Another Word:
Chasing the High
Chasing the High
When you start out wanting to be a
writer, you’re screwed. You haven’t read enough to really understand
what writing is. There are all sorts of different genres, and you may
not know if you’re better at detective novels or literary vignettes or
personal essays. You’re pretty impressed by some of the stuff you’ve
done when you’re noodling around, but most of it’s not very good. (And
you’re probably not actually sure which parts are impressive and which
ones aren’t very good.) There’s a whole obscure mechanism between you
and getting publishing that you’ve got no idea about,
and you don’t want to look stupid. Plus, it seems like everyone you know
wants to be a writer, and almost all of them fail, which is, let’s say,
discouraging. The sheer volume of things you need to figure out is unmanageable and huge. You’re screwed.
When you start sending out stories, you’re screwed. There are only a
few markets that publish the kind of stories you write, and the slush
piles there are like broken faucets that won’t turn off. You want to
stand out, but short of printing your story on bright blue paper or
including a chocolate bar with the submission, you don’t know how to do
that. No one knows your name.
Every rejection slip—and holy cow are there a lot of rejection
slips—makes it a little easier to just not send out the next story. The
idea of paying someone to publish your stuff just so it’s out there—just
so you can see your words in print—starts to seem like maybe a pretty
good idea even though part of you knows that’s the despair talking. The
Holy Grail is a personal rejection letter, because at least that would
mean someone cared enough to respond to you. You’re screwed.
When you start selling a few stories, you’re kind of screwed. You
have a few things in print, and you’ve gotten checks for a couple
hundred dollars to prove it! The people in your writer’s group threw you
a little party after the first one, but when the third sale came
through, the congratulations started getting kind of perfunctory.
Now that you don’t need the emotional support, you’re not getting as
much of it. Except that you’re still basically unknown, and you’re still
getting an awful lot of rejections that sting just as much as they did
before. You’ve sent your novel out to a few agents and gotten polite
“Not for me” answers. You’ve gone to a few conventions and actually been
on panels, which on one hand was really cool, and on the other left you
feeling kind of like an impostor. The world’s full of people who
published a few short stories and then vanished without a literary
trace, and you’re starting to think that you may be one of those.
When you sell your first novel, you’re screwed, but only a little.
Yeah, there are still a lot of dangers and hurdles coming. The book may
or may not get good reviews. You don’t know how it’s going to sell.
You’re really jazzed by the cover art, even if there are maybe a couple
little things you’d have done differently. Your friends and family are
congratulating you. There’s the anxiety that maybe it will fail, but
when you walk into the bookstore and see your book on the shelf for the
first time, it’s like being in a dream. Yes, if the numbers aren’t good,
the publisher may not pick up the next book. Yes, the advance you got
for it was less than you’d have made working a minimum wage job for the
same hours you spent writing. Yes, some of your unpublished friends seem
a little resentful. But at least now you can say you’re really a
writer. This is kind of the high-water mark. You should enjoy it.
When you’ve sold a few books, you’re screwed. Your first novel didn’t
set the world on fire, but it did okay. It sold through maybe eighty
percent of the copies that went out. Only then the bookstores ordered
twenty percent fewer of the next title, and that one sold through about
eighty percent. So when the third book hit, and they ordered eighty
percent of eighty percent of your first book’s numbers, you started
looking at a consistent pattern of lower sales, and the eBook sales
haven’t been high enough to buck the trend.
Now your editor is talking about how the subgenre you write in is
kind of oversaturated. And there was that one asshole reviewer on
Goodreads who totally savaged you for no good reason. When you very
politely pointed out that they’d misread the book, the Internet fell on
your head for a week. You’re in the death spiral. The good reviews you
get are easy to forget and the bad ones linger at the back of your head
for days. You’re watching your career die, and the war stories from
other writers about the times their careers were shot out from under
them only help a little. You’re screwed.
When you hit the bestsellers list, you’re screwed, and no one believes it. You’re a success fercrissakes!
This is what the brass ring looks like. Your series actually built,
you’ve quit your day job. You’re supporting yourself on the writing
alone. You don’t get to complain anymore. Ever. Because nobody has any sympathy.
Someone wrote a savage blog post that got passed around dissecting
how exactly your books show you’re a vacuous, stupid, venal person who
wants to degrade all that’s good in the world because you’re stupid. And
then a hundred comments after it praised the blogger for being brave
enough to speak the truth.
A reviewer at a major magazine uses your name as a synonym for bad
writing? Suck it up. Or stay off the Internet. If you defend yourself,
you’re only going to make it worse. And the sneaking suspicion that
you’re only selling your story to the anthology so they can put your
name on the cover (and not because the story is good) isn’t something
anyone wants to hear. The way that your new book coming out has gone
from a massive rush to “Yay, now get back to work” isn’t interesting.
Your problems don’t count anymore. You won!
If that’s a little lonely, a little isolating, less fun than you
thought it was going to be, if you still feel like an impostor,
literally nobody wants to hear you whine about it. So shut up and live
the dream. No one wants to hear how you’re screwed.
When you’re one of the handful that make it all the way to the
top—recognition, awards, more money than you’ll ever be able to
spend—weirdly, you’re screwed. You’re a celebrity now. When you go out
in public, strangers come up to you constantly and it’s your job to be
nice and polite no matter how awkward it is or how bad you feel.
If you make a bad joke on Twitter, it’s a headline on Slate and Gawker.
The praise for your work seems almost unrelated to the actual words you
put on the page, and the story about who you are feels like people are
talking about someone else.
Whenever you meet new people, it feels like they can’t see past your
persona. There are maybe three or four people in your life who aren’t
asking for things from you. The money is great, and it solves a lot of
problems, but not all of them. They won’t let you walk the floor at
Comicon anymore because of the security risk. You don’t go out to the
movies. You know that your writing is a commodity now just because it’s
got your name on it.
The jokes about how you could blow your nose on a piece of paper and
get a six-figure advance are funny because they speak to a real fear.
Maybe you’re not good anymore, because you don’t have to be. The passion
that started you down this path is still there, and so is the fear. You
want to be good, but maybe you’re only successful. And with the story about you so much bigger than the story you’re writing, there may not be a way to judge anymore.
A writing career is a constantly shifting environment where there is
no promised land. There’s only a changing, and hopefully improving, set
of problems.
The constants—the pleasure of reading a really good story or
paragraph or sentence or phrase (or, even better, writing it), the
well-considered praise of a respected voice, the sense of having learned
something new or relearned something old in a deeper way—have to be
enough, because they’re what we have.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And the good. And the work.
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