Hoping to “Succeed” at Writing? (What Is “Failure”?)

One summer around ten years ago, while in the artistically bipolar midst of writing a novel, I discovered after a shower that I had a perfectly round and perfectly bald spot the size of a quarter behind my right ear.

I had no idea how long it had been there, how that much hair could have escaped my scalp without my knowledge, or *whether it would ever grow back. What I did know, even though something like that had never happened to me before, was that it was stress-induced. (Sometimes you just know things, like if you get sick after dinner and know it was the lettuce and not the chicken.)

More specifically, I knew the bald spot was writing stress-induced.

But even that isn’t accurate. The stressor was actually a fear of not being a success at writing, and this fear was inhibiting my desire to write, which meant I wasn’t writing as much as I felt I should have been writing after my generous and loving husband had said to me, “We’re in a place now where you can quit writing for the paper and write what you want to write.”

To justify not working at the job I’d quit in order to spend my time writing, I’d have to be successful, I thought (at the very least get traditionally major-pub published, which in the writing world is quite the achievement). However, my first two novels hadn’t been published traditionally, and it wasn’t as if I could, or would, change how I wrote, so what if no one in the industry wanted this novel, either?

While many artsy types are somehow able to create with an enviable disinterest in success or peer respect or whatever other annoyances exist, just as many of them, and probably more, feel the weight of the possibility of not succeeding. They’re everywhere you look, if you go looking, but here are a couple examples I came across by chance:

A writer on Substack recently shared that she’d wanted a positivity injection and so had sought out clips or quotes by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. What she’d found instead was a video of Gilbert telling writers, “First of all, sweetheart, making a career as an artist is impossible almost everywhere.” Gilbert, the Substack post read, had broken her heart. Had made her cry. Had made her feel like she should just stop trying.

Another writer, one I’m social media-acquainted with and who’s been published by someone other than himself, once shared in a post, “been writing since i was 14. feeling it’s pointless to go on with it. it’s all rejections and neglect, with interludes of brain twisting.”

Surely when any of us started writing — when anyone started doing anything creative, whether writing or painting or playing an instrument —it was for the joy of it. Right? So how did it get so un-fun?

“Success” means never having to say “I’m sorry for living”

When I’m at a social gathering among professional types, which happens to me less than once a year, if someone asks “What do you do” (and this will sound dramatic, or worse, cliché), I start sweating. I get shorter. I immediately feel like a teenager in a room full of middle-aged bankers, or other people who comfortably wear swishy slacks and shirts with collars. I say, “Um…noth — I’m a writer, I guess.”

“Really!” they say with no malice or snobbery. “What do you write?”

Eff me. More shrugging. Blushing. Wanting my husband Ian, standing next to me, to answer for me, but he’s making me practice this kind of exchange because, obviously, I’m a social moron. When I finally say “Fiction” and they ask whether I’ve written anything they might have heard of, I know my answer should be, “Maybe! But if you haven’t, [X, Y, and Z] are my titles, which you can order from your local brick and mortar.”

Instead I say, “Oh, no. I doubt it.” Laugh-ish noise. “I don’t have an actual publisher, or anything. I just, you know, put them out myself.”

This is when Ian, standing patiently by like the solid friend he is, probably wants to push me into a drink tray.

*

When I’m all by myself and in touch with what really matters in this uncomfortably short existence, I know I am creatively fulfilled. I have followed my own interests. I have worked very hard at what I care about most.

But I imagine saying “I’ve improved my crahhft and enriched my soul” when asked at one of these social gatherings “What do you do?” and suspect it wouldn’t be received in the same spirit as it might at, say, an ayahuasca retreat. The majority of people at the social event likely have ideas — as, unfortunately, do I — of success that align with those of the 92 percent of respondents in that previously mentioned poll, who said in answer to a slightly different question that they believe other people think someone is successful “if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known.”

