Surprisingly intense. ( )

This is really well-made, but God, it is grim. Solidarity in suffering and all that. Still. He's not wrong. ( )

Listen up, kid writers. Misery loves company. And since you say you want to be a writer, you must love misery. You are going to fail. A lot! And even if you sometimes don’t fail, you will feel like you have. But if you are really a writer, you are going to keep doing this failing, again and again, no matter what I or Stephen Marche say. So, good luck! You’ll need it. Oh, and herein you’ll also find lots of anecdotes about other writers, including very famous ones, who failed about as much you are about to.

Stephen March takes us on a misery tour of the writing life. It doesn’t sound all that appealing, but if you’ve decided to read this book, you probably think it sounds peachy. Heaven help us, you must be a writer. Remember, if it doesn’t work out for you, you can always write a book about how most every writer fails.

Gently recommended for writers; no one else needs it. ( )

Writing and failure go together like a horse and carriage. Would-be writers see it as romantic, or life-saving, or at very least remote work. But ultimately, it is all about failure says Stephen Marche (citing George Orwell) in his book On Writing and Failure. Marche is a successful (in my mind) writer who plumbs history for examples of incredible suffering, frustration, poverty and rejection that is the life of writers. It’s a lifetime struggle, even, if not especially, for what readers would consider successful ones. The book is one long essay that makes for a very short book, but it is packed with real life stories that come with a warning at the end of many of its paragraphs: “Why would it be different for you?”

Throughout the eighty pages here, Marche keeps saying “No whining” and “No complaining” because young writers, old writers and would-be writers spend all their time doing just that. He tells of major successes like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who considered himself a failure and drank himself to death, complaining all the way. He even goes back to Socrates and Confucius, whose writings not only didn’t make for successful careers, but demonstrated failure at every turn.

First off there is rejection. Marche has stories, including his own, of collecting rejection letters. He says he stopped at two thousand of them. Publishing is a totally irrational business, run by tastemakers with no taste. One example of rejection not in the book is something I will never forget, and which deterred me from a writing career as a primary pursuit very early on.

In the early 1970s, some Harvard students took a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Painted Bird, and laboriously retyped the whole thing onto plain paper, double-spaced, using a manual typewriter (as there were no word processors or scanners). They made copies and submitted them under their own names as new manuscripts to several dozen publishers. As I recall, they received about twenty responses back, all of them rejections, including one that attempted to be encouraging by saying the style was reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinski.

Rejection is a way of life for writers. It hurts and it changes them, and not for the better. Marche says even when they succeed, they fail. Immediately following the publication of a story or a book, the writer knows with certainty that a rejection is on its way for the next effort. For most, it never gets any easier. Writers need a thick skin, but the skin gets thinner and thinner with experience and age, he says. The most famous of the famous live with continual rejection.

In 2014, I watched a documentary on my favorite cartoonist, Gahan Wilson, possibly the most established cartoonist since Charles Schulz and before Gary Larson. It showed him getting on a bus in Sag Harbor, Long Island, for the two and a half hour slog into Manhattan, where every Tuesday he had to present twenty new cartoons to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, in the hopes they might publish one of them. They often didn’t. Then it was back on the bus to dwell on his rejections for the long ride home. And this was eighty year-old Gahan Wilson.

It has stuck with me for the wrong reason. Every week, for decades, there were twenty Gahan Wilson cartoons that I (we) never got to see. All that creativity, all that humor, all that effort, never saw publication. A lifetime of it. After the rejection and before the bus, he would get together with all the other New Yorker cartoonists who had come in for rejection day, and they had lunch at an Italian restaurant in midtown near The New Yorker offices. Everyone was in the same boat – maybe getting one cartoon accepted if the stars were aligned that day. It confirmed my decision of not following the fulltime creative path. Which is no easy feat when you are a creative person. Very frustrating. This book has the same effect, and the whole book is dedicated to it. That it is well written and a very smooth and fast read is beside the point. As I would have said fifty years ago, buzzkill.

The message is to write if you must, with must being the key word and requirement. Marche has plenty of stories of writers who simply had to write, including one in Russia who could not put anything on paper, and got friends in the same prison to memorize lines for her that could be written down at some future date in some other universe.

As for fame, consider that the best writers of every era have been completely forgotten. Research projects always reveal wonderful work by people the researcher had never heard of, but who were mega-stars in their time. They get cited in papers or books (epigraphs are a favorite spot), but no one actually reads them any more. Writing the great American novel will not confer immortality. It probably won’t even pay the rent.
I spent years collecting first editions of the best humorists of the Roaring Twenties. They were legendary in their time: Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman, James Thurber... I paid as much as $40 for a used book. Today, if you even know who to search for (and few do), all those works are readily available online for a couple of bucks — and no takers. But I digress.

At the industry level, Marche says about 300,000 books are published in America every year, and at most a few hundred could be classified as commercial or even creative successes. It follows that even new works by established authors are failures, he says.

He doesn’t stop at rejection. There’s writers’ block to consider. This is the period where despite or because of a looming deadline, the writer can’t think of what to type. Marche dismisses it with a little perspective: “It used to be called ‘not having anything to say.’” Marche is not sharing a table at the pity party.

He says writing itself is failure, that readers take it where the author never intended it to be. That there are several hundred thousand kind of jobs that pay better. That several famous writers never wrote another thing after they had a bestselling hit. “Success” totally changed them.

The stats are even more discouraging, as writers prove to succumb to mental health diseases more than the general public. There’s lots of suicide too, by people (eg. Kosinski, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Dorothy Parker – several times) that most would consider total literary successes. Depression and substance abuse are on public display far too often in the writing fraternity. Marche says he knows of many cases himself, and finds “zero romance” in them at all. It is so crazy that he can cite one writer who left a suicide note for his wife: “I’m not dying because I hate you – it’s because I’ve come to hate writing.” That’s a terrific description of the writing obsession.

The problems mutate as writers rack up successes. In Marche’s own case:
“I have no idea whether I’m successful or not. That’s the honest truth. There would be those who would find it ridiculous of me to consider myself a failure. I make a living from writing, and don’t even have to teach. I receive fan mail almost every day. Because of some ads for an audio series I made, I am regularly recognized in the street. Others would consider the idea that I might consider myself a successful writer equally ridiculous. I’ve barely been published internationally. I only earned out a couple of books (ie. made more than the advance). I alienated myself out of the literary community of my own country (Canada) as quickly as possible. I am unprizeable. By no means can I just do what I like. I only work on what I believe in but that’s a way of describing my own pride rather than any external achievement […] As I’ve proceeded deeper into the writer’s life, I understand less and less what success looks like.”

And why would it be any different for you?

David Wineberg ( )