So I often sit and wonder to myself about the successes and failures of writing. About the Odds and oddities of it all. And like most, I'm sure, I think about what the actual chances of ever reaching the top are. I imagine the levels of writing like a pyramid, at the bottom, where most would-be-writers flounder are the people who start off, maybe have a good idea and scribble notes, maybe even a chapter or two before storing it away to be forgotten. Then the next level you get the people who might complete a short story or two, but nothing too ambitious or time consuming. Next up you get the people that write most if not all of a novel, but lack any real desire to get published, don't edit or proofread etc....You get the idea, it goes on until you get to the top, the very pinnacle is the gold capped point of the Pyramid, your J.K Rowling's, George RR Martins etc. I just wonder, how wide that bottom layer is and how quickly it tapers off to the top.
The top of what - published wordcount? Number of readers? Commercial success? Number of twitter followers or movie deals? Critical acclaim? Because you describe the bottom layers of your pyramid as the struggle to produce something worthwhile, something worth reading. And the top is suddenly those shining lights of celebritism like Rowling or Martin - only that they're not at the "top" because of the flawless quality of their writing but because of clever and well-funded marketing and a whole lot of dynamics and mechanisms that have nothing to do with the things the bottom layers struggle with. Their gold-tipped pyramid is basically a whole different pyramid than the one where aspiring newbie writers are crawling about, and to lead them to believe that Rowlinguesque commercial success is the top of the pyramid they're aspiring to climb is a recipe for disaster.
I'm not sure I follow. The writers I stated are extremely popular and successful, they just happened to spring to mind. I don't think I'm being disingenuous to point out that they are at, what by most measures, would be considered the pinnacle of the writing world. I would argue they are very much part of the same pyramid, and writers of all levels must know that. I guess I'd look at it like athletics, or some other sport, most people take part in sport, some try and give up, some carry on but would only ever do it for fun, others might put time into it and never achieve anything more than minor success, but at the very top would be the elite athletes, global superstars etc. I don't think it would be fair to dismiss them completely because of their success. You could argue there should be a separate, fictional pyramid, for worthwhile/acclaimed writing, but that's another issue.
Beware: the false dichotomy of "popular vs. excellence" lurks just ahead. But, to answer the OP, if we define the area by numbers of aspiring writers, and the layers leading to the top as the various steps of development - 1. those who daydream but write nothing; 2. those who jot down ideas for stories but never put much effort into them; 3. those who spend a significant amount of time writing but never produce a finished product; 4. those who finish their first drafts and move on to the next thing, content to have "written something"; 5. those who, having completed a first draft, go back and review and revise until they are satisfied; 6. those who seek out critique of their work and revise accordingly; 7. those who learn everything they can about the publishing business - how the querying process works, the steps one must follow, either to get a book published traditionally or to be successful as a self-pubber; 8. those who fail at getting their work published (or, if self-pubbing, fail to gain more than the average 200 readers for self-pubbed work), go back, learn from their mistakes, and try again; 9. those who gain their ultimate goal - and if the width of each layer was determined based upon the amount of determination needed to advance past it, then I believe it would look rather like a child's drawing of a rocket, very wide at the base, a more gradual tapering, and then a sharp narrowing as one reaches the top. I post this without any judgment toward those who never get to that ninth and final layer, because that is most of us, and there can be any number of reasons for stopping the climb. Many of those at levels 1 through 6 probably never seriously considered the possibility of a wide readership. Some are happy treating writing as a whim, and others are happy just to have their writings for their own enjoyment. Nothing at all wrong with that. And many at levels 7 and 8 may have other factors in their lives that prevent them from moving forward. Some may have lost heart at the sometimes apparently arbitrary nature of the business. And some may have decided it just wasn't worth the time and effort to keep going. But let us not spend too much time pondering such matters. Let us instead get back to work on reaching the apex - however one wishes to define it.
