I recently read the book On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche. This book is determined to make you put your own writing career/life into perspective. “Oh, are you sad you got a rejection from that magazine? Well, Ovid was exiled and his later works lost to the abyss of time. So, maybe, suck it up.”
It’s an unflinching look at how writing can be a compulsion, and while making it your career can be a goal, at the root of all writing careers is failure. Constant failure. The key is to have enough success to make a living, but you need to keep submitting/ publishing, which, in turn means you need to keep writing.
I highly recommend this short book to anyone who struggles with allowing themselves to write, to write one thing over the other thing, to make time to write, or to just feel like someone will want to read your writing.
Key quotes:
“…the playwright John Webster, whose birth and death dates in the Dictionary of Literary Biography are question marks, symbolic hooks into oblivion” (8). I will cross-stitch this onto a pillow this winter and post a picture of it here. “Symbolic hooks into oblivion” is one of those phrases I wish I’d written. Dammit.
“The first job of a writer is to write. The second job is to persevere” (9). Bah. Fine. FINE!
On Richard Savage: “Alexander Pope set up a subscription to provide him with an annual pension on the condition that keep himself out in Wales” (16). While I like the idea of being paid to stay away from some place, I don’t necessarily want to be the kind of person that pension would go to. Also, when I first read this I thought it said “out of Wales” but “out in Wales” is so much funnier.
“There are writers who write and there are writers who want to be writers” (19). This one took me a while to understand, since I belong to the first group and understand what the first job is. I think I would express this as writers who want to be authors. But that’s not as pithy.
“[Orwell] creat[ed] a small masterpiece [in 1984] that he couldn’t make anyone publish, then liv[ed] long enough to see it misunderstood” (21). The short section on Orwell is worth a reread. As well as the one on Machiavelli: “Instead of teaching to kids he wrote The Prince”(42), which is funnier in context, because teaching to children would have been the last resort, apparently.
Also, I think this is the most important part of the piece and something all writers, especially new writers, should absorb:
“Nobody knows what they’re writing. Intention never aligns with result. You never know how readers will react. You never see how readers will react. It’s all about what quantum physicists call ‘spooky action at a distance’” (67).
If you’re a writer, I would recommend this book. Get your self-loathing and pitifulness out of the way and go back to the page. Remember Ovid exiled and wasting away, writing poetry to the Barbarians in a language that would die and take his writing with it.
H.B. FLYTE 