What Makes a Successful Writing Career?
I seem to write this piece every six months or so, as I go into this space where I question why I write. This is after seemingly justifying it to myself over something like a fifteen-year career of having written and published nearly 100 pieces in more than fifty literary journals. (Shameless self-promotion insert here.) And a nearly daily practice of writing in the morning, and the accustoming thick skin from myriad rejections. But to say my writing career went in any way I expected it to would far overshoot belief. Even to call it a career is a stretch. Over that time, I've gone from novel writing, to essays and memoirs, to poetry. What you learn going into it is that barring success from publishing a novel, you might as well write this other stuff over here. You want to publish, so that means going with your own writing whims, though I'd say it is less likely that I followed the whims of the publishing world. If I had, I might have had a successful career as a novelist. Believe me, that was a dream at one time, and I have several novels in drawers to prove it.
What makes a successful career? I've come to conclude that it can only be defined ad hominem. This is when I often look around and notice everyone and his great aunt has published a celebrated novel, though I always wonder what else have they done. I may write in obscurity, but at least I haven't stopped writing. We seem to put the premium in the culture on the big moves, the grand splash: the publishing debut or worse, where you went to school (for writers it only seems to matter that you went to Iowa. The rest of us be damned.
A few years in, after my MFA for my humble and humble making low residency program in Vermont, I've seen one or two of my classmates go on to the apparent worldly success of writing careers. This used to make me more jealous, until I learned that time and dedication mean I can only take the path I am on. I will never know why I did not get that opportunity to have that career, but it wasn't for a lack of trying. At this point I usually quote Thoreau, except to say that I didn't imagine the writing life I have now, which is filled with near daily doubts and the sense of reversals that have made a majority of my peers (I'm guessing) give up. To say that I feel successful or lucky might be belied by my actual results. Many people might look at me and say, “Where can I find your work?” which is not as embarrassingly bad as “Have I heard of you?” Nowhere, and, um, no. Not likely.
And this is not to say I don't feel successful. This is not to say I haven't marched to the beat of a different drummer or confronted a success unexpected in common hours. I think I have, if you consider that starting out, I had only unrealistic dreams, and very little but determination, no luck (which never happened) and a sense of expectation. Expectation might be the first thing to have thankfully been jettisoned. And then comes in the slightly inconsistent daily practice, of which this musing, as of late, has taken the lion’s share. I still like to remind myself that I have a natural persistence, and this may be the quality I really have to thank for still calling myself a writer. Though not a day goes by when I wonder what would make me stop. It is certainly not the lack of accolades—if this were the case, I might have stopped years ago. Does the slow trickle of publications give me some false feeling of success? I then have to remind myself that these are no small thing, i.e., a lot of work still went into those years to accumulate the credit. But I wonder, why should writing success be gauged merely on how much I publish? I think because I have so little community in my writing life. I don't schmooze or hang around Pulitzer Prize winners; I don't feel super at ease at AWP; I don't have any agent; I'm not attempting to write a Netflix series. For me, it is the trickle. And then I think of all those people in my small “c” writing community, most middle to late age aspiring poets who may never try to publish—they may not want to, having not built up the thick skin that I have for years. But again, who gauges success but ourselves, through our own subjective lens? I'm not sure it matters to me that you reading this determine whether I am or not.