Success

[rachelmanija]

Apropos of discussions going on in the journals of janni, 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.

Comments

[tharain.livejournal.com]

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.