Bluesky

One recent morning, looking for a distraction, I devoted myself to the spreadsheet where I track my fiction submissions. I added some new literary magazines and deleted the defunct ones. I updated submissions windows and word counts. I categorized the nice rejections I’d received: the generic (We enjoyed this), the semi-personalized (This one made it to our final round), and, finally, the ones that included a specific critique—which at least served as evidence that some human somewhere had read what I’d written. The spreadsheet, which always bums me out the longer I spend time with it, would help me determine where to send my latest short story, the first one I’d finished in months. But by the time that I was done—having spent all this time laying out plans for placing this new story somewhere—it was suddenly lunch, and I hadn’t done any actual writing. When I’m in the spreadsheet, I forget what I originally set out to do: I find myself believing that my ultimate goal is to publish, when I know the real goal is simply to write something good.

This confusion—about what it means to succeed––is at the heart of Alex Higley’s True Failure. Ben, the novel’s protagonist, sets out on a quest to audition for Big Shot, a Shark Tank–style reality show, even though he has no real idea to pitch. Ben is an out-of-work accountant, but he resembles a writer. He spends his days in a library carrel, staring at a computer; he procrastinates, struggling to dream up an invention or a business plan. Gradually, True Failure comes to seem like an allegory for the writing life today.

Publishing a literary novel with a big press, after all, is perhaps not so different from making a successful pitch on Shark Tank—your success is based solely on whether your “product” will earn money. Fiction writers today find themselves in a bind: The professionalization of creative writing can make it feel like the only reason to write is to publish, since publishing is what will keep the engine of your career moving. At the same time, the corporatization of book publishing has made the process of publication increasingly fraught, making it all the more tempting to write what an imagined audience or editor might want. Higley’s novel dramatizes the effect of this market logic, showing how an obsession with external success can distort the creative process itself.

One source of this distortion is the image of success we get from social media. This is where Ben’s quest to get on Big Shot begins: Scrolling on his phone, he sees “remembrance posts for a former college classmate,” Trevor Crant, who once appeared on the reality show and successfully pitched a “natural odorless spot eraser…packaged in tiny orange keychainable bottles.” Ben doesn’t linger on what prompted the posts (his classmate’s death by suicide). It doesn’t matter, for Ben, if Trevor’s success before his death made him happy; what matters is that he appeared successful. What Ben wants out of Big Shot, he admits later, is “undeniable public success on his own terms.” The key word here is public: the idea that success is only real if other people can see it.

Perhaps because photos of Word documents or typed pages are boring, the writing life, as it appears on Instagram, is made up of well-ordered desks, stylish notebooks, expensive fountain pens. It’s not just influencers I’m talking about: While many famous writers—or famous creative people in general—have online presences that are friendly, wholesome, and encouraging, the images they share have a certain allure. When I see a photo of a writing shed—from Alexander Chee on Instagram, from George Saunders on Substack—I can’t help but feel some envy: I’d like to write there… I’d love to have a space like that. I think back to the experiences in my adolescence that made me want to write—namely, reading books that I loved, books by Saunders among them—and it somehow isn’t hard to imagine young writers now embarking on a writing life with this image of success in their heads: a writing shed with a view, a solid desk, a stack of leather notebooks. There’s nothing wrong with wanting those things. But as motivators to write, they’re empty, unlikely to spark much good work.

Another danger is to lose oneself in logistics and to obsess over the end goal––of publication or, in the case of Ben, televised recognition—rather than embracing the process. “I’m less concerned with what I’m going to pitch than with how it is I’m going to get on the show,” Ben tells his wife, Tara. It’s fun to think up dumb inventions—a favorite imagined app in my household is Dog Uber, a service that would allow us to walk the dog to a restaurant, then send him home in a cab—but Ben is less interested in the fun part of imagination; he just wants to win the show. His research consists of reading interviews with past contestants and looking up producers and casting directors; he even considers how best to fit his pitch into an April Fools’ Day episode. He wants to find a hack, some way to game the process.

Midway through True Failure, Ben finally lands on an idea: He’ll pitch “his own Big Shot,” only “on a local, more personal, smaller scale.” Ben describes this idea as “nothing”; he will “couch his nothing,” he thinks, “inside a prank, an April Fools’ pitch.” He will ask the Big Shots to “believe in [him], to invest in the person,” since they’re always saying on the show that they “invest in people.” Because his pitch doesn’t really matter to him, he’s incapable of really believing in it—he repeatedly insists that it’s “nothing.” I thought of Jerry and George in season four of Seinfeld, pitching a “show about nothing”: “Even nothing is something,” as Jerry wisely observes.

Years ago, I drafted a novel with an opening that was heavily plotted, dramatic, and entirely ripped off from Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin—a novel I didn’t even love, but which represented for me some ideal of mainstream success. I went through a phase of writing creative nonfiction—not because I enjoyed reading memoirs or particularly wanted to write one, but because I knew that magazines receive fewer of these submissions. I tried writing flash fiction, because it seemed to me that magazines might find it harder to reject a 500-word story than an 8,000-word one. Of course, none of these attempts to write what I assumed other people wanted were successful. I’m glad I learned this lesson early. A friend of mine spent several years writing novels that he thought would appeal to publishers—novels he called commercial—and it took the repeated rejection of these manuscripts for him to return to his roots, writing fiction that felt truer to his needs as a writer. Who knows if this work will be published, but at least he’s writing what he believes in.

One last danger—especially if you have friends engaged in the same creative practice—is competitiveness. When Ben, surprisingly, advances through the early stages of the Big Shot process, he lands at a mass audition. The scale of it shocks him:

The sheer number of people trying to do what he was doing was overwhelming. His confidence had shifted into quiet, defensive anger. Who were all these fucking people? Much harder to delude oneself in the presence of so many others trying to do the same, alone with a computer being maybe the most conducive situation for delusion there is—and Ben had had a lot of that lately.

Here, Higley may as well be describing a writer’s experience at the annual conference held by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where thousands of people gather in a convention center, gossiping and envying one another’s successes. The goal of the event is “being in community,” as a recent e-mail blast from AWP put it, but the downside—as anyone who has ever been in a writing workshop must know—is that it’s easy to feel demoralized and competitive in a room full of writers. What Higley captures about this environment is the way that a solitary pursuit, such as writing, suddenly feels like a sport. “Among the crowd,” he writes, Ben “now [wants] it more.”