Tolstoy and Austen aren't world-historically unique and special geniuses

But most geniuses of their caliber can't escape the mediocrity machine

I give two pieces of advice to writers. The first is that you must write with some awareness of the market. And the second is that you must preserve your own creativity.

These pieces of advice are obviously contradictory. The market creates a rather arbitrary set of valuations on different story types and writing styles, while in contrast your own creativity is a nameless wellspring which cannot easily be controlled or coerced. And, indeed, the number one way of destroying your creativity is to attempt to make it conform.

The easy advice is the one that most writers are given: “Write from the heart, and you will create your own market.” This is why when agents and editors are asked what they’re looking for, they say “I want a fresh voice.” They want some ineffable thing-ness that makes a writer unique and exciting.

From the standpoint of the consumer of writing—whether that consumer is a middleman like an agent or editor or an end-user like a reader—the “write from your heart” advice makes considerable sense. The number of aspiring writers is virtually infinite. They can produce work in a dizzying, infinite profusion, and you can select what most appeals to you. Both the marketplace and our culture as a whole benefit from a large number of writers ignoring the market and writing from the heart.

But this advice is absolutely punishing for writers. And, worse, it is the most punishing for the most promising writers. These are the writers who strike out on their own, produce fresh new work, work that is beautiful according to their own lights, and who eagerly offer it to the world—only to find there is no market for it.

Sometimes this work is taken up late in life or after their death. In the public imagination, this retrospectively justifies their suffering. But I am not so sure it does. I think of Herman Melville working at the customs house for thirty years, his creativity choked off, or Charles W. Chesnutt, working as land surveyer for thirty years, neither writing nor producing art. Think of the incalculable human misery of being amongst the best in the world at something and reaching the apex of your abilities—the moment when you ought to be producing your best and freshest work—and simply seeing no point in doing so.

Some claim this is a relatively rare phenomenon. Looking at our great authors, relatively few never achieved success. Richard Yates, for all his carping, was short-listed for major awards and was a professor at universities. The same was true for John Williams and other supposedly obscure writers. They did achieve success in life—they simply achieved more success after their life ended.

I would say that Richard Yates and John Williams were the lucky ones. Any writer who publishes a book, any writer who makes any form of living doing this work, is an exception. Some of the best novels and poems in the English language were never published in the first place and, hence, are lost forever—they cannot be rediscovered later.

This is something that very few published writers, or even aspiring writers, are willing to believe. Anyone who has read any significant amount of unpublished writing is aware that most of it is quite mediocre: it resembles a story, but has no heart, no true reason for existing. And most published writers have had the experience of trying really, really hard to be published…and then succeeding.

And yet…I know a considerable number of talented writers whose books did not sell. I think that many published writers blind themselves to this reality. They think, well, the book wasn’t that great, or the time wasn’t right, or the next one will sell. But what if you never write another one? I think published writers like to believe that the books which don’t sell were the ones that were on the bubble—the promising first novels—whereas anything truly remarkable will certainly sell.

I cannot convince most published writers of this—and I have certainly never managed to convince anyone who did not already believe it—but this is not the case. In fact, it is the opposite of the case. It is the promising first novels—the ones that show talent but are derivative—which do sell, and it is the truly remarkable that fail to sell.

I cannot say why this should be so. I think it is because gatekeepers when they read a book are generally looking for something “book-shaped”. They want something that, from its first page, feels like what a story ought to feel like. But many worthwhile things do not feel like that—they feel like something different! Think of Proust—a writer who would not have sold if his work had not been privately printed at his own expense—his work from the very first line breaks a number of promises to the reader. And the book continues to break those promises.

But you do not need to be Proust for your book to fail to sell. The writer who, in 2023, is merely inspired by Proust will also fail to sell their book! If you write in the Proustian style about your life in San Francisco or New York or Idaho, your book will not sell! And this remains true despite the success of Knausgaard—whose book did exactly that! Every writer must know this to be true. I have not met a single contemporary writer who, in the America of 2023, would set out to write a work in Proust’s style.

Most writers who have achieved any amount of success did this because they were able to conform unconsciously to the market. They learned to produce “book-shaped objects”. In most cases this is because the writer is, essentially, a mediocrity. They read only popular contemporary fictions, so they write in the style of popular contemporary fiction, with rather minor variations. Because their imagination was already well-bounded by the limits of their taste and experience, they are able to give it free reign. When you live on an island and the island has no natural predators, it is easy to let your sheep run free.

But the aspiring writer who is willing to stay on the island forever is a rare beast. Most aspiring writers are eventually drawn to the best that fiction has to offer: they are drawn to Proust, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Dostoeyevsky, Balzac, Austen, et al. They are drawn to Icelandic sagas or Homeric poetry or the Lake poets or Heian-era diaries. They listen to symphonies and read comic books. They watch foreign cinema and read foreign books. They are exposed to outside influences that set their imagination free.

