Roxane Gay once noted in Salon that all our discussions about whether women writers like best-selling Jennifer Weiner don’t get enough press coverage miss a major point.
Oh yea. Fortunately I am just happy to get my words onto the page and have a few readers, but I can definitely see the constant desire for more fame and attention. I love when others read what I write. I can only imagine what it would be like once you get a taste of a larger audience. Similar to money, when you've got very little, enough to live and pay for your life, but it's not that important. Once you get enough to buy many of the finer things in life, and it becomes a competition, that's when it digs its claws in you.
Wow! This made me pause and reflect on my own writing life/career. Have I been a self-created victim of regret, rather than appreciating what I have accomplished?
Thank you, Lev. I needed this today (and probably tomorrow, as well).
You're welcome. Given how much comparison-making there is in this culture, it's sometimes an effort to focus on everything we've accomplished rather than the dreams that faded or were crushed, but sometimes the latter makes good material. :-)
Yes, yes... of course look back and see what you've accomplished, and repress envy, and spite. Still, ambition is not a bad thing. In a calling (and writing is a calling) that is made of so much rejection and angst, we need a drive, to keep going and getting these stories out.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with ambition at all--it's the invidious comparisons that are a problem. Of course we have to be ambitious, or how would we accomplish anything? We'd be like Oblomov, daydreaming and not getting anywhere.
Absolutely--who are we writing for and why? And success can have many forms. I still am moved, years after I started, when I get fan mail. It proves my work is touching people.
On one of my first book tours, a woman told me she kept my collection of stories by her bedside and had read it several times already. It blew me away.
Oh yea. Fortunately I am just happy to get my words onto the page and have a few readers, but I can definitely see the constant desire for more fame and attention. I love when others read what I write. I can only imagine what it would be like once you get a taste of a larger audience. Similar to money, when you've got very little, enough to live and pay for your life, but it's not that important. Once you get enough to buy many of the finer things in life, and it becomes a competition, that's when it digs its claws in you.
I highly recommend the new satire of publishing Yellowface.
Wow! This made me pause and reflect on my own writing life/career. Have I been a self-created victim of regret, rather than appreciating what I have accomplished?
Thank you, Lev. I needed this today (and probably tomorrow, as well).
You're welcome. Given how much comparison-making there is in this culture, it's sometimes an effort to focus on everything we've accomplished rather than the dreams that faded or were crushed, but sometimes the latter makes good material. :-)
Yes, yes... of course look back and see what you've accomplished, and repress envy, and spite. Still, ambition is not a bad thing. In a calling (and writing is a calling) that is made of so much rejection and angst, we need a drive, to keep going and getting these stories out.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with ambition at all--it's the invidious comparisons that are a problem. Of course we have to be ambitious, or how would we accomplish anything? We'd be like Oblomov, daydreaming and not getting anywhere.
Absolutely--who are we writing for and why? And success can have many forms. I still am moved, years after I started, when I get fan mail. It proves my work is touching people.
On one of my first book tours, a woman told me she kept my collection of stories by her bedside and had read it several times already. It blew me away.
Amen.