If You Should Fail by Joe Moran

Author:Joe Moran [Moran, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241988114
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

5.

None of Us Is Proust

Or how creative failure is like life

In 2011, the artist Cory Arcangel created a bot that searched for and retweeted anyone who sent a tweet containing the words ‘working on my novel’.

Many of the tweeters sounded rather pleased with themselves. Some cheerfully admitted to multitasking – to writing their novels while listening to Fleetwood Mac, drinking mimosas by the pool or waiting for their hair to set. Others assured their publics that they would be working on their novels just as soon as they came off Pinterest or were done watching Doctor Who. Others put a brave face on not having written for a while. But all were adamant that they were, or soon would be, working on their novels.

Arcangel later published these tweets as a book, which was funny in a queasy-making way. Despite his protests to the contrary, it felt as if these aspiring authors, mute inglorious Miltons all, were victims of a drive-by act of web-harvested ridicule. All had agreed to be in the book, but this only compounded the insult by implying that they didn’t get the joke – any more than did the subjects of one of Arcangel’s previous projects, ‘Sorry I Haven’t Posted’, a collection of people apologizing for not updating their unread blogs.

I doubt many, perhaps any, of these authors finished, let alone published, their novels. But so what? Progress in writing is usually slow, absent or invisible, and these different states can look confusingly alike. However hard you cultivate your imagination, the harvest of words remains unreliable. A day’s labour might yield a few salvageable sentences, or nothing. At times, writing can feel less like real work than like a selfish, neurotic tic you can’t shake off – a matter of typing away futilely to no one in particular, rather as some people talk to themselves in the street while passers-by look away and quicken their pace.

Writing is a long game, a leap into the dark with uncertain outcome. Its essential adjunct is daydreaming. I find writing even a few sentences laborious, and I can only steel myself to do it by imagining readers falling on those sentences with euphoric welcome. I am in no position to mock my fellow failures for shouting to the world that they are working on their novels.

Writing inspires its own mythology of failure and atonement. These myths offer succour to the failed author with their stories of successful books that emerged out of umpteen abandoned drafts, or were rejected by every publisher but one, or got rescued from the bottom of a slush pile, or were unread when they came out and are now classics. Just because these things sometimes happen in real life doesn’t stop them all being versions of the same fairy tale. The hard facts are economic. Writing is a bear market in which sellers always outnumber buyers.

I know. There is nothing more tedious than a writer telling you how hard his job is. Literary failure is no worse, and often much cushier, than other kinds of failure.

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