Another 86 percent from that same poll believe other people think “a person is successful only if he/she is doing better than others.”

As of this day, not only have I (like many other artsies) not made myself rich, but I’m miles deep on the wrong side of the profit line, spending-to-sales-wise. Additionally, I am neither well-known nor known-period, my writing hasn’t granted me any kind of brag-worthy prestige, and the only people I’m doing “better” than — arguably — are those who hide their writing in drawers/documents folders.

So if I come off like a sad failure at these gatherings, it’s because without an official traditional publisher logo on the spine of my books, I feel like a failure around other people, because according to the majority of other people, I probably am one.

And if you’re a creative type who hasn’t “made it,” so are you, probably.

America: The land of (dashed) dreams

“I’m a big dreamer,” a lot of us artist types (and fame fantasizers and money lovers) brag. We’re not hanging back in this life and simply existing, no way. We have plans. We’re going to do something extraordinary.

We Americans embrace and preach dream-biggery as if dreaming big is a remarkable act, but in our country, at least, reaching “for the stars” is as obvious as pairing pork chops and applesauce. The conditioning begins early. In our first twelve years of schooling, toy designer Cas Holman says in an Armchair Expert interview, “our self-value got attached to success. … Someone told us what things to do, they told us how to be good at them, and they told us we needed to be good at them.”

In an unwitting illustration of the training, host Dax Shepard later tells co-host Monica Padman a story about his daughter’s recent volleyball game, which he ends by gushing over how well she did — better than most of the other kids on the team! He acknowledges that he should be happy simply because she’d had a good time, but he couldn’t help, he said, being thrilled that she’d stood out.

Our parents’ pride in our “standing out” indoctrinates us as much as school might. Our movies do it, too. Joy, based on the experience of Miracle Mop creator Joy Mangano, is considered inspirational not because Mangano’s inventions were genius, but because they made her rich. The Pursuit of Happyness, based on the life of Christopher Paul Gardner, Sr., also celebrates the life of someone who started as a “nobody” and worked his way to being really rich.

It’s also telling that we use the word “nobody” to describe those who aren’t rich or known by many — even when talking about ourselves. “Here I was, just some nobody,” an actor said in an interview I listened to, “and [Famous Actor] took the time to talk to me.” When Being Better Than Others in order to qualify as Somebody is our unofficial religion, how can we not dream big?

And how can we not refuse to accept an alternative when we’re constantly told we can all — every single one of us! — achieve our goal of being standouts with things like hard work, the never-quits, and a positive attitude?

We can all succeed if we just try hard and never give up!

“Success isn’t about talent — it’s about never giving up.” These are the words in the caption of a motivational video posted on YouTube by Canadian-American motivational speaker Brian Tracy for his 39.7K (as I write this) subscribers.

Other ways to guarantee we’ll get what we want include manifesting, detaching, reality transurfing (more here if it’s as new to you as it is to me), reading The Secret, etc. Many everyday people recommend these techniques, or say, “Of course you can do it — and you will,” in a genuine desire to be helpful without realizing that the assurance of success — along with the implication that a certain level of success is the natural standard to achieve — does the same kind of damage that’s been making women mad at romantic comedies for the last ten years. (“Romantic comedies set women up for failure by making them believe they WILL find prince charming/true love if they just open themselves up to it and that, furthermore, women need true love to be happy!”)

When not properly prepared for the possibility of not succeeding, being told or otherwise learning that the odds aren’t in our favor can understandably cause an emotional short circuit.

“Failure” is not making the Big Dream come true

As complicated as achieving success can be, what with all the emotional and psychological self-manipulation and the game-playing with the supernatural realm, failure is simple: it’s anything short of success!

On a recent episode of The Oprah Podcast, rags-to-riches success-figure-extraordinaire Oprah Winfrey interviews the now-famous comic Leanne Morgan, who after years of struggling to achieve her desired level of recognition has been duly recognized.

