“No whining. It doesn’t help and it’s probably wrong.”
The phrase, “No whining”, permeates Stephen Marche’s searing and small (just 73 pages of actual stuff) book, On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer (2023). It was recommended to me by fellow Yukon writer, Nick Pullen.
I loved reading this book. I relished in Marche’s relentless style. I laughed out loud at multiple passages. I felt energized and refreshed by his sincerity.
In an interview with Karen Hunter, Marche talks about how he wrote the book to show what it is really like to be a writer, and to dissemble (or at least confront) the consistently unhelpful yet cathedralesque mythology that surrounds our craft. The only way to do that is irreverence. For example:
If you are writing because you want to be a writer, I would very much like to dissuade you from that ambition. Trying to find fulfillment through writing is like trying to fly by jumping off a cliff.
And yet there is a powerful sense of yearning in the book—the desire to keep going, despite his knowledge that writing is, mostly and ultimately, about failure:
To persevere through the condition of total rejection so that the work may come to be, to keep throwing yourself against the door so that a crack may allow light in. That is what strength, in this business, looks like. […] So anyone who tells you that you have to be a certain way to be a writer, that you have to live a certain life, that you have to see the world or that you have to lock yourself away, that you have to abandon your people or that you have to love your people, that you have to suffer or that you have to forget your suffering, whatever, it’s all bullshit. You have to write. You have to submit. You have to persevere. You have to throw yourself against the door. That’s it.
A Truth Grenade
Here’s the key takeaway of Marche’s book, and the antidote to the self-obsessive, self-swindling, success-is-guaranteed-if-only-you-follow-these-three-steps bullshit of modern life: failure is just not a stepping stone. It is the reality. It is not a learning experience but a truth through which we must persevere. We all die. Isn’t that helpful to remember sometimes?
Time and again, Marche points out that famous authors like James Joyce, Jane Austen, John Keats, Herman Melville, Ovid and so many others were mostly failures in their time, or for most of their lives. Why should you or I be any different?
It sounds harsh. Maybe it is. But I found it bracing and invigorating. Instead of trying to trick or avoid or bypass or overwhelm failure, it feels so much better to just accept it. To write because I want to write, and because I want to share—even if I know that I will be misunderstood, or that the intention will be divorced from the outcome, or that I’d be better off achieving things by pretty much any other means—is enough.
Of course I want success. I want to be paid for my work. I want to be read and liked and loved and respected. I want you to pass on this Substack to five people so I can get 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year. I want to publish a dozen masterpieces that are both widely and deeply read. I want to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. I want Martians to scrape the meaning from between my lines 300 years from now.
By no means does Marche try to discourage me from these goals. He just reminds me that their realization—indeed, my fate—really has nothing to do with me or my efforts. “The quality of your writing will have very little effect on your career,” he says, “and yet it is the only thing that matters.” As I’ve had to remind myself since the first piece in this series, I am not in control. And even if I achieved every single one of my goals, the goalposts would simply move. What about Martians in 600 years?
Failure in writing is the same as failure in keeping an empty email inbox or committing to reading the paper every day or raising perfect children who carry none of my faults. Failure doesn’t make me better at these things. It’s just what is bound to happen.
When I submit to this reality of writing, I feel like a weight has been lifted. I want to write more. Is it because the facade has been lifted, and the pretence dissipated? Maybe. Maybe I just need to be reminded of the why I’m here writing to you, and the fact that it isn’t precious, sacred or original. It’s just me. Or, maybe I need to be told that the present predicament of the writer’s life is not all that new.
In Light of Last Week
Last week I scared the pants off of you by writing about artificial intelligence. Don’t worry, I scared myself too. And I’ve been carrying this question: for how long can I keep this writing thing up until it’s obvious I’m just late to the party? The golden age of creative expression is about to end, and snap, we’ll be living through an epic AI-induced famine for writers. Too bad I didn’t, what, learn carpentry? Become a doctor or lawyer?
The whole notion of impending doom for all writers from ChatGPT may or may not be overwrought. But it doesn’t actually matter, because writing was mostly about failure anyway. To assume I can know what these tools will mean for me and my kind is yet another exercise in vanity. I don’t write because that’s the stock I decided to pick, and here I am hoping a bull market will bail me out. If I did, I would have sold out years ago.
