Write now?
“Publish or perish” used to be, I am given to understand, a directive given to university faculty: you did the papers, or you’d never work on this tenure track again, Bunkie. Now it seems to have filtered down to the students. Dani Shapiro writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Today’s young writers don’t peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller — and did.
The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn’t reward persistence, that doesn’t see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn’t trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”
I suspect that the ones who really want to write — as distinguished from those who really want to have written, which is not the same thing — are passing up the creative writing programs and the festivals and the conferences and are spending their time staring down a blank piece of paper until the words start to flow.
(Via Little Miss Attila, who asks: “[S]ince when has any artist been entitled to get along without a day job?”)
fillyjonk »
8 February 2010 · 2:07 pm
Hmm. The Career as Big Lottery Win model.
I suspect that a lot of the instant-success types wind up about as happy as the stereotypical lottery winner. Which is to say, after the initial excitement has worn off, not very.
sya »
8 February 2010 · 2:32 pm
Well, since most creative writing programs look down on genre fiction anyway (unless you’re using spaceships and explosions as metaphors for existentialist angst or somesuch nonsense), they would be pointless for anyone trying their hand at non-literary fiction.
McGehee »
8 February 2010 · 6:06 pm
Who says that had to be the idea when you wrote it? A truly (ahem) creative creative-writing student can convince a professor the plot elements mean whatever the professor likes.
CT »
8 February 2010 · 9:31 pm
As a creative-writing program drop-out, I chuckle at the cavalier disregard for the odds against these bushy-tailed scribes. And I’ll invoke the best advice I’ve heard regarding those odds:
“You’ll write a million words before you publish your first thousand.” – Donn “Cool Hand Luke” Pearce
Despite the Online Age’s more flexible definition of “publish” (and, for that matter, “write”), I think this still holds true.