It is a disservice to writers everywhere to promote the idea that writing success happens overnight. Years of hard work and practice at the skill of concise and interesting stories is what precedes every novel that goes to print, and a good many besides.
Let’s look at a well-known fantasy name, George R.R. Martin. You would have to have been deaf, blind and mute to miss the impact that Game of Thrones has made on all things pop culture. I don’t know about you, but to the uninitiated, it seems as if GRRM came out of nowhere. It may be why the cover below surprised me. I was very wrong. Have a look at the bibliography on his website. He had a few publications in the 70s, was involved in some projects in the 80s, started the Game of Thrones series in the 90s but his major emergence on the world stage was when they turned his series into an HBO series. Even though his work has been nominated for Hugo Awards 4 times (his first nomination was in 1978), he’s never won. He’s been present in the industry, as a writer and editor, since he first began publishing. That’s not overnight success by any stretch of the imagination.
Jo Rowling (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling) is held up as the example of “instant success”, in that her book was picked up on the merits of that initial submission alone. But that ignores her whole history. It ignores her own words: “I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before.” So, she had been doing lots of writing in her spare time. Ms. Rowling had an agent, and it still took two rounds of offering for Bloomsbury to take on Harry Potter.
Even when you have an online fan base, like (I shudder to mention the book that is traditional publishing’s shame, but a point is a point) E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, it took from 2009 (when initially published on fanfiction.net) for it to be “traditionally” published in 2011. There was even a market made up of all of the original fans of the book. She had to work at keeping people interested in her work of fiction and publish updates regularly.
This post could go on and on about dozens of other authors whose work I respect. Why would anyone expect that success in this industry would happen overnight? Why is this idea of an instant advancement in the field of writing one that persists, and that is promoted? Especially in other types of work, the idea is that your former work is what builds your network, your array of skills, your attractiveness to those in your industry. It seems a disconnect from industry for us to think and feel this way.
If anyone is interested, I have a great blog by Delilah S. Dawson on the steps to becoming a traditionally published author. None of which include get rich quick schemes. I’d be interested to hear what my writer and reader friends have to say about where this misconception comes from.
It’s completely appropriate that they are calling it an illusion. it’s the same as the idea that magicians are guarding an empty safe, its one of the reasons magic works. I might have a trick that I show you, lets say a coin vanish, you watch it and it fools you, you do a simple mental calculation in your head it was a good trick but it wasn’t that great, you might spend like 4 or 5 hours perfecting a trick like that? But there is no way the trick could be accomplished on 4 or 5 hours of practice. So you are fooled and say “Good trick” not realising that I’ve spend 2 hours a day every day for the last 3 years perfecting this stupid trick. Of course you don’t realise that, no sane person would do that. If I don’t see the effort, or can’t understand the effort then to me the effort doesn’t exist. It’s not that I’m being mean or trying to undersell you, it’s just that whilst I like reading I might not be interested in writing, so I can’t see myself investing the time and effort necessary to be a good writer. Therefore you didn’t either.
It’s also that the “overnight success” is a much more satisfying story for my audience who crave easy outs rather than “Author slogged hard hours, burning lean tissue into the night, for hours, gathering rejection slips into a blanket that will keep them warm for years”.
You make a very good point Christopher. Do you think it is part of a current culture of wanting everything yesterday as well?
Your discussion of magic is a good one. It is a technique that requires practice to render your show into entertainment, but all we see is the flash and bang of the trick.
Conversely, when you see the magician’s secrets revealed, it doesn’t seem like such a hard thing to do. Which perhaps encourages others to try? I am not sure…
I don’t think that wanting instantaneous gratification is a current phenomenon, the fact that we have almost achieved it in many sectors of our lives, that re-enforces it to perhaps a damaging degree. I think that when we see a magicians secret revealed, we are disappointed but not as disappointed as we would be if we were told the real secret of “years of hard work” we like magicians because they seem to do the impossible. Yes there is always a “trick” but knowing the trick, working out how to stage it, checking your angles, the slight of hand needed to perform one small but crucial aspect, the way of performing it, the stage presence that can only be learned by years in front of an audience. The trick is nothing without the work. Much like writing, i can’t write a book that says in the first page “Ok…look I don’t know how to get my character from here to there, but lets just pretend I did right? Because once you have swallowed that I have a great chapter for you”. Although I have read some books that come close. In short I don’t think we will ever get over the idea or romance that we have with overnight success. Yes it sells writers short but the second word in “overnight success” is “success” so I don’t’ feel too sorry for them.
It’s not the successful ones that I feel sorry for. More the people who are working on their craft without a huge, measurable success.
I love your description of the book without the work in intervening chapters. It made me laugh. I think we’ve all encountered one of those.
Hang on! Bryce Courtney assured me that if my book was good it would be published, he can’t have lied could he? I just assumed that it hadn’t happened yet because my writing wasn’t good enough.
Oh no. It’s definitely nothing to do with circumstances or who you know or what else you’ve published/been published in… -crickets-
*tumbleweed*
Heh heh. Thanks for the laugh Christopher Tyler.
Anytime
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Yesterday I wrote a post about the overnight illusion of writing success. Where do you think this comes from? http://t.co/DPqGZJmeYz