From near the start of his book, Marche makes me feel at home:
Right now, the power of failure happens to be swelling, accelerating. The condition of failure is a constant in writerly life but the current generation of writers lives with more failure than the previous generation, and the next generation will live with more failure that the current generation. I have only ever made a living inside crumbling institutions—I know no one who feels differently. […] And it’s not like these transitions take place over the course of a lifetime. All this shit happened in the past ten years.
Crumbling institutions. Yep. I have dwelled nowhere else.
Marche says that “failure is the body of a writer’s life. Success is only ever an attire.” He stresses throughout the book that this condition is not new, and it’s certainly not about AI. From Socrates to Confucius to Jesus, it’s helpful to know that the reality of writing today is fundamentally the same as it was in the dawn of history, just faster.
If I could chat with Marche about this book, I think I’d be direct about the specific challenges and questions generative AI poses. Not because I think he’d change his tune. But because I think it’d be interesting to hear his take. After all, in the 14 months since publication, a hell of a lot has changed.
No Whining
Failure plagued the great writers of history. The better Herman Melville wrote, the more he failed. It’s a breath of fresh air to remember that an avalanche of rejection is inevitable, because it buried countless names before me. Why care so much about it? Move on. Stop whining. Persevere.
And by the way, if you’re thinking of picking up this book, it is not concerned with writing itself and doesn’t contain much advice on the craft. But there are a few sections that contain tools I stole for my toolbox:
Innocence. The best stuff comes from a writer who doesn’t yet know they are a writer, from early impressions, and from the perspective of a “child’s beautifully clear eyes.”
Writer’s block. Marche calls it “the struggle of no struggle” and says it used to be called “not having anything to say”. In other words, it’s not a complex pathology. It’s just a choice to speak or not speak, share or not share, solve problems in your work or leave them be. Again: no whining.
Constriction. Anna Akhmatova wrote Requiem about the terrors of Stalinist Russia. For three decades she had to compose the piece without it being discovered. She wrote lines, had her friends memorize them, and then destroyed the writing. Then, to edit the whole thing, her friends returned to her with their lines, which were adjusted and then re-memorized. “The lines had to be memorable to survive. Any changes, since they were so painful, had to be essential and final. Which is why every word of Requiem is perfect. The words fit together like the stones in the Machu Picchu walls that need no mortar because of the precision of their carving and placement. It was the worst possible way to write. It was also the best possible way to write.”
Attention. This is actually not from the book itself, but the same interview mentioned earlier. Marche says we need to strip away distraction (“dig ourselves into a deep hole”), be alone with the words, and wrestle with the angels. “If you’re connected to the internet, why on earth would you want to write? Every movie on earth is right there.” My will to resist the internet ebbs and flows. It’s an imperfect solution, but I use the Freedom app to block distraction on my devices. I can’t use social media on my phone except between 8-9pm each day, and I can’t do any mindless scrolling (social media, news sites, video) on any device from 5-11am. It’s not always possible to keep this regimen with my client work, but it is my ideal. And it usually works.
Hustle. When you’re pitching and making and selling stories or books, you are the same as pretty much every other writer, famous or not. The work is different by degree, not by nature.
How does this week’s newsletter make you feel? Do you agree? Is it helpful or hindering? Do you feel like a weight has been lifted from you too, or have I simply removed mine and strapped it to your neck?
Writing
Last week I moved up to the second round of the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. I had four days (due on Sunday) to write a 2000-word piece with the prompts: lifeguard (character), regimen (event), and science fiction (genre). I quickly came up with an idea and had a blast writing the piece, until I realized I had 4300 words, which had to be cut in half… I’d like to revisit the short story after a week or two away, and will probably spend some time putting meat back on the bones.
Submitted a pitch to a local magazine. Will keep you updated on these!
Reading and Listening
Restarted The Library Book by Susan Orlean. Hard to imagine a more proficient writer of “literary” creative nonfiction than Orlean, which shows in her ease of delivery.
Quote of the Week
“Rejection is the evidence of your hustle.”
― Stephen Marche, On Writing and Failure
A great post.
"Hustle. When you’re pitching and making and selling stories or books, you are the same as pretty much every other writer, famous or not. The work is different by degree, not by nature."
Yes, to all of this. And yes, to reminding ourselves that the work is the thing. Not how much or how little we have to do to get it done. When we begin to resent the work itself, that only leads to a perennial self-loathing that serves no purpose.
Move beyond the resentment and embrace the work itself in whatever form it takes.