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Amanda's blog

What is the point of keeping on writing?

Posted on: 14 October 2009

Some notable failures: Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen

Sooner or later, every novelist I know has asked themselves What is the point of keeping on? This question, always a painful one, has loomed ever larger as the effects of the recession bite deep into publishing lists. At the beginning of the year, horror stories abounded of people having contracts cancelled on the slightest pretext. Now, even top agents feel only relief at extracting advances for successful, well-known authors.

If you happen to be one of hundreds of so-called “mid-list” authors, life has never felt more grim. Few of us have ever been able to live off our income from books, but now, if you haven’t ever written a best-seller, been on Richard & Judy, had a TV or film adaptation or been short-listed for a major prize, the future has become absolutely horrible. Journalism, which has always been the default setting for many, has either slashed its freelance rates by 25%-50%, or vanished altogether. Teaching, the other standby, is besieged with eager new applicants and so hedged about with testing and regulations that anything approaching creativity is almost impossible.

Meanwhile, authors travel up and down the country to go to literary festivals where, humiliatingly, they sell almost no books. (As a matter of fact, I enjoyed a lovely one in Ilkley, Yorkshire last Saturday where I had one of the nicest audiences ever. They not only asked strikingly good questions, having actually read Hearts and Minds, but they bought it in droves. But this is the exception.) Everyone seems to be feeling wretched.

So, what IS the point in going on? It certainly isn’t for money. Nor is it, as amateurs believe, because writing makes us happy people. Writing for a living is like banging your head against the proverbial brick wall, wonderful when you stop. Actually, in a deeper sense, the professional and the amateur have this in common: nothing beats having written a book. Yes, writing is a vocation, but it’s also a neurosis. You start to wonder whether anything you’ve ever done is any good – or in my case you expend huge amounts of mental energy blocking off that apprehension, and as Dr Johnson put it, going doggedly to it.

There are novelists, who shall remain nameless, who are notorious for thinking themselves to be above ordinary mortals. They have all won prizes and/or written best-sellers, and if ever it were true that success ruins a person, they are the living examples of how rude, monstrous and ugly the untrammelled ego becomes. (Sadly, almost all are men, but then men do win about five times more prizes than women.) Almost all the novelists I know are exceptionally nice people, and not at all like this, but that could just be failure gnawing away at the vitals.

Failure is actually the single experience common to all mankind, and there is some slight consolation that the more bloated with success any artist becomes, the more remote they are likely to become from the source of genuine inspiration. Although the sorrows of novelists pale into insignificance beside those of composers, those who are instantly successful always labour under a terrible curse: from then on, they know almost nothing about the rest of the world. The old joke about Martin Amis writing Mein Kampf has worn very thin over the past twenty years, after all. What would Dickens have been without the bottle factory, Trollope without the Post Office and Austen without her spinsterdom? The novel is the mature person’s art, and the art of people who have known despair, humiliation, rejection and above all failure. “Fail again, fail better,” as Beckett put it.

Yet publishers tend to have forgotten this in the search for instant stardom. Look at any major writer’s oeuvre and you’ll see books so bad that they would long ago have been forgotten had not the genius eventually matured. Is any play as awful as Titus Andronicus? (Yes, commercially successful – but still an atrocious play.) Would we read Sense and Sensibility without what came after? Some, like Lampedusa and Harper Lee had the wisdom or the leisure to write just one, perfect book. Most of us write a “heroic failure” (as the Guardian, in its usual kindly way, termed my own latest book.)

So what is the point? Maybe it’s that nobody can possibly succeed, beyond question, without a whole raft of those heroic failures. Evolution itself is full of creatures which did not survive, or which were just stepping stones in the continual path to becoming something new. It may be that, in the case of fiction, this something new are those handful of writers seen to make money or win prizes, while the rest of us are dead as dodos. Or it may be quite otherwise; an amusing new book, Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola, (to be published on October 22 by Frances Lincoln at £9.99,) shows how very wrong even authors can be when judging each other.

In the meantime, all those publishers who have been battling to survive their own recession (and let us not forget that they, too can’t be having much fun) may yet look up in the new economic dawn next year and find themselves strangely short of material that isn’t about vampires or Tudors. So my advice is, we should keep on keeping on. Because, like suicide, you never find out what would have happened next if you decide to end it all.

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Comments

At 11:40:24 on 14 October 2009, Francis Gilbert wrote:

I read this with interest. Yes, why do writers write? I'm doing a PhD for my sins at the moment, and my education supervisor has asked this question of me and wants me to ask other writers. Looks like you've given me a good answer here! Can I quote you?

At 17:57:12 on 18 October 2009, Amanda wrote:

Well said Madeline! I completely agree with all the points you made, especially about the way that any kind of writing improves your ability to read and understand what it is we can get out of reading.

Mslexia is an excellent forum for these kinds of issues. My great worry is that the seed-bed of future writing is being killed off due to the recession and what has happened in publishing (see Robert McCrum''s column in the Observer this week)

You sound a little depressed over the teaching. However, I''ve talked to lots of men who say that they turned off fiction as teenagers only to recover their pleasure in it later. Perhaps the bright ones realise that, without the things only fiction can teach, they stand no change of getting an interesting girlfriend...

