More Writing. Less Magical Thinking

I read this post from author Victoria Schwab. In it, she advises writers to just keep writing no matter what's going on with the business side of the writing business. This is absolutely rock-solid advice.

But the end of the post veers off into the kind of triumphal narrative that we Americans in particular seem to love. After facing hard times, Ms. Schwab finds her career turning around, to the point where her middle grade series sells half a million copies.

This is great (no, really: it's amazingly great), but it feeds into the lie that our entire country seems to buy into (and that we may be infecting the rest of the world with through our pop culture hegemony): that life is somehow fair. The implication here (or at least the inference that people on Twitter were drawing from the piece, which may not be the same thing) is that if you keep putting in hard work, your hard work will eventually be rewarded. 

There are a lot of problems with this. One is that, as everyone knows but nobody likes to think about, life is profoundly unfair. Being a good person, doing the right thing and working hard do not guarantee that you'll get what you want. Want to sell half a million copies? Line up. But I can tell you that you almost certainly won't.  Because almost nobody does. Yes, we can find examples, just as we can find examples of people who have won the lottery. It can happen. It just almost never does. 

This doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But just be aware that Victoria Schwab's experience will probably not be yours, just as E.L. James' success doesn't imply that your fanfic is going to sell a gazillion copies.

But we love these stories of hard work paying off; they provide the comforting illusion that life makes sense. It's scary to think about how chaotic and unfair the world is. But Victoria Schwab does not deserve her success; nobody does. Or, to put it another way, Victoria Schwab deserves her success, and so does everybody else. Some people are just lucky enough to get it.

Poe died broke. Gatsby was out of print when Fitzgerald died. Talent and hard work are neither necessary nor sufficient for success. 

I guess this might sound like a terrible bummer, but for me, 20 years older than Victoria Schwab and far less commercially successful, it's actually very comforting. Because there's a really dark side to the magical thinking that dominates this country.

If success is possible for everyone, if hard work and determination bring success, then if you don't succeed, it's fundamentally your fault. You must not have visioned it properly, you must not have worked hard enough, you must not deserve it. So not only do you have do deal with disappointment and frustration, you also have to carry around the guilt of knowing that if you're not rich, if your art isn't reaching the audience you think it should, you only have yourself to blame.

But that's not true. Some of us will get lucky; most of us won't. (and I know that, having had a bunch of books published, I count as someone who got lucky. It's another national curse that no matter how much success we've achieved, we spend our time looking up at people with more.) Magical thinking is so deep in our national character that it's hard to escape. And it's exhausting to have to carry around the responsibility for your lot in life.

But any artisitic career is a crapshoot. No. Way worse odds than that: it's a powerball ticket. You don't earn your good fortune, and you don't deserve your bad fortune. Shit just happens.

Which means you need to stop waiting on your happy ending. Make your happy now instead.

 

Note: some of this post is probably unconsciously plagiarized from Barbara Ehrenreich's amazing book Bright Sided, which explores these ideas better and in more depth and which you should probably read.