On Success

Office Hours

First: many thanks to Sam Harris for having me on “Making Sense,” his podcast. You may have to subscribe to listen but it was, from my end, a really interesting and inspiring conversation.

Now, for our question of the week:

Q.

Hi George!

I'll start, as most do, by thanking you for Story Club. Reading A Swim In a Pond in the Rain got me to start writing seriously, and so the existence of Story Club is kind of a small, bi-weekly miracle to me (and many others). 

I have a question about success, and finding motivation in the face of its absence.

For some background about me, and I’m sure others can relate to this – I’ve written a novel and several short stories. I’ve queried the novel to many agents, and submitted the stories around lots of places, to no success.

So it feels like there could be a few reasons for this:

-It’s just not the right fit (Ok, sure).

-My work is staggeringly brilliant and the gatekeepers of the world can’t see that (unlikely).

-My work is staggeringly not-good-enough, and the gatekeepers of the world are doing me a favor (more likely, hopefully unlikely).

Kind of a 2-part question related to this:

1) Is there any way we can tell the differences ourselves? I’m reminded of a John Waters quote where he said “Somebody has to like [your work] besides the person you’re fucking and your mother.” But what is there beyond finding trusted readers?

2) You talk a lot about the story as a conversation between writer and reader. The times I have gotten strangers to read my work, seeing them have an emotional reaction really does feel like the completion of the writing process. Writing things into the void, as it were, where no one else sees them, is obviously still valuable, fascinating, fun etc., but it can feel a little futile.

How did you deal with this when you were starting out? What kind of advice do you give your students about this?

Thank you!

A.

Yes, and thanks for the good question, which I’m sure all of us can relate to.

Re this idea of “success,” I sometimes think about those immortal Dr. Seuss lines in “Oh, the Places You’ll Go”:

Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don't
Because, sometimes they won't.

And…then what?

I’ve touched on this subject of success and failure here and here before, but let me add a few additional thoughts today, if I could.

The first-order answer is: “We don’t, of course, write for worldly success; we write for the pleasure of being involved in a work of art, and discovering new things about our mind and the world,” and so on.

Which….well, this is how I really feel. 

Mostly.

But (I feel like adding, in the name of honesty): “I DO, also, want to be successful in that craven, worldly way.  Because I feel (I really do feel) that there is a rough correspondence between what is published/praised and what is good.  Not an absolute correspondence, but a rough correspondence.” 

For me – given my brain and my style of writing – this is especially true.  (I know, from years of experience that I’m off the mark when my work stops being funny/fast/enjoyable and starts being a burden for others to read.)

Among the writers I know, I’d say there’s a sliding scale, ranging from “I really don’t care about publishing and am all in it for the experience of writing,” to “I will do anything to publish because, otherwise, who cares?” 

For my part – full admission – I’ve always (since I was very young) been interested in doing something really well and becoming known for it.  And I still use that desire as a powerful motivator. 

This brings to my mind that timeless Q&A standby: “If you were the last person in the world and there was no hope of anyone ever reading your work, would you still write?”

To which my avoidant answer would be: “Why?  Have you heard something?”

“Hello, hello! Does anyone want to read my NOVEL?”

The work an artist does is hard.  There are so many false starts and reworkings required, and all of it takes time (and energy). 

So, I’m all for using any energy source we can find – if it’s desire for fame, money, praise, whatever. 

An artist is like a person crossing a desert that is nearly impossible to cross – she wouldn’t want to reject any source of possible sustenance.

It sounds like our questioner feels that publishing is a worthy goal for him.  As he says very nicely: we all, to a greater or lesser extent, crave the completion of having someone who reads our work being moved by it and so on. 

Then we send something out, and get a No, and have to deal with that.

What to do?

First, I think it’s worth noting that there’s something genuinely strange going on in the artistic world these days – the marketplace is just tougher.  It feels to me like this may have to do with a general, corporate, feast-or-famine mindset.  It used to be that a publisher would nurture a new writer, and I don’t think this is happening as much anymore.  (See this article, by Dan Sinykin, about Cormac McCarthy’s early career.) 