At 08:19:16 on 22 October 2009, John Keenan wrote:

Hi Amanda, "The novel is the mature person’s art, and the art of people who have known despair, humiliation, rejection and above all failure." I'd better get cracking then! (Long time, no see, by the way. I'm looking forward to reading your latest.) John

At 00:09:54 on 03 November 2009, L. Lee Lowe wrote:

For obvious reasons, I'm not keen on the amateur/professional divide, and suspect that it will grow ever more irrelevant, but there are probably as many reasons to continue as there are writers. In my case it has very little to do with fun - it's not - or money - there is none - and nothing at all to do with having written my novels. Neurosis may be closer: the endlessly frustrating struggle to get it right, and then righter. Sometimes I call it the scale-the-highest-peak syndrome.

At 09:22:12 on 15 October 2009, Amanda wrote:

Francis, as one of the most inspirational teachers/writers around, I''d be delighted to be quoted by you, though I''m sure that you have plenty of better thoughts of your own.

And yes, Adele, Readers ARE one very good reason. It does make all the difference doesn''t it when someone just gets what you''ve done, and likes or even loves it? But the trouble is that you have to put up such a barrier between yourself and those who say, as nastily as possible in some cases, that they very much dislike it that in the end, for sanity''s sake, you have to become quite detached. I actually think this is a big part of the problem for the modern novelist, as it was not, I suspect, for the Victorians. A fully defended personality just seizes up (one can see this in Nabokov) but one who is open and responsive to reader''s is just too vulnerable.

Readers are perfectly entitled to dislike a book, especially when (unlike reviewers) they''ve paid good money for it. It''s not at all a personal thing; I very much admire Hilary Mantel, both personally and as a contemporary novelist, I just can''t bear her historical stuff. Happily, I''m not in the majority here. The trouble is, though that to an author it can all feel very personal indeed, and given how many poor mid-listers are having their contracts cancelled the rise of misery and despair is greater now than at any time I can recall.

I am certainly not going to give up. However, my publisher may well give up on me, for all the reasons listed in my blog, unless a miracle happens. And I couldn''t blame him, because he is part of a business that is also assailed by market forces.

At 00:04:27 on 15 October 2009, adele geras wrote:

I'm very glad that Ilkely was good. And at least part of the answer is: FOR YOUR DEVOTED READERS! I'm one of them and I'd be very sad to think there might be no more STORIES from you. Because when you come right down to it, that's what it's about....telling stories. Hearing voices you like speaking to you,telling you stuff. Trying to amuse, entertain, move etc etc. I reckon as long as there is an AUDIENCE for what you have to say, that's good enough to be getting on with. Don't, whatever you do, think of NOT WRITING!

At 01:27:39 on 15 October 2009, katherine langrish wrote:

"Nothing beats having written a book" - yes, that and 'being about to start one!' I'm about to start one soon; I can feel it coming closer. That tremulous moment when you sit there about to type the first sentence - yay, hooray!!!

At 14:48:23 on 16 October 2009, Amanda wrote:

Yes, who can afford to write is a whole other debate. But if we only get books by those who don''t need the money, we''ll be very much the poorer as a culture.

I suspect most writers are made as well as born. Being compelled to write will only take you so far when plodding up Mt Parnassus. Maybe it depends on what you''re trying to do: frsik on the flowery foothills, or fly with eagles.

At 09:34:05 on 15 October 2009, nappyvalleygirl wrote:

I think it's because true writers were just born with an urge to write, whether paid or unpaid. I've written professionally as a journalist for many years, but the most pleasure I have had out of writing has been with the stories I wrote as a child and teenager and the writing I currently do on my blog - neither of which have earned me a cent. I've always wanted to write a book, and maybe one day I will, but while it would be nice to earn some money from it any real happiness would come from knowing that people enjoyed reading it and maybe even thought it was good. But I suppose there is another debate - who can afford to become a writer these days? Only people who have other income sources. I've only survived as a journalist because my husband has a better paid job. Unless you are incredibly successful, writing doesn't make any money, which makes it a luxury.

At 09:52:47 on 17 October 2009, Madeleine Conway wrote:

I've written five (published) novels and made derisory sums from each of them. Nonetheless, I continue writing, mainly because the stories keep coming. If I can sell them at all, it is a step - where to, I'm not sure, but I think you have identified the addictive aspect of knowing one has written. As a teacher, I know my understanding of books has increased exponentially since I have started writing regularly. I am unabashedly a commercial writer, working on commercial fiction, but I know that my ability to teach the greatest literature has been significantly improved by experiencing the writing process. And of course, what I teach informs what I write. In the past few years, I think I've come to see more clearly why we have stories and poems and plays, and how essential they are to us all. Explaining over and over again to teenagers who used to read, but who no longer read, to teenagers (sadly, mostly boys) who deride and mock fiction, how humanity has needed fiction to make sense of our realities has only made me want to write more and write better. Whether I can do that is the big question that I wrestle with daily. Interestingly, I just received the latest issue of Mslexia, the magazine aimed at women writers, in which Danuta Keane wrote an article which is rather more optimistic (http://www.mslexia.co.uk/magazine/magazine.html) http://www.thatreadingwritingthing.com/

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What is the point of keeping on writing?

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