Very nicely put. To use your analogy, I guess I'm currently sitting somewhere midship, looking out a porthole into space, as I try to figure our which combination of buttons opens up the sealed hatch to the next level
And this is exactly what I'm questioning. What exactly are these "most measures"? Certainly not mine. Why would a short story writer measure themselves against Rowling? Why a biographer? An essayist? A poet? A crime fiction writer or that guy over there who's writing the ultimate and only legitimate successor to Ulysses? Or someone who writes in another language than English? I really hate that the genre novel is supposed to be the be-all-end-all of writing just because it's the only form that gets sold to the masses. Another thing is - what makes them the "pinnacle" is something neither Rowling nor Martin nor any other writer really has influence on. Do you think when JKR started writing and made her first steps up the pyramid, she imagined to be one of the richest people on the planet one day, have billions of readers and a movie series and who-knows-what? No, she just wrote her story. On the other hand, do you know how many stories get lost in the 5 to 6-digit rankings on Amazon that are at least as good/well written/promising as everything Rowling and Martin have ever published? Every writer has influence on their writing - it's a question of knowledge and discipline, mostly. All those bottom layers of the pyramid you described - I can work on that climb, train my writing muscles, ascend and see my progress. As a self-publisher or with good marketing skills, I may even get pretty far. But if Rowling and Martin are the pinnacle, I can only look up, get blinded and know exactly that there's nothing I can do to get there - just like they couldn't do anything on their own to get there, other than write the best book they could and hope for a enormous dose of luck. Which they got. Millions of others don't. So, to remain in your pyramid image, you can climb the bottom layers on your own. To get to the top, you need a gust of wind or a rope someone else throws you or a djinn with a flying carpet, but it won't be by your own effort. And yes, I think to make aspiring writers believe that they can be as successful as Rowling or Martin by their own effort does more harm than good. It's not realistic, and it only leads to frustration, because unfortunately there's no reasonable correlation between "good writing" and "income from readers", nowadays probably even less than in pre-selfpublishing-eras. So yes, I think we look at two different pyramids here: One that measures the quality of the product - and no, the top level is not necessarily the novel. Many writers are happy and fully satisfied writing shorts or flash or essays or fanfiction. I also doubt that either Rowling or Martin would be considered the absolute pinnacle in this regard. And another pyramid that measures "success", and then you'd have to define exactly what you mean with success. Because your "most measures", which seems equivalent to "commercial success" because I really see no other measure where those two stand at the top, are only one of many scales here. For writers of genre fantasy, the pinnacle can be Rowling or Martin, but it can just as well be Gaiman, or Zelazny or Tolkien. For short story writers, it may be Alice Munro. For writers most interested in the relation of effort to financial success, E.L. James may be their heroine. For writers of conspiracy thrillers, it's perhaps Dan Brown. Or Umberto Eco. It would be really nice if writing worked like that - you work yourself through the youth leagues into the regional adults, then on to the national level, championships, olympics, and after every contest you have a measurable result and know to the millisecond or centimeter exactly how much better or worse you are than your peers. Unfortunately, it doesn't. No, I would argue that there's much more under the sun than gigantomaniac fantasy series on one side and worthwhile/acclaimed writing on the other, and this is only "another issue" if you insist on this separation and ignore everything inbetween respectively outside of your chosen scale.
I dunno, maybe I didn't put it very clearly, but EdFromNY did in his response and covered pretty much what I was going for.... I didn't set out to give you a heart attack about what defines success. Please refrain from putting whatever gripes you have about this onto me. I was just trying to give examples of successful writers, I think they are successful, obviously they don't fit every measure of success...have they successfully written cook books? or IT Help guides? No! then they cannot be successful. I was not going to sit and list every possible measure of success and hundreds of writers that fall into these with Venn Diagrams and footnotes.
My ultimate goal is to get good enough at writing where I can feel confident enough to publish a book. I don't rally care if it's self or trad, I just want to be confident enough in my writing that I'm comfortable with other people purchasing and reading it. After that I'll just continue working on my writing skills and try to publish more (hopefully better) works.
Which is a great example. Rowling's crime fiction novels are terrible, and their sales were disappointing. She's at a pinnacle for YA, but not even mediocre for detective genre. Where would I put her in the pyramid if the pyramid's criteria is 'general writing' success?
The situation is actually much worse than a pyramid. The chances of reaching the top in any creative endeavor are governed by a Pareto distribution, which is an exponential curve determined by a mathematical equation that says that out of a number of people involved in the creative process, 50% of the work will be done by the square root of the number of people. So, for example, out of 100 authors, 10 will produce 50% of the sales, and 3 of those (roughly) will produce half of that. It is even more striking as the numbers get larger. Suppose there are 1 million authors. The square root of 1 million (1,000) will account for 50% of sales, 32 of whom will account for half of that (25%), 6 of whom will account for half of that. So out of a million authors, 6 will account for 12.5% of all sales. The Pareto distribution appears to be true for all creative endeavours, for example musical composition, whether classical, jazz, or country. Art. It is interesting (and important) because it also applies to wealth creation in society, which is how most of the wealth ends up in the hands of a few fabulously-rich people, and the inequality this produces is a source of much conflict and competing political philosophies. If you want to go into it in more detail, here is a link to one of Jordan Peterson's lectures on the subject. Peterson is a Canadian psychologist who has studied this in depth and how different cultures have tried (and mostly failed) to do something about the inequality: His introduction to the Pareto distribution starts at 7minutes, and his example related to book sales starts at 11 minutes. He also gives many more fascinating examples, like how the Pareto curve distributes wealth and power in the drug trade. The whole lecture takes 2 hours. It is time well spent if you want to watch it all but from 7 minutes to 20 minutes will give you a good idea of the importance of this type of distribution curve.
I seem to have shut down discussion on this thread. I certainly didn't mean to. I didn't mean to imply, for example, that writing is a waste of time because the chances of becoming a "Stephen King" are hundreds of thousands to one against. The mathematical odds are definitely in that range, but there are also many hundreds of thousands of us who get books published that reach a small and very appreciative audience. Many of us cannot rely on writing to make a living, so almost all of us on this forum have other jobs, and we write because we have this little Jiminey Cricket in our ear that tells us we should. It is the same for all creative souls. My father was an extremely competent musician who played piano and was an arranger for 20 and 30 piece bands in the 1940s. He did this at night while working in a Scottish shipyard during the day. My uncle won national awards for both popular and classical drumming, and visited 105 different ports in his career as a musician on cruise ships. But he was a long way from being rich and lived from gig to gig. My keyboard Guru - an amazing musician - who teaches me advanced jazz keyboard has just retired from his second job as salesman in a local music store. The number of dancers, actors, singers, artists, writers, who wait on tables during the day is infinite. What does this all mean? I think it means that we simply strive to do the best we can with the talents we have been given, and that reaching the peak of a remote, unachievable mountaintop is not really that important. If our talent is appreciated by our family, our friends, our audience, and those who love us, it is enough.
This is a Haemunculi: It feeds it's soul on ones suffering. And the odds of escaping such a creature are microscopic, compared to being tormented by it for an extreme length of time before it simply can't keep you alive anymore. So I am going to say like 1/100,000,000 that you get extremely lucky and escape. So yeah like everyone else said you just have to slowly climb your way up to the top, if you can. And if you see a Haemunculi, run.
Hi Cave Troll. I'd just move to the side while the Haemunculus fed on one of the many who see themselves as victims. Then I'd go to my keyboard / laptop and do my thing. Cheers, Ghengis.
Thanks for this, never heard of the 'Pareto distribution' before. I'll check out the video, sounds interesting
She got her book published (not using her own name), which means she's a hell of lot further ahead than the vast majority of people who try writing detective fiction. I think her sales may have been disappointing for the JK Rowling level of sales, but so are the sales of every writer! Cuckoo's Calling got a starred review in Publishers' Weekly before anyone knew who wrote it, got good reviews elsewhere, etc. I think she did a hell of a lot better than "mediocre". So I'd put her near the top of the pyramid, for sure.
I wouldn't have sad they were terrible either ... i quite liked the latter two ( i haven't read the first one)
That was a mechanicus. This is a heamoculi But i agree, if you see one.... run. But in regards to the OP more specifically. I am on of those that would argue that whilst some writings may be considered superior based on, for instance, grammar or plot complexity. At the end of the day it is a form of art and not really quantifiable. I think that today there is too much pressure to become successfull in whichever particular path taken, but often fails to see the beauty in the work being done - whether it be writing or otherwise. As for the pymarids, I would say they as big as you want them to be - or however big you view them. One person's criteria for a 'successful author' may be different to another. Similarly, writing a single published book may make you consider yourself an author, but to someone else who has written a hundred, he may think otherwise. Just saying that perspective it quite important here.
I would think the writers winning the Pulitzers and Nobels and Bookers and such would knock the examples given by the OP right off the top of that self-created and a bit screwy pyramid. In fact, I struggle to put any genre writer (with a few exceptions) at the top of such a pyramid. I guess who is at the top of the pyramid would be different, depending on who you admire and look up to in terms of writing. But those examples given by the OP are not my examples, and, personally, I don't really see them as good examples. Also, I wouldn't put short stories at the bottom or imply they are for beginners. It's probably easier to sell a novel to a top publisher than sell a short story to The New Yorker. So, would that put New Yorker writers above many novelist? In my pyramid it does. As for climbing a pyramid, it doesn't really work like that. Sure, we get better as we go, but there aren't predetermined steps or levels we need to start off with. Writers write, so anyone not writing doesn't really belong there. There is nothing wrong with jumping right into a novel. I believe a well-read aspiring writer will do a lot better than a writer who reads very little, and they probably won't enter the game at the same level. Same with short stories and essays and poems. That being said, I think talent is important, but persistence is more important. And, like I said, this doesn't have to be something where you start at any kind of bottom or aim for what may seem more realistic to newer writers. Then we have the so-called top. And here's the thing with the being at the top of anything, it's really hard to stay there. Sure, JKR makes a bunch of money and created something popular, but is she going to win any literary prizes for it? Probably not. And it's quite unlikely that she will produce something as successful as good old Harry. Even if we did a pyramid of just popular fiction, I'm not sure she would be at the top anymore.
Wouldn't be enough for me. My first reaction to that is to say "Fuck them, I want to make it, goddamn it!" I couldn't give a fuck if my friends and family or loved ones like my writing. ETA: They don't write the paycheck.
Let's play Pareto-play. 80/20 20% of writers do 80% of work and success. ==> 20% of them do 80% of that tops work and success. It's 4% of total that make 64% of total. ==> 0.8% of total make 51% of total. ==> 0.16% of total make 41% of total. So if you have 1 000 000 writers, they cultural impact and sales are a bit like 200 000 ==> 80% 40 000 ==> 64% 8 000 ==> 51% 160 ==> 41% Bottom 992 000 writers have about same amount of impact than 8 000 top writers. Another play. Price square root play. When we are stuying creative work a square root of all doers has an impact of 50%. 100 writers ==> 3 does half of the impact. 10 000 writers ==> 100 does half of the impact. 1 000 000 writers ==> 1 000 does half of the impact. Those are not exact numbers but they point quite well how things are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle "Price's well-known square root law states that half of the literature on a subject will be contributed by the square root of the total number of authors publishing in that area." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0306457388900490
