Thursday Soapbox: Success Sucks

This week our guest Soapboxer is author Hamish MacFarlane. Hamish’s first novel was published in 1998. You can read it for free, along with an excerpt from his novel-in-progress, on his website.

Success sucks: when getting published kills your writing.

Some fiction writers I speak to don’t mention publication. Perhaps they see it as beyond them, or a mythical creature that will only materialise if they don’t name it. Or perhaps, sensationally, they’re just not interested.

Other writers are ravenous for a book deal; armed with submission tracking software and market research, or bewildered and wide-eyed with no idea where to start.

I can’t blame writers who spend more time perfecting their pitch than their prose. In the blurred world of creative writing, getting published means validation and getting paid means you know the secret handshake. You can stop asking your reflection, am I any good at this?

Except it doesn’t mean any of that. And there are worse things than the keenly felt shame of the unpublished author.

I started writing stories when I was 23 years old. Two years later I celebrated the final keystrokes of my first novel by running to Tesco with my housemate Marissa for jam donuts and pushing her back home in the shopping trolley, sugar in my veins and a twinkle in my eye. Writing a good book; that’s a real trick, that’s a rabbit out of the hat.

A publisher accepted this first try, this first stab at a novel, and after four months of back-and-forth editing and compromise it finally didn’t matter whether the book was any good because it was for sale. I had ISBN kudos; a published author with the cheque to prove it.

Missing an agent and without a clue, I delighted in launching the book in a pub where a lot of people bought me drinks and fed me cigarettes. Just like that, I was much smarter and somewhat cuter than I had been the day before, and I was here to stay.

Ten years later and I’m writing my second novel, slipping back into a business I barely recognise, littered with podcasts and Kindles.

What happened to the decade in-between? How do I justify the slow word-count, the word-crawl? Did I join the War on Terror? Did I invent reality television? What’s the worthier cause that kept me from the keyboard?

I’ll confess: getting published wrecked my writing.

I was welcomed into a scene where success was the norm. Half the writers I knew had publishing deals; attending a friend’s book launch became a regular event. I liked these authors, spilling over with big ideas and willing to share, and I was ready to take my writing and ego to the next level.

But publication wasn’t making me famous, or less prickly, or the Victoria Line run on time. And it definitely wasn’t making writing any easier. Instead, the pressure was greater, with more people on my bandwagon and the goalposts shifted. No catharsis, just twitchy-eyed fear that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

Surrounded by big-time players, my writing became self-conscious for the first time. My writing got mean. And that same terrible question again and again, how’s the second novel going?

I had to be missing something crucial about the publication experience. I prodded my peers for answers and quickly concluded that my publication wasn’t the same as their publication.

While my friends’ agents were selling translation rights in Frankfurt, I was hard to find in English. My novel was in Books Etc but it wasn’t in WH Smith, the only bookshop in the North London suburb where I lived. It was as popular as a warm turd on Amazon and just when I thought I’d hit rock bottom, I found my masterpiece wrapped in plastic with another book in Safeway. I was literary baked beans; I was buy-one-get-one-free.

Trapped in a three-book-deal, I looked for escape from my publisher. Agents took the time to shake their heads at me for not having approached them 18 months before. Then, with more enthusiasm, they told me what kind of writer I was (kinky, modern, funny) and what I wasn’t (Nick Hornby, able to write female characters, funny).

It wasn’t long before I covered my windows with black craft paper because I couldn’t sleep, forgot to buy groceries because I couldn’t eat, and none of this meant anything next to the stainless steel knowledge that I couldn’t write a second novel.

I took a flight to Toronto, where I’d written most of the first book, in search of inspiration. And I got it, for five whole weeks, but then came Canada Day fireworks and my flight home, and back in London I read through my notes, took a deep breath, put my papers in a box and stopped writing.

It turned out that I had a lot of TV to catch up on, shirts to iron. I spent my weekends tidying my room, then other people’s rooms, and then the garden shed.

I learned how to floss and I bought exercise videos, and who’s to say that wasn’t more important than any literary work-in-progress? All that dental hygiene and Tae Bo wasn’t a waste and Borders didn’t bang on my door to demand my second book.

I remained friends with some of my writer buddies, but if you’re not writing, what’s there to talk about? I looked at my regular friends and decided I’d wasted my time writing a novel while they’d been conscientiously climbing the pole in software development or banking, acquiring stock options and bonuses and mortgages.

As my 20s began to fizzle out, it dawned on me that there were more constructive things to do than peck at a keyboard and create a book that no one asked for, that no one needs. Writers should be learning emergency first-aid or hugging their children. This desire to narrate, to reveal the truth of life – as if people don’t already know, as if they can’t see what’s in front of their noses.

But writers write, right?

We love words and we love to make stuff up. We steal and push and poke and how did I believe that I could ever really leave that obnoxious club?

I want to put it down on paper and I want to be read. I want people to see my take and say, you’re spot-on about that, and you put it in such a pretty way, too. I know this is true because it’s the opposite of my enduring number one fear of writing, not that I’ll fail to be published but that people will read my work and say, oh you freak, that’s not what the rest of us think at all.

It was publication that stopped me writing. Some authors are a work-in-progress, not ready for business. If I’d been published at the 5^th or 50^th attempt, I would’ve appreciated it, taken it for what it was. But because publication came so easy, I assumed the rest of my beautifully lit daydream would come true as well.

It took publication to shatter the essential spell, to show that my name on a book cover wouldn’t give me super-powers, that millions of people had got there before me, that I was only just good enough.

And it took eight years of not-writing to show me – closing my eyes at the best lines, curling my toes at the worst – that I was stuck being a writer. Stories are born whether you like it or not and you can get guilt-tripped by your own creation, so you’d better just suck it up and write it down.

I’m writing my novel. No one’s holding their breath and that’s okay. I’ve kept some of the sky-high publication fantasies I entertained first time around because it helps keep my lazy self in the chair, but mostly I write to find out what happens next.

For the book’s completion, I’m planning a similar style of celebration as for my first one. Marissa lives in Canada these days and I order my groceries online, but I’ll think of something.

And I’m thinking of changing my name and approaching agents as a shiny-new product – novelists who take ten-year breaks between books don’t inspire confidence – so don’t tell them, okay? Let’s keep this between us. Cheers.

You can find Hamish at HamishMacFarlane. com

Our thanks to Everything is Permuted on Flickr for the fed up fox.