But the moment you start assimilating influences that aren’t of high value in the contemporary marketplace, you risk writing something that is unsaleable.

The number of unsalable books in contemporary America is legion. I already mentioned the Proustian novel. Any book over 150,000 words is a difficult sell. Any book over 200,000 is almost impossible. Books with omniscient narration, where the narrator takes a distinct point of view, are quite difficult to sell. Books with the sort of free-indirect practiced by Virginia Woolf, where the narrative eye slips into and out of various heads are quite difficult to sell. It’s difficult to sell books without strong surface texture, without strong visual description, and yet are there any visual descriptions in Jane Austen? What exactly does Elizabeth Bennett’s house look like?

Even things quite recently in vogue, like the multicultural novels of, say, James Michener, would be almost impossible to sell today. Writers have, in their own lifetime, gone from writing unsalable, to salable, to unsalable work, without changing their style one bit, and they never quite understand why it is happening.

We can name exceptions to all of these, and the publishing industry likes to say “Well, yes, if the book is good enough it can still sell…” But I am here to tell you that, in practice, in the cold dead of morning, when an agent sees your email or reads your sample pages, they will find reason to say “It is not good enough.” And you are free to not believe me, but if you understand both capitalism and human nature at all, then you know I am correct.

Nor is the avant-garde any sort of recourse. Even small presses are desperate for hits. Lately entire small presses have been kept afloat by publishing surprise hits from abroad: Every Man Dies Alone for Melville; Knausgaard for Archipelago, Ferrante for Europa. But what do these hits have in common? Their authors were well-known in their home countries! These books had a proven appeal. Small presses need big books to survive. If a small press ignores the market for even a single year, it will go under.

The number of saleable books is quite small, compared to the number of writeable and readable ones. If you survey the broad stream of world history, this cannot help be obvious, otherwise why else does our contemporary fiction world partake of such a small range of styles and forms? Epic poetry was the most widely read form for most of world history—so try and sell an epic poem today. Do you think nobody out there is writing epic poetry about their farm in Iowa? I assure you they are. They are telling themselves that their book will be the exception that proves the rule—they are saying people will be bowled over and their book will be big. But I assure you, people will not be. They will send their book to agents, hear nothing, submit it to contests, get nowhere, and then retire back into obscurity. Nobody will ever read their book, and someday their hard-drive will crash and it will be lost forever.

This post isn’t being written out of sour grapes. Most of my best work has been published or will be published. You can read it. I made my peace with the market many years ago—I do not even begin to write something unless it is salable. Nor do I think my work is of any particular genius. It is good, and it uniquely my own, and it is published, and that is all any writer can ask for.

But a great many writers do not even achieve the minimal level of publication that I have achieved.

I have read the books. I swear this to you. It is true. There are great books being written every day that nobody will ever read, and the number of such books dwarfs the number that are eventually published. If you knew the quantity of unpublished greatness, you would think it was a travesty to worship Tolstoy and Austen, because, for all their talents, they are merely the winners of the lottery. The unique thing about Tolstoy and Austen is not their talent, but that someone of their talent was published and is remembered. They are the vessels that their age chose to perpetuate itself.

But you will not be that vessel. I know that you hope you will, but it won’t happen.

This, in short, is why it is important to write for the market. And, moreover, it is why writing for the market is essential if you are to preserve your creativity. Because after the failure of Moby Dick, Melville did not write anymore. And if you write a masterpiece that does not sell, you will not write anymore either—what would be the point? You have done your job and done your best—it is the world that has failed you! After that what was Melville supposed to do? Go back to writing regular sea adventure stories of the sort he knew so well? No, he had left the island, and could not go back.

You must preserve your creativity so that you have something worth saying; and you must write to the market to ensure that someone eventually hears what you have to say. The latter is just as important as the former, in my opinion.

Writing for the market is simple. Your work must superficially resemble whatever is popular. You must write in a style, using plots and themes and characters, that superficially resemble those of recent well-regarded books. If there has not been a successful epic poem in the last three years, then you must not write such a thing. If there has not been a successful omniscient novel, from a debut author of your country, in the last three years, then you must not write such a thing. Etc. Etc.

Smuggle in whatever is fresh. For instance, novels told in retrospective are salable. Instead of writing an omniscient book, have a first-person narrator looking back on their life with fuller knowledge (a la Catcher in the Rye or Gilead). In a pinch, the narrator can even be dead (a la The Lovely Bones). There are ways of retaining whatever you most value without utterly destroying your salability.

