"The Ambition Conundrum." Sounds almost like a Robert Ludlum title, I know. But the question I've been batting around my head lately is serious.............
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"The Ambition Conundrum." Sounds almost like a Robert Ludlum title, I know. But the question I've been batting around my head lately is serious:
"How do you define success?"
I remember when I first asked myself that question, a few years ago. I was on one of my long walks around Jersey City, thinking about my future as a writer. My thoughts went something like this: bzz bzz bzz agent bzz bzz book deal bzz sales bzz. The truth hit me: I had no real definition of success. I couldn't picture what the word meant to me.
It came as a bit of a shock. For the previous decade I had worked hard at my writing and published a fair amount, but I had never bothered to define what I would need to do in order to consider myself successful. How could I achieve anything if I didn't know what it was I wanted to achieve in the first place?
Part of the problem, at least as I saw it, is that the type of ambition we are usually exposed to is from people who seek fame for fame's sake. Most of the gossip/tabloid infotainment that passes for news in this country, as well as the entire (and entirely dominant) reality TV genre are built on the same premise: how far will you go to win?
It's a fuzzy line sometimes between noble ambition and that peculiarly American disease of raging, nostril-flared Entitlement. There are plenty of ambitious, successful people who don't seek the spotlight, while those who do come across as the bloodthirsty, ruthless sorts who will use whatever underhanded tactics they can to get ahead.
The literary world has its share of them. There is the cynical, self-righteous bully who has made a brilliant career for himself by exploiting the young and the powerless, while convincing an army of Believers that he's doing it all for their benefit. There's the author who wrote a maudlin essay bemoaning his lack of fame, and then when he got exactly what he wanted--a mega-bestseller and massive acclaim--he threw a hissy fit, claiming that an Oprah sticker on the jacket of his book would somehow defile the sanctity of his work.
Even populist lit hero Stephen King showed the ugly side of his ambition during his disastrous serial e-book experiment, "The Plant". After a tremendously successful start things got weird quickly, as King began claiming that his fans were stealing from him. (For those of you who don't know the story, King insisted on an honor system requiring that at least 75% of downloaders pay his fee or he would pull the serial--a shitty move on the face of it, and yet his fans did exactly that, despite glitches and problems with the site. King rewarded them by calling them thieves, doubled the price of downloads after the first few episodes, and then yanked the serial in a self-indulgent rage when the pay-through rates naturally plummeted, stranding tens of thousands of paying customers with a big "fuck you.") Even now, eight years later, and despite all his wealth and fame, I can no longer think of Stephen King as anything but a small-minded, greedy, miserable failure. We are truly a nation of sore winners.
Real-life horror stories like these have always made me a little bit wary of the whole notion of success, striving for it, wanting it. It sometimes seems like you either have to be a monster to want success, or success will turn you into one eventually. Not much of a choice either way.
Then there's the other side of ambition, the one that we don't always acknowledge: Ambition will make you a better writer. Maybe not a great one, but better than you were. Are the famous writers famous because they're better writers? Sometimes, but very often the answer is No. They're famous because they did whatever they had to do in order to achieve success. I would argue that the majority of famous writers in any generation have successful primarily because they convinced others that they deserved to be. The irony is, at least to me, that in the process of chasing that goal they also became better writers than they were, or would have been if they had suppressed their ambition. (to take one easy example, what if Jagger and Richards had decided to be blues 'purists' and suppressed the ambition to become as big as the Beatles?)
Like it or not, just about every author you have ever heard of has realized at some point that in order to fully realize their art they have to get their message across to the world. Believing in yourself enough to try convincing others of that fact is one of the necessary foundations for a great artist. Unfortunately, a lot of mediocrities believe in themselves too, which is why the world is filled with so many angry, manipulative strivers who make the rest of us want to run away and hide.
It's not about changing your style to suit the market, in a New Grub Street kind of way. It's just that recognizing the competitive nature of the business--whether that spurs you on to achieve a more public success or simply inspires you to a greater private ambition within yourself--will cause many of your most cherished literary illusions to fade away. You run the risk of creating bigger, more grotesque illusions about yourself in the process, but there isn't a part of this whole gig that isn't risky. Are you willing to chance it?
For more literary opinions visit Tim's blog.
Last update : 22-04-2008 11:52
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