101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Continuing our Dantean descent through the levels of writing success (see Part One if you missed it). Take a look around, admire the view, then get your ass back on the elevator, buddy. We ain’t reached your floor yet.

The Breakout

The answer to next year’s “whatever happened to?” question. Every few years some perennial Midlister (see below) or took-ten-years-to-write freshman strikes it lucky with a novel that gets way more attention than it deserves. They make it look all too easy, primarily because the author has no fscking idea how it happened.

Sometimes it’s because an advance reading copy was thrown over the walls around Fortress Oprah. Or because some random world event gave journalists short of detail on the breaking story the opportunity to waste airtime and column inches analysing the “parallels” in the book. Or because … (shakes magic 8-ball) … Rarely, it’s because the novel is genuinely, accidentally brilliant.

It sounds like a good deal, and if you like your royalty payments on Big Cheques, it is. But the problems come when the sudden fanbase expects more of the same, and the publisher insists that the money train keep rolling on schedule. Which is a problem, because the author has no fscking idea how it happened.

The smart ones know how to handle breakout success. They stop writing.

The Debut

The debut novel holds a magical allure: the possibility of an undiscovered Faulkner, Joyce, Chandler, Tolkein, Asimov, and the subsequent opportunity to boast about reading them before they “get noticed”, “sell out” and “go mainstream”. People buy debut authors almost entirely because of this hopeless optimism.

Subconsciously, readers (and reviewers) go a little easy on debuts because “it’s only their first novel”. Unless it’s utterly shit, people will say it “shows promise”. Publishers take advantage of this because for most debuts, this is the only marketing angle.

Debut authors can go from “Am I really good enough yet? What if no-one buys it?” to “Hey, I’m kickass, where’s my publicist?” in record time. Then the second-novel blues set in, when they realise that they got raped by their two-book deal and they won’t see another dime until the publisher signs off on the next book, which is due next Tuesday.

The Midlist

Where most published authors remain until their careers quietly die. Most lexicographers agree that “Midlist” derives from a Latin phrase which means “everything that isn’t a Bestseller”, though there is some argument that comes from the Greek for “no marketing hook whatsoever”.

Ninety percent of published authors are “midlist” because if their editors told them they were “bottom of the list” they’d never get the corrected proofs back. A few at the top of the midlist make enough to cover their mortgage, but every midlister finds that the second-novel blues is a permanent affliction. Most of them are effectively working a second job for $2 an hour, scribbling down the first draft at lunch while their colleagues at the Department of Transportation wear out every variation of “Mister Big Time Author is too important now to attend the health and safety seminar.”

For most published authors, this is where the dream ends. You, however, are still dreaming of getting this far.

(On to Part Three.)