“You never gave up,” Oprah tells her. “And that’s why I thought you would be so inspirational to anybody listening or watching this right now. Because you just never gave up.”

That Morgan “never gave up” isn’t what Oprah finds inspirational, though; it’s that Morgan eventually found fame. Had Morgan persisted throughout her life, trying and improving and working at her craft until it was objectively genius-level comedy people regularly came to enjoy but without having become famous, Oprah probably wouldn’t have invited her on her podcast to talk about that. Want fame + don’t get fame = fail, even though people actually were loving Morgan, and were coming to see her regularly, long before she famed.

This means that in our current success/failure model, our country’s artist community is populated almost entirely by failures.

“Oprah wouldn’t even have heard of Leanne Morgan to have her on the podcast if she hadn’t gotten famous,” it could be argued.

Sure. But what if we as a society reprioritized? What if we celebrated talent instead of fame, showcased the artistry rather than the attention/big money the artist has managed to accumulate?

Take Actors on Actors, for example, a Variety series in which famous actors praise each other and talk about being famous. As celebrity actors have pointed out in various interviews, there are countless remarkable performers out there who we don’t know about simply because they haven’t been embraced by, or joined up with, Hollywood, for whatever reason. Couldn’t “A-list” actors with one kind of professional experience (fame) visit theaters around the country/world to talk to equally hardworking, skilled, experienced, talented, “nobody” actors about what they love about the work, how they got interested, what keeps them interested, and any tips they might have for others who want to improve their acting?

Big Book Clubs, too, could deliver more artistic diversity to readers by choosing half of their books from major publishers (who often tend to release what they predict will be “marketable”) and the other half from independent authors.

If there were more emphasis overall on the love of the art than on the love of the artist, would “success” start to look different, and would those of us practicing whatever passion pursuit be able to focus more joyfully and confidently on the act and less on whether what we’re doing will end with a status achievement?

Feelin’ lucky, kid?

Considering how much of “success” is out of our control, we may as well do more joyful work and less stressed-out striving. Brian Tracy, that motivational speaker with the YouTube channel, was half right: success doesn’t have a lot to do with talent.

Italian researchers found:

the most talented individuals were rarely the most successful. In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.

This doesn’t mean writers — or people, period — who “succeed” don’t work hard or aren’t good at what they do; it means those who don’t “succeed” also work hard. They’re also good at what they do. They just don’t have the right connections. Or the right timing. Or some other magical equation of factors.

As upsetting as Elizabeth Gilbert’s message might have been to that writer, what Gilbert importantly did not say is that being a writer is impossible almost everywhere. She didn’t say writers can’t write whatever books they want whenever they want (which we can, even if all we have is a pen and toilet paper, and we can publish for free) or that we can’t keep being inventive and mastering skills and enjoying everything about the writing process.

The worst she did was express the truth: most of us aren’t going to squeeze into that small percentage of writers whose books are career-making. “Something I keep saying (and have explained, at length, in my book The Business of Being a Writer),” writes Jane Friedman, who reports on the publishing industry, “is that the writer who makes a living from book sales alone is the exception and not the rule in traditional publishing.”

Just want your book put out by a traditional publisher, and that’s it? Still a small percentage. It’s said publishers accept 1–2% of manuscripts. The obligatory soft pillow added to this figure is that if your writing is good, you’re already going to beat 80% of the other hopefuls, vastly improving your chances.

But, a question: what’s “good?” to a publisher?

And while we’re asking that which is impossible to know, who can say why a video goes viral?

As valid as those questions are, there’s a better one for those who write but who hate having to accept that they might not find the success they feel will validate their life choice:

Say a psychic whose skills have been proven reliable by 100% of materialist scientists tells you, “You will not [achieve your specific success goal]. People will read your work, and many will love it, but you will not attract Random House/have a movie made/win an award/[fill in your blank].”

Do you still want to write?

I do.

—

*My hair did grow back.