Salability is influenced quite strongly by subject matter. Pirates and Vikings are exactly the same thing, but right now it’s probably easier to sell a book about Vikings (South China Sea pirates would be even better!). If you’re choosing between setting your book in the Anarchy or the War of the Roses, you must choose the War of the Roses, because nobody has ever heard of the Anarchy. If you have a Black protagonist, make their wife a white woman. Etc. You know the tricks I am talking about—they’re used in every book and TV show and film.

The problem is that sometimes people don’t realize why things are the way they are. People who are told “I need to write something fresh” will think, hey I should write about the Anarchy! I should write a black guy who’s actually married to a black woman! I should write a pirate book, people love pirates! They fail to recognize that the gap in the market is purposeful.

Most folks have a subconscious awareness of these gaps. For instance, there was a whole circle of Mormon PoC YA writers who was very into diversity. They always gave interviews about how they felt they needed to write PoC characters. I once asked one why she didn’t write a Mormon protagonist. She said, “Oh that would never sell.” And she was right. There are hundreds of Mormon YA writers, and zero YA novels from mainstream presses that are about Mormon youth. There is a reason for that!

And if even something simple like making your character a Mormon (or too overtly Christian at all) can hamper your salability, then anything can! These strictures are entirely arbitrary, entirely a matter of fashion. There is no way of avoiding them naturalistically—they are not correlated in any way with the book’s quality—you simply need to know the market.

Do not be the fool who thinks your book will be good enough to overcome the market. It is not like rolling a boulder up-hill. The two things are not weighed up against each other. The editor does not say “Well, it’s SO good that I can ignore the unmarketability.” That is how it should work, but it does not work that way at all. In very rare cases, when an editor has strong belief, then they can acquire something that is not traditionally marketable, but they almost always do so by arguing that there is a large untapped market for this book: they argue that the book will be a black swan breakout hit, getting untold critical and commercial acclaim. The chances that an editor will decide, on their own, that your book is that book? Those chances are miniscule. You do not want to stake your life on those chances, believe me.

It takes a keen awareness to figure out the market. And you will make missteps. I still end up with unsalable books sometimes. The market changes out from under me. Or I stray too far and try to smuggle in too much that’s new. But there is no avoiding the market, no getting around it. Self-publishing platforms have a market, the same as traditional presses. You see on Substack plenty of people writing stuff that will never, ever get traction, because there is no market here for, say, romance short stories. You see people self-publishing their literary novels, and those too will never get traction, because literary readers don’t buy self-published novels. There is no escape from the market.

This is similar to the problem of figuring out who to marry. Without love, marriage is tedious, but, as the saying goes, it is just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one. Ideally one wants to marry for love—indeed, most people will not marry without at least some profession of love—but you do not want to shackle yourself for life to someone without a profession, or someone who has significant mental or emotional difficulties, or a disreputable family, or who is otherwise unsuited for the life you’d like to lead.

And yet those mercenary considerations are, in themselves, inimical to finding love—if you are measuring a partner’s suitability then you cannot fully trust them, fully fall into the relationship. So how can these considerations be reconciled with the search for love? Some people pay no attention to suitability, and they ruin their lives by falling in love with debt-ridden or drug-addicted people. Some people only pay attention to practical considerations, and they lead tedious, drab lives of plenty.

Most people manage this problem by setting a strong filter: they won’t even look at a person who falls outside their parameters. But oftentimes they set their parameters strictly or foolishly or without any self-awareness, so they end up with a list of people who they are either unable to love or who aren’t truly suitable in the way they need.¹

And then there is the delightful X-factor. Love ennobles people. Sometimes when you find love, two people grow together, learning to support each other. And familiarity can also turn into love. Sometimes when people are well-suited to one another, and they marry, their relationship can blossom into true love.

Still, you don’t want to rely on either of those two things happening! And yet…sometimes you must. Sometimes you have the strong feeling that you will never find a more suitable partner, or a partner who you might love better.

And, similarly, sometimes when you are writing a book, you just know, I could write nothing other than this book, and I could write it in no other way. Then that’s simply what you need to do. There is no point in writing if you’re not going to follow your own creativity. And, moreover, if you ignore your creativity enough, eventually it will drift away from you.

So what can be done?

Well, that’s what makes life interesting, isn’t it? You just have to apply fingers to keyboard and figure that shit out.

The imave prompt was: Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen running away from a scary robot with blood dripping from its jaws. Methinks this tech has a bit of a ways to go.

1. My wife and I frequently argue about which of us had the sillier dating strategy. I argue that her parameters were far too strict and rather arbitrary. She says that I didn’t exercise nearly enough selection (I would go on a date with anyone!) In reality, I think both of us were at strong risk of making poor matches, but luckily we found the right person and it worked out well! It’s definitely a relief to meet a mentally stable person with a good job and then be like…oh wait, I am falling in love with them too!?! When that happens there is absolutely no way you’re ever going to break up. Unless, of course, you are the mentally unstable or foolish one.