I think it (whatever it is) is happening in writing and also in TV and film (and, for that matter, politics) – an unhappy melding of art and commerce that is leeching out into the larger culture, tainting us with banality and lack of nuance, and inspiring a slew of auto-narratives that have less to do with our lived experience than they should.  (Phew: I’ve used up my Monthly Mad-Generalizing Quota there.  But I’ll let that statement stand, in the name of getting the conversation started).

We don’t, of course, want to use this “the market is screwed” idea as an excuse, but it’s something to consider. 

The next thing that comes to mind is a period in my career that I’ve written about many times – when I pivoted from pseudo-Hemingway to something that felt more authentic to me.  Part of what motivated that pivot was a steady stream of rejections that all had about them a particular quality of indifference that I came to find nauseating.  I was writing my heart out, it felt like, and the world was (merely) shrugging in response.

I couldn’t stand that feeling.

What I wanted was…anything not that.  I desperately wanted to be noticed, even if in a negative way.  I wanted to cause some sort of reaction in the mind of my reader, even distaste, even rage, even a feeling that I was doing it all wrong – anything but “meh.” 

Feeling this, I felt something open up in me.

Again, I’ve written about this ad nauseum but, for today’s purpose, I want to emphasize that swerve; I’d been writing one way (with a fairly rigid set of beliefs about how one was supposed to write, and how one was supposed to feel while writing) and then, in the face of all of that ongoing indifference, I felt a sense of revulsion and…..swerved (forcibly) away from that set of beliefs.  Not because I suddenly felt they were “wrong,” or that they had been intellectually discredited – they hadn’t, not really – but simply because (damn it!) they weren’t working. 

They were leading me to make a middling product, one that caused indifference in my reader, and I found that unbearable.

I’ve used this analogy before: if I really want to be known as a composer of serious string quartets but, when one my quartets was played, everybody fell asleep…well, there’s a message in that.  If on the other hand, when I played a polka, on my accordion, everyone was suddenly joyfully dancing: there’s a message in that, too.

So: we are all seeking our equivalent of that accordion/polka combo.

What can we do, that makes the world respond enthusiastically to us?

If we buy into this model, then a moment of non-success might be profitably understood as that which might invoke the swerve; that is: might we view “a moment of failure” as, instead, “a sacred opportunity to reject old habits?”

In other words, a setback might be seen as a moment at which to ask ourselves: Hey, why do I write the way I write?

Why am I, these days, using this particular approach?   Can I see what “my default approach” actually consists of?  (Much of this is so automatic, so pre-programmed into us, that it’s difficult.)  

Am I wedded to this approach?  If so, why?  Could I (would I), having identified it, be able to give it up?  (Swerve away from it?)  If I adapted a whole new (even arbitrary) approach, and applied this with good energy…wouldn’t that still be “me,” writing?  (If not, who would it be?)

Underlying this idea is the notion that there is no “correct” approach, except the one that makes an intense result AND that, if the resulting work is intense, it will, almost automatically, have plenty of “you” in it. 

This is maybe the most profound and inexplicable thing I’ve ever learned from a lifetime of doing art: if I take a thing and obsessively work with it, it always ends up having “me” in it.  It doesn’t matter what I start with and I don’t require any ideas along the way except “keep making it better, in even the smallest way.”

And again – for me, but maybe not for you – the driver through all of this is, simply: acceding to my innate desire to be noticed. 

You’re talking to a person at a party and his or her attention is elsewhere, annoyingly.  How do you get their attention back to you, and then hold it?

For me, that’s the essence of my approach to writing.

When the world says “meh” to something I’ve written, I try my best to think of this as a gift; as the world saying, “You are not writing from your most powerful place.”  

Helpful?

What do you, esteemed members of Story Club, do with an absence of success, or a dry period, or a period during which the world is not loving what you do?