The Most Failed Writer of All Time

I’ve had writing on the brain these past months. Not the practice of it but the purpose. Partly this is due to the comedown from a rather brutal book promotional cycle and with it, the contemplation of a new project. Partly it’s due to the observable decline in reading I’m seeing everywhere I look, especially among men. Partly it’s due to the whiplash-inducing migrations of remaining readers (hey, I’m on Substack now! sigh). And yes, partly it’s due to the encroachments of AI and the experience I mentioned the other day.

Why keep doing this?

Surely the main reasons are self-serving. While I can’t say I *enjoy* writing — not in the way I enjoy reading or listening to music — the process of creating does have a way of soothing anxiety, and this seems to be the mode of creation the good Lord molded me for.

Moreover, you hear writers say they don’t really know what they think or feel about a certain subject until they’ve written about it, and I find that to be true in my own case. Writing is a way of gaining access to an inner life that can sometimes be, well, murky. In almost every instance, the resulting clarity comforts.

Then there are the psychological benefits, which are neither negligible nor particularly noble. In his special from last year, comedian Bill Burr fessed up to a core reason many of us “put ourselves out there” publicly:

I thought I did stand-up because I loved comedy. But then what I really figured out is that I did stand-up because that was the easiest way I could walk into a room full of a bunch of people I didn’t know and make everybody like me.

I recognize myself in his admission, and I dare say it applies to preaching as well.

The double whammy of reducing anxiety and securing love is more than enough reason to keep putting pen to paper. The problem is that the publishing of one’s words produces anxiety —judge me! — and never, ever delivers enough affirmation.

Thankfully the content itself can cover a multitude of sins. If the material captivates, the compulsion to share overwhelms any drawbacks or self-consciousness. At least it does for me. Telling someone about my favorite band, even if it’s one person, multiplies the joy. The same goes for stories, jokes, and theological insights. Evangelists gonna evangelize, whether the topic be justification by faith or the later output of Mancunian legends New Order.

I suppose there’s a spiritual aspect to the undertaking as well. It feels like an act of faith — not just in God but in life itself — to keep throwing thoughts into the ether and let the Spirit sort things out. Stopping would involve capitulation to depression and despair, and who wants that.

The best book I’ve read about writing is not actually Stephen King’s On Writing. Nor is it Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird or Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art or even one of Austin Kleon’s inspired little chapbooks. Those are all great, but the one that knocked me flat is Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer. It’s a powder keg of a pamphlet: abrasive, hilarious, full of incredible anecdotes whose wisdom resonates far beyond the literary world.

For example, and maybe it’s just ’cause I’m in the midst of editing a new episode of The Brothers Zahl on the Law (out in a week or so) but whoa, nellie:

I’ve been lucky enough to know some of the most successful writers of my generation, men and women who have earned hundreds of millions of dollars, who have won all the prizes, who have received all the accolades, who have achieved fame insofar as writerly fame exists. The triumphs don’t seem to make much difference. A hundred million dollars is worth having, to be sure, but it doesn’t protect you from the sense that you’ve been misunderstood, that the world doesn’t recognize who you are. It doesn’t. I know if you’re a kid writer you must think I’m either lying or they’re crazy. All I can tell you is that I’m not lying.

Occasionally, I will meet with a kid writer who has confused me with somebody to be envied. They want to know what it’s like to write professionally. My good news is the same as my bad news. Rejection never ends. Success is no cure. Success only alters to whom, or what, you may submit. Rejection is the river in which we swim.

Success is an attire; sometimes it slows you down if it grows too heavy. “Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness,” John Updike wrote. “One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer becomes conscious of himself as a writer…” Success destroys what gives success.

Joseph Mitchell, the New Yorker writer, finished his masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret”, in 1964. He came into the office regularly for the next thirty-two years and contributed not one word to the magazine. Calvin Trillin remembered hearing that Mitchell lived “writing away at a normal pace until some professor called him the greatest living master of the English declarative sentence and stopped him cold.” Acclaim ended these writers’ work, as it did with Harper Lee and J. D. Salinger.

Then again, maybe it’s cause I’m in the midst of editing a new episode of The Brothers Zahl on the Theology of the Cross (out in a couple weeks or so) but oh, Moses smell the roses:

I do not believe that suffering exalts. I do not believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I do not believe in the dignity of poverty. It is nonetheless true that some of the greatest works rise out of the worst horrors. Glories stroll out of burning buildings.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn survived partisan warfare against the Nazis, then the gulag, then cancer. He wrote brilliantly about each misery. The United States harboured him in 1974, offering him freedom, security, and medical care. He loathed the West that had saved him. The culture was pornography. The media was empty gossip. The politics was what you could get away with. “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century,” Solzhenitsyn told an audience at Harvard. The freedom, so long hungered for, turned to emptiness in his guts. The moment he could return to the country that had tortured and condemned him, he went. For many writers, home is where the suffering is.

Writing itself is failure. Even the successes are failures. In the best work, the intentions of the author fall away, leaving an open field for readers to play in, and they create meaning that may have nothing to do with the author’s. Jonathan Swift famously intended Gulliver’s Travels as an indictment of all humanity but ended up leaving a story for children. The joy of language is also a torment. “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to,” Flaubert wrote, “while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” Nobody knows what they’re writing. Intention never aligns with result. You never know how readers will react. You never see how readers will react. It’s all what quantum physicists call “spooky action at a distance.” And here we come to the real crux of the matter at last: The spirit, and its daemon language, live in failure.

Profound as all the above may be, I was nevertheless taken aback in the final third when Marche unexpectedly connected the dots to the Nazarene himself. Or maybe it’s just ’cause I’m in the midst of editing a new episode of The Brothers Zahl on The Bible (out in three weeks or so):

Jesus Christ may be the most failed writer. He preached love as clearly and as evocatively as possible. In return, his friends betrayed him, his people turned against him, the authorities crucified him. After his death, his disciples gathered a bunch of his speeches into a handful of potted biographies that contradict one another and their readers used these texts primarily to justify empires. The world took to massacring his own people on the basis of what they thought he meant. Two thousand years later, Jesus has over a billion devoted fans. They get together, sometimes once a week or more, to read his stuff out loud to each other. A career could not have gone much worse or better.

On Writing and Failure contains more than its share of brilliant aphorisms, but I’ll leave you with my favorite. Because nowhere in the book is the temptation to sub “writers” for “preachers” or, well, “humans” stronger:

Good writers offer advice. Great writers offer condolences.

Take it away, Andy: