week for six months in something that'll barely pay rent, much less bills or groceries. So rejections don't have a tinge of desperation for me.

Something similar to the Great Publishing Success in the scientific world is the lecture my advisor gave my class on the first day of our How To Do Research class in grad school: in your career you're not going to make a huge scientific breakthrough. You're not going to win the Nobel Prize. You're not going to write the definitive textbook on the subject. That happens rarely, and to very special people who are in the right place at the right time. You're not one of them. Your contribution is to be doing all those little things: refining the scientific theories, making tiny contributions to the literature, verifying or disproving some small hypothesis that isn't going to make much of a difference to anyone overall. But what you're doing is all the work that will allow that one special person to make the breakthrough or write the textbook or turn currently accepted scientific theories upside down, and that's something that's absolutely necessary to science. You are an indispensible part of the scientific machine, and it cannot work without you.

Or words to that effect. It was a decade ago and I don't remember what she said, just the gist of it. It doesn't quite map perfectly to the world of literature, but I think the sentiment fits well enough.

I like that very much.

And in mapping it to the writing world: if you don't get published, but encourage, support, and mentor someone who does, then their success is your success.

[[ I manage failure by thinking of it as the possibly temporary failure of an individual project, not the failure of my life. Projects can always be revived and recycled. And if not, there's always something new. ]]

That's kind of my reaction to this 'success' discussion elsewhere. In writing, you haven't lost/failed till the game is over -- and the game isn't over till YOU say it's over. Even if you die with unpublished stuff, as long as it's knocking around somewhere in the digital databanks (Project Gutenberg etc), it may in some future century get discovered and read. (Emily Dickinson? Kierkegaard? J. S. Bach's music that was used for fish-wrapping?)

Who really 'succeeded'? Someone who studied the markets and the how-to's and made money with a lot of time spent dealing with contracts and deadlines and book-signings and tax accountants? Or someone who spent all her time writing just what she wanted to, which eventually found just the right readers?

Sometimes it seems like being a writer means spending a lot of time being right on the edge of something wonderful being about to happen any moment now, maybe, unless it doesn't.

With "any moment now" covering a much longer time span than it sounds like.

*roots for you right back*

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Success

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Pollyanna speaks up.

Re: Pollyanna speaks up.

Re: Pollyanna speaks up.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject