"A few months ago I met a young writer at a party—a recent graduate of a prestigious MFA program who published his first novel this spring with a popular and well-respected literary imprint of a major house. Let’s call him David. David’s book release had been less than thrilling: it had landed on some “most anticipated” lists but hadn’t received many reviews, especially not that one crucial one in the New York Times Book Review. David told me he felt absolutely crushed and devastated, and I told him I couldn’t sympathize more—the very same thing happened with my first book, The Train to Lo Wu, in 2005. But the worst part, he said, was that a close friend and classmate of his had become a literary superstar: her first novel had received incredible fanfare and been chosen for a nationwide TV book club. “I was in the room when she got the call,” David said. “Listen, you have to understand, in my program, if you get a $250,000 book deal, it’s nothing. It’s a disappointment.” I didn’t know what to say: or, rather, I wasn’t sure what to say first. I wanted to know if that’s the message this young writer was getting from the MFA faculty: why weren’t they being good mentors, why weren’t they offering better advice? I wanted to talk about money: how the amount of an advance isn’t as meaningful as most people think, how few books ever earn out, how little control writers have over how much their publisher invests in them. At the same time I knew none of that was what David really needed to hear. Somehow he had absorbed the message that in order to feel successful as a literary novelist, he had to be famous—like Oprah’s Book Club-level famous—which is like telling a cardiac surgeon she’ll only succeed dressed up as a clown. But as we’ve all learned by observing American political life over the last decade, outrageous lies are the hardest to disprove, especially if they’re shared by others: they harden into an ideology, a kind of collective promise. In this case, among writers, it’s a promise to make ourselves deeply, collectively miserable." - Jess Row, Can a Writer Survive Without Being a Star?
