Writing Without the Promise of Success

A small essay regarding my view of life as a writer.

I'm afraid this is going to sound bleak, but I think it's something a lot of authors never fully confront because it's both a difficult and terrifying topic. Feel free to disagree or provide feedback, thank you everyone who keeps this community alive 👍.

1. Introduction

I don't know why I write, not exactly. I don't think it's a painful externalization of my subconscious into a page, nor do I find it absolutely blissful and heavenly all of the time. It's something that is quite important in my life but it's not the only thing I want to do. It's certainly not the second best thing to dying and going to heaven; relationships, love, time with friends; those things get closer to that description.

But, as much as I've managed to distract myself, I haven't been able to push writing out of my life. I don't much want to either, despite being absolutely certain that I'm not any kind of literary genius. There is a need to write something and point towards it and say "I made that" and I'm going to work with the operating assumption that you have something similar to that.

Also, when talking about this topic, some people will say that wanting to make money is impure or corrupting art or that it somehow demonstrates a lack of honesty or whatever nonsense like that. Of course we want to make money writing. Now that would be heavenly. Being able to sustain oneself through their passion would simultaneously provide them with more time to do what they want to do, and raise their motivation to do it. Financial freedom is also a main predictor of overall reported happiness. You don't need to be a greedy Animal Farm-esque bureaucrat to want to, ideally, make money out of the thing you spend so much time doing.

2. The Distribution

Let's get acquainted with the Pareto Principle. The 80/20 rule. 80% of outcomes stem from 20% of causes. 80% of the revenue in a business comes from 20% of the customers. 20% of programming bugs cause 80% of system crashes. It applies even more dramatically to money, with the top 0.001% of people having more money than the bottom 50% combined. These are intuitive illustrations of a larger reality: Uneven distribution.

And yes, it applies to art. Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Bach; there, that's the four classical musicians the average person knows about. And writing? Hell, most writers never finish a book. Those that do never sell it to anyone. The few that do sell it to someone usually don't make a significant amount of money, certainly not enough to live a modern life just by writing. When you walk into a book store and see the front shelf, those five books are basically the only books making any money.

There is a very attractive rational solution to that problem: These writers aren't trying hard enough. They don't have the will power. They are blinded by misconceptions and don't see the Truth that I see. Truly good writing is eventually always recognized, even if only after years of effort.

Many writers will tell you that. That's the thing about pop culture, you only hear the success stories. You might think there's something outstandingly special about your favorite writer, and there might very well be, but you haven't heard the hundreds if not thousands of stories about people who may have had similar capability, similar vision, similar work ethic, but simply didn't have luck on their side. Maybe they got sick. Maybe they had to stop writing full time to keep a job and help their family. Maybe they did literally everything right and still failed because at the end of the day, you are relying on someone else to see the value in what you created. It's brutal. There is no recipe for success.

3. Lessons from the Past

I thought that perhaps I could study these writers who never got their "writing careers" off the ground but, for obvious reasons, it's hard to find them. I did find one, who, while extremely famous now, lived the vast majority of his life, even as he wrote his masterpieces, in complete poverty. I'm talking about Cormac McCarthy, who spoke about this exact issue with one of his few interviews, with Oprah Winfrey.

McCarthy only reached consistent financial success when he was in his late 50s with All The Pretty Horses. He wrote his masterpiece, Blood Meridian after receiving a MacArthur Fellowship. He wrote Suttree, an even longer novel, over the span of twenty years through which he didn't have any money. He refused to work a job, indeed making a point of shaping his life in such a way that he could only write. It was hard. He ate beans every day for years.

Cormac didn't only not expect recognition and fame, he actively refused the few instances in which he was requested to play the role of the writer enlightening others. He refused $2000,00 to speak at a university about his work. He famously avoided congregating with other writers, and did very few interviews even after his works became widely recognized.

When Oprah asked him about the years in poverty and whether or not he thought about things like money, he didn't pretend that he had some secret genius within him that had allowed him to become The One. In fact, he attributed his success to mere probability, stating he was the luckiest person he knew. There was also a near-superstitious notion that he described, that he always felt things would work out and they did. He recounted how he ran out of toothpaste one day, walked to the mail box and there was a free sample tub of toothpaste.

4. So how should one live?

So what can we learn from the author of Blood Meridian? Likely that the probabilistic, ruthless nature of reality he wrote about wasn't something he himself was exempt of, far from it. Control is an illusion. You can do everything right and still fail, if your measure is financial success. Your time needs to be considered.

This is the reason why I believe you should answer the question "Am I okay with doing this without expecting external reward?" before you commit massive amounts of time to writing. Not because you need a big, fatalistic statement to base your life around (It's perfectly acceptable to be a seasonal writer, or try it out for a while, give up, then return; that's the kind of movement writing gurus don't talk about), but because if you are writing with the belief that your work only has value if other people see it as valuable and are willing to financially support it, then your writing isn't based around a principle that can survive the nature of reality. The Pareto distribution applies beyond humanity itself. It applies to river networks and asteroid sizes and things like that.

None of that is to say that dedicated, conscientious, hard work is useless. Nor that learning more about writing and refining your craft won't be vital if you are to encounter any kind of success. It will be vital. It just may be that being in the right place at the right time will be the actual thing that allows the right person to see it. We tend to imagine qualities as these things that bring good results in and of themselves; real life isn't like that, the whole story of you could be changed by a single well placed decision.

5. Conclusion

Upon these reflections, more and more I think to myself that "Why should I write?" isn't the right question. It might be "Do I need to write?", because if you do, you need to figure out how much of it you need. You need to detach expectation of success from it because it will corrupt it and most likely lead to a lot of disappointment. And if you don't need to write? I might be able to say that, in a small way, I envy you. As you can see by the length of this post, I lack that same gift.

Feel free to comment your own perspective on the subject. I wrote this out of deep reflection I've been thinking through, and it's completely possible I'm incorrect or ignorant of something else. I apologize for the unmotivating nature of this post and I'll understand if it's deleted.

I leave you with the opening paragraph of Suttree. It's an invitation. Always remember to invite the reader into your work.

"Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you."