In 1983, Martin Amis wrote:
When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life. The transformation is more or less inexorable. (The Moronic Inferno)I was reminded of this back in August when, like lots of other people, I read Heather Demetrios's How to Lose a Third of a Million Dollars Without Really Trying.
There are reasons to question Amis's opinion, but in this case it seemed apposite. The core of Demetrios's piece is that she got a great advance, left her job, and headed to Brooklyn and lived the life of a famous writer—until reality set in. She thought she could buy a lifestyle but, despite awards and acclaim, not enough people bought her books.
I'm not writing this to criticise Demetrios; she took flak from plenty of people after her cautionary tale and I don't really have any reason to add or subtract from that, although, at the risk of sounding snotty, I thought the piece could really have done with an editor: it didn't entice me to read any of her fiction. Rather, I want to go off on a tangent from her piece.
I'd also like to refer to a Guardian piece from 2016 by Ros Barber: For me, traditional publishing means poverty. But self-publish? No way. In her article, Barber lists her seven reasons for not self-publishing:
- You have to forget writing for a living
- Self publishing can make you behave like a fool
- Gatekeepers are saving you from your own ego
- Serving an apprenticeship is important
- You can forget Hay and the Booker
- You risk looking like an amateur
- 70% of nothing is nothing
The list doesn't strike me as especially convincing, insofar as it comes laden with the baggage of a set of assumptions. Again, I don't want to criticise Barber; her list is personal and real to her. But for me it tickles the same tangents as Demetrios: the fetishisation of writing and being a writer, and expectations of what that means.
A lot of what I see in the media and on social media about writing and ‘being a writer’ I find absurd, either for its pretension, its self-delusion, or both. A lot of that is to do with elevating the act of writing into something like a sacred vocation and consequently sanctifying the participants in the rite (which the real professionals never do.)
For me, writing is something I do: it is not my identity. I have no lapel badges proclaiming 'I'm a writer, look at me. Me, Me, Me.' Mini-bios, on what little social media I do, don't identify me as 'a writer.’ I am simply someone who takes pleasure in working out a story then trying to turn that story into a piece of writing, taking cues from others whose work I enjoy (George Mackay Brown, Muriel Spark, Dorothy Dunnett, Thomas Pynchon, Christopher Priest, and others.)
I'm privileged. I retired, early, with a pension that is sufficient to live on; we own our house outright and our kids are grown up. This means I can write in my hack way for the simplest of reasons: I want to write. That doesn't mean I'm content to write badly: I want to write as well as I can and keep improving; there is aesthetic joy in that, in the act of creation for its own sake. But it matters not a jot if anything I write is ever published.
Nor, at the risk of setting a hobby horse loose from its stable, have I any interest in the MFA (as Demetrios pursues.) When Frank Zappa was once asked about the sources of America's ills, he said
Well, two important things, and each one of them has only three letters: One was LSD, a chemical which is capable of turning a hippie into a yuppie, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind. And the other is MBA. When people started taking MBA seriously, that was the beginning of the ruination of the American industrial society.In the context of writing, I'd add the MFA, and for much the same reason, the ruination of literary society. I'm not aware of reading anything from someone with an MFA that I've enjoyed or, failing enjoyment, appreciated. It all reads the same to me, and most of it is dull. Of course, you don't have to do an MFA to be dull, but it acts to institutionalise the dullness and call it style. That is a crass generalisation, but nevertheless I find it consistently true, and, if that is a hostage to fortune, then so be it.
This post has turned into more of a rant than a considered piece leading to a considered conclusion. I’m not sure, in truth, if I have a considered conclusion to draw, except maybe this: even as a hack scribbler, the focus of my efforts should not be on dreams of an imaginary status, but on the writing: the sequencing of words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, and the crafting of those into something that entertains, amuses and, with a bit of luck, resonates.
