Literary luck
Is your favorite author brilliant, lucky, or some combination of the two?
In an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray submits sample chapters of a book to his agent, only to discover that the publisher isn’t interested.
“There are a lot of books that get published that suck,” says Ray’s resentful older brother, Robert, “so for yours not to get published, it must really suck.”
Robert is half right. A lot of books that get published suck. A lot of books that make the bestseller list suck. But that doesn’t mean books that never make it out of the slushpile are terrible. Many, many of them are. I was an intern at a publishing house and read submissions, so I know. But there are also great books that never get picked up, just like there are singers with incredible voices who will never perform outside of dive bar karaoke nights.
You may have seen the article, “No one owes you success in publishing,” and I agreed with a lot of it, especially the part about how it doesn’t get any easier after you put out a debut novel. It certainly hasn’t gotten easier since I published mine.
I also think Andrew Boryga is correct in saying that writers should spend more time focusing on writing than complaining about the industry. I’d much rather be creating than obsessing about publishing. The novel I’m currently working on is set in 1957 and follows a troupe of fat dancers who do the can-can in sleazy, skid row bars. Spending time in this world I’ve created is delightful, far more so than worrying about who got what contract or which book got this or that award.
So, overall, I think I’m on the same page with Andrew. But I take issue with some of the comments, like the one that says people would rather blame the publishing industry for being “broken” than realize they aren’t geniuses. Okay, so a lot of people probably do fit into this category. I won’t deny that.
But I’ve read hardcovers that didn’t deserve their cardboard, and Fifty Shades of Gray, which is nobody’s example of great writing, is available in paperback from a major publisher. To imply that publishing is a line separating talented people on one side, and bitter, frustrated talentless wannabes on the other is wide of the mark.
What does success prove?
I have a theory that there are four categories of people who are successful -- or not -- in the arts: 1) talented people who get breaks; 2) untalented people who get breaks; 3) talented people who don’t get breaks; 4) untalented people who don’t get breaks. Everyone wants to be in group 1. Many people in Group 2 think they’re in Group 1, while hardly anyone in Group 4 realizes they don’t belong in Group 1. I’m reasonably certain I’m in Group 3 and waiting on my break, but I ask myself every day whether Group 4 is where I actually belong.
I suspect that some people who accuse unpublished or underknown writers of “coping” may be doing some coping of their own. After all, if they made it onto the other side of the publishing line, it’s because they are uniquely talented, and it can’t possibly be that they’re just lucky. No, it can’t be luck because that might mean their luck could run out, and what then?
I admit these categories are inherently subjective. It’s not like baseball, where a Class-A player doesn’t usually play in the majors unless his cash-strapped team has run out of options. (Shoutout to all my friends who are fans of poverty franchises!) A mediocre writer can get lucky and land a contract, and somebody, somewhere, will think the book is a homerun, even if critics pan it. That’s what makes this so hard. The lines separating the four categories are there, but they’re smudged.
Still, there’s an artful way to use sentence fragments, and then there’s not knowing how to write a complete sentence. I recently read a bestseller guilty of the latter. On top of the choppy prose, the plot and character development weren’t that great, but the concept was a winner, and I think that’s what propelled the book to the heights it reached more than anything. In other words, yes, things are subjective, but sometimes a book fails by certain measures but is otherwise marketable, so it’s not all a matter of taste.
Celebrities on luck
I’m a Beatles superfan, and will defend their talents against any iconoclast who thinks it’s cool to put them down. But I also acknowledge that luck and happenstance played a huge part in what they became. Beatle biographer Mark Lewisohn has argued that the band’s Hamburg residency was the lynchpin to their success, and through his research, he showed that they only went to Germany in the first place as a result of a chance meeting. If the Beatles' then-manager, Alan Williams, hadn’t run into German club owner Bruno Koschmider in a London bar one day, the entire British invasion may have never happened.
George Harrison himself acknowledged the role of luck in the Beatles’ rise. On January 10, 1969, fed up with his bandmates, he told them he’d see them around the clubs and left the studio. He returned home, wrote in his diary, “left the Beatles,” and composed “Wah-Wah.”
The song, which he released in 1970 on All Things Must Pass, contains a commentary on the band’s ascension to the toppermost of the poppermost:
Wah-wah
You made me such a big star
Being there at the right time
Cheaper than a dime
He reiterated this last point in the 1995 documentary, The Beatles Anthology. Bruno Koschmider was pleased with the first Liverpool band Williams had sent to Hamburg and called to ask him to send another. Recounting this story, George added, “Because we were probably so cheap.”
George Harrison isn’t the only celebrity to acknowledge the role that fate played in his success. Actor Bryan Cranston sat down with Howard Stern and said, “In all the acting classes I’ve been in, I’ve seen brilliant actors who I’ve never seen again…Let’s say everybody has the same talent. You have talent, you have perseverance and you have patience. But there’s a component that you absolutely have to have in order to have a successful career as an actor, writer or director, and that’s luck.”
Being there at the right time
On an episode of Meghan Daum’s podcast, The Unspeakable, Stephen Marche pointed out that the publishing industry doesn’t test talent; it tests timing. Marche said, “I always found [David Foster Wallace] to be a celebrity in the negative sense of that word. He was an icon of something that the American public happened to need at one point. The quote about the market doesn’t test talent, it tests timing. I mean, he came along with a bandana at just the right time, and that’s really it.”
Marche went on to say, “There needed to be a great American novelist, capital G, capital A, capital N, that fit in with grunge music, popular music, the 90s, Generation X, etc. He was in-between of them…the fact that his major book was basically unreadable and nobody read it, that only helped him.”
While I won’t speak ill of David Foster Wallace (though I admit I have no desire to read Infinite Jest, the “unreadable” book Marche was referring to), I think there’s something to the timing argument. The Beatles became popular as a dancehall band in Liverpool because the wild stage show they’d developed in Hamburg stood in loud, stomping contrast to the more staid style of groups like the Shadows. How many novels or movies got the green light because they somehow aligned with the right thing at the right time, regardless of the quality of the actual content?
In the end, we never learn why Ray Barone’s book was turned down, so we can’t know for sure whether his brother was right about how badly it sucked. In the same vein, you can’t look at an unpublished writer’s complaints about agents and publishers and assume they haven’t been published because they aren’t good. And when you get right down to it, you can’t even look at someone’s work you don’t like and declare with any certainty what it deserves. (I say this as someone with a lot of opinions about what certain books deserve.)
So much less of it is in our hands than we’d like to believe, whether we’re successful or not.
Bo, who writes Whisky Jesus Proxy, gets the final word: “Art is so subjective and taste is so fluid. I just think of all the artists who were not appreciated in their time or were super famous and how those things have flipped. Ultimately, you write or act or paint or whatever because you feel a deep calling to participate in the cultural conversation. Art is long, life is short.”