Harsh truth 1 (of 8) for writers

As a Scotsman, I enjoy hard truths. (My people recently learned that there are other kinds, though it has minimally influenced our usage or acknowledgement of them.)

Other cultures prefer an attitude of perpetual positivity. I’ve tried. I hear it so often that I was almost convinced there was no other way to be. But eventually you’re just lying yourself away from anything negative.

Perpetual positivity isn’t the worst stance to take. It’s way better than join-me-in-the-murkers. But I’ve always been a realist.

There’s always a middle ground. I think it’s essential to see the upside of everything, but you must look at the thing first and then identify its upside, rather than turning your head and cycling off on some road made out of candyfloss, which’ll melt in the rain and leave you even more lost than ever before.

So I hope you enjoy this series, in which I will probably say things you already knew or expected, but hope to bring them out into the light so you can look at them and be totally cool with what they look like

Here’s harsh truth #1!

Other writers are better than you. Kinda.

I’m about to do something that may make you feel defeated if you take it seriously. Doing so would be close to deadly. So don’t. (I’m hoping the exercise in itself reveals how ridiculous the idea is.)

Here we go.

I recently read Best of McSweeney’s—or I had way back when I wrote draft 1 of this whole spiel!—and my favorite piece in it was by George Saunders.

I know that every other piece was about something else, but Saunders’ piece seemed to do more and say more than any other.

McSweeney’s as you probably know is a very exclusive litmag. Having read the “best of” and determined who I think the best author in there is, I wanted to do some crude maths so we can better understand what to make of this:

Best of McSweeney’s came out in 2004, and the mag, a quarterly, started in 1998. That means the book is the best of 6*4 = 24 issues.A more recent issue, McSweeney’s 50, has 50 authors in it, and is 300 pages long. Not to say that’s the same for every issue, but let’s assume it is. That means the pieces in the “best of” were selected from a pool of 24*50 = 1200 writers. (Assuming they were all different authors. Mags may publish the same authors multiple times. But I’m not gonna go through every issue of McSweeney’s just to polish this number a bit for you!)Best of McSweeney’s is 624 pages long, so it probably contains about 100 authors (I don’t have it to hand.) It therefore represents the top 100/1200*100= 8.3% of authors who have been published by McSweeney’s.Saunders is the top 1% of the Best of McSweeney’s, therefore the top 1/100*8.3 = 0.083% of authors published by McSweeney’s.From Duotrope, McSweeney’s has an acceptance rate of 0.1%. (Assume Duotrope ranking, tabulated from its users, is an accurate representation of all writers submitting to McSweeney’s. It’s good enough for this example.) That means of everything sent to them, only 0.1% of pieces are accepted. (Let’s assume again that the number of pieces submitted is equivalent to the number of authors submitting. Not necessarily true, but good enough.) That means at the date of the “Best of” publication, assuming a constant acceptance rate, 1200 authors were published from a pool of 1200/(0.1/100) = 1,200,000 authors. And George Saunders is the best out of all of those. (The top 1/1200000*100 = 0.000083%.)

That’s only of the authors who submit to McSweeney’s. I never have, nor, I don’t believe, have most authors I know. I don’t think there’s a way to quantify how many have submitted to McSweeney’s or not. So this is as far as we can go: George Saunders ranks as in the top 0.000083% of authors out there (writing literary fiction, I guess.)

If you trust that I’ve read enough contemporary American literature—one of my favourite types!—we could say that he ranks better than anyone who’s ever been published in McSweeney’s. Therefore, of the full 50 issues to date, he ranks:

50 authors x 50 quarterlies = 2500 authors2500/(0.1/100) = 2,500,0001/2500000*100 = top 0.00004%

(On good days I’ll include David Foster Wallace too, who was also in the Best of. So when you think about it that way, Saunders is only in the top 0.00008%. Better?)

I know this is bullshit and so do you. But why?

Here are some exceptions to the assumptions I made along the way, and some caveats to the conclusions made:

Many brave authors, following many McSweeney’s rejections, keep submitting. Some of those may get accepted.Many stellar authors get accepted by McSweeney’s more than once. And they’re not always fiction writers.Many, many people disagree with me that George Saunders is even that great.Saunders himself doesn’t win every battle. Last year, Amazon Studios passed on the pilot TV episode adapted from his short story “Sea Oak.” Trust authors when they tell you that rejection is part of it. It’s not necessarily an indicator of quality. (It probably is, but you can’t prove that. Best way to handle it is to improve the thing if you can and send it back out again. After all, all you can offer is your best at time of submission.)

Writing is highly subjective. I get that. Highly, but not wholly. My maths is a bit off, but not completely.

Where am I in these rankings? I’ve never submitted to McSweeney’s, as I say, though I don’t think I would be that high up. Duotrope tells me that with my 11% acceptance rate for what I dosend out, that I’m above average. That’s nice! I’ll interpret it as this: it’s more likely than not that I wrote something worth reading. That’ll do!

Don’t let this panic you.

Here are some further disclaimers:

None of this means that no one else’s work is worth reading. 2% or more of fiction produced is probably astounding, life changing even—it’s also way more than gets published by the biggest mags. Some of these mags receive 10,000 stories a year and will publish between 3 and 24. There are literally thousands of writers who get rejected from these mags who have successful careers.Say a McSweeney’s takes 8 hours to read. Well, there’s way more time in a person’s life—between then and waiting 3 months for the next quarterly—for them to read something else. Many more things!Extending that argument, Saunders is almost 60 and has 8 books out. I’ve apparently read 38 books this year (at time of writing this.) (One was his.)Have you ever lost excitement at the prospect of reading a new book? Have you ever had a week go by without learning of something else you might want to read? Me neither!There’s time and space for more. Few things make me happier than anticipating a new book. Those people who write them make my life more exciting. It’s a very good thing.

Though I don’t want to lean on the subjectivity of fiction too hard, because I think there’s enough said about that. It’s harder to imagine that someone can get better as a writer if it’s really all just chaos—so it’s not even that consolatory an idea.

Even disregarding subjectivity, we know intuitively that thinking like this is pointless. You can feel it right now, I’m pretty sure. I didn’t just kill the thing you want to improve for the rest of your life in one blog post.

Phew! You made it! Stay (blog equivalent of) tuned for a new harsh truth asap!!