The Observer has an article up on Stephenie Meyer, which got me thinking. The article – and indeed, Meyer’s bio/publicity – features many of the elements that are hugely popular in media stories about writers. JK Rowling and Zadie Smith are a couple of other examples of this. It’s what I like to call the Magical Writer Journey.
1. The writer who didn’t actually have ambition to be a writer, just happened to stumble into the career by accident, because they got a random idea for a book that inspired them.
2. The huge advance given to the writer, for something they did ‘jotted down’, which translated into multi-million copies sold. Easy!
3. The genre writer who doesn’t have a particular interest in that genre, and admits to no influences or debt to other writers. Cos they basically invented it for themselves. Effortlessly.
“But then Meyer is not your typical queen of the night. She hates horror, is a teetotaller, has never seen an R-rated film and confesses to not even having read Dracula (one imagines the sexy, savage True Blood is also out).”
It’s really no wonder that some people think that writers are these mad, indolent creatures who turn out prose in exchange for fur coats and diamonds. It’s as if the most popular image of a successful writer is someone who is not tainted by anything so vulgar as hard work, ambition, forward planning, or awareness of where their writing fits in with everyone else’s.
The Magical Writer Journey is somewhat akin to the ‘hey a talent scout saw me in the street and now I’m going to be a famous model’ story, and it makes no sense whatsoever. Is it just that everyday writer journeys are, well, everyday? I’m sure you don’t see successful architects or doctors being interviewed about how they were at a dark time in their life and then they just happened to sketch a building on the back of a napkin, or happened to stumble on someone’s appendix with a steak knife, and whizzzz! there they were, instant million dollar career.
I’m not begrudging JK or Stephenie their Magical Journeys. Pots of money for big name authors is good news for the publishing industry as a whole. It’s just – no wonder people think that this is how it happens. That writers don’t actually work for a living, they just scrawl a few stories that make them feel good inside and poof, million dollar contracts and fame everlasting.
Equally annoying of course is the Agonised Writer Journey, which is as much of an urban myth as the Magical Writer Journey only with bonus added angst, pain and starving in garrets while carving the words of one’s novel onto one’s own emaciated thighs because you can’t afford proper paper and biros. (neither Magical writers nor Agonised writers use computers cos that would be weird)
The only explanation is that these non-writerly writers are in fact fictional characters, designed to keep real writers out of the public eye. Cos real writers are scary twitchy people, surgically attached to their laptops, who should mostly not be allowed out in public at all. Or you know, the stories they have to tell are along the lines of ‘got up, wrote book, wrote more book, had cup of tea, wrote more book,’ which is frankly lousy newspaper copy. Like interviewing someone in an office job and asking them what they did all day.
Anyway, for an example of a Truly Real Sweat Of My Brow I’ve-Met-Her-So-She-Does-Exist Genuine Writer Journey, check out Karen Miller, who wrote five entire books this year. Karen has managed to launch herself with amazing momentum from the beginning right through to the healthy (and I hope long-lasting) middle of her writing career in a few short years by the amazingly unmagical technique of working her arse off. She’s an inspiration to those of us who suspect our careers might be better served by sitting at a computer every day and getting some words written than sitting in a cafe, daydreaming of that million dollar book contract.