The Four Horses of Success

And how to drive your chariot

Back in the early days of the Itch, I blogged about what it takes to get published - and, yes, I freely admit that it was partly out of irritation, because when I said that my debut novel had just been published, my interlocutor so often asked if (or even assumed that) it was my surname which had got me that two-book contract.*

Whereas, as far as I was concerned, I’d spent fifteen years, at least K. Anders Ericsson et al.’s 10,000 hours, at least the million-words-to-make-a-writer that according to Karen Woodward is variously attributed to Hemingway, Bradbury** or Stephen King, and not a little hard cash on my MPhil in Writing, on getting to that point.

Since then I’ve read, met, taught, been taught by, mentored, befriended, envied, admired, reviewed and sympathised with thousands of writers and authors. And although each of us has our own individual, always peculiar (in the old sense), often peculiar (in the modern sense) story about how it happened, it’s worth unpicking what those who have succeeded - however you like to define success - have in common.

Now, over on Jane Friedman’s brilliant blog, an excellent post by playwright Jules Horne about deliberate practice in the creative arts has got me reviewing the whole idea - not least because in the last eighteen years independent self-publishing*** has become an equally practical and potentially rewarding route to a paying audience.

Yes, publishing your own work independently removes one fundamental element of the process: when you’re being your own publisher, you only have to persuade yourself, not a separate commercial entity, that you can afford to gamble on enough people wanting to buy your book.

But I find I haven’t changed my mind about the four things that you need, if you’re to become not only a writer but also an author. So I’ve bullet-pointed these, not numbered them, because they are all equal, like the horses in the quadriga of the ancient gods: not driven four-in-hand as we’re used to seeing, but harnessed side-by-side.

• Hard Work On a good day writing doesn’t feel ‘hard’ in the sense of difficult or problematic, so maybe we should just call this work. The evidence that hard mental work uses large amounts of energy is mixed, and on a really good day you may not even realise it is being hard work - until you emerge exhausted. On bad days it can be so difficult you wonder if it’s telling you to give up completely. Either way, the work is sure to be lots and lots of:

  • writing or re-writing words

  • researching thoroughly and as thoroughly leaving the research behind

  • not skimping the dull copy-editing jobs or the brain-spraining search for the perfect word

  • not ignoring that little voice which says that a whole character, or the whole book, needs re-writing

  • ignoring that little voice which says that it shouldn’t be this hard or boring, so this must be the wrong project

  • undertaking whatever writing-training is best for you: daily writing yoga; a vast reading list and a solitary and enquiring mind; a Masters degree.

  • ploughing on with whatever tedious or daunting tasks (social media, networking, submissions, self-promotion) you have decided have a decent chance of helping gain you an audience

• Persistence Hard work stretched over months and years takes persistence:

  • yet more writing, re-writing and researching

  • resisting the lure of the sexy, twinkly, delightful Other Project and the carping of your Inner Critic (who may well get even carpier, as you get nearer finishing)

  • submitting widely because you can’t second-guess agents’ and editors’ personal taste

  • following up every helpful lead, however daunting

  • starting something new while you’re in the long agony of waiting to hear back about writing you’ve sent out

  • receiving, processing and moving on from standard rejections or unhelpful or even hostile feedback (you need to be a paying supporter of the Itch to access that one)

  • ploughing on with that Difficult Second Novel whatever good or bad things are happening to the first

  • being canny about tracking, researching and implementing where you direct that persistence: not just keeping on keeping on, but keeping intelligently on.

• Luck When I blushfully qualified having four prize nominations and a big publisher who was extremely supportive of my debut novel as my being very lucky, a writer friend said, ‘No, that’s not luck, that’s because you’ve written a fantastic book’. Thank you kindly for that, my friend - but all editors know that every month they reject fantastic books for reasons which are nothing to do with their quality.
  
  And yet it’s also true that ‘fortune favours the prepared mind’: when the Editorial Director of MegaBooks nearly spills coffee down you and you get chatting, it’s preparation, not luck, that enables you to trot out a great elevator pitch. So what is the relationship of luck to authorly success? Yes, it probably counts as luck, not one of the other horses, when:

  • what you write best is what readers at the moment want to read - or, better still, what at least one agent, one editor and one acquisitions meeting think readers will want to be reading in two years’ time.

  • you have the determined, resilient personality which is naturally, or was nurtured to be, hard working and persistent (see above); thin-skinned as writers must be but paradoxically also thick-skinned enough to keep on picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and starting all over again

  • you have more of what civilised humans in the 21st century recognise as luck, i.e. privilege: cultural capital, and the financial and temporal elbow-room to park the children or the job, and get yourself to the writing conference where Ms MegaBooks will also hang out. But I know plenty of people who have cultural capital and elbow-room, but still can’t or don’t do well with writing, and plenty who have little of either and do brilliantly - so privilege is neither necessary nor sufficient.

• Talent In a way, the ultimate luck is to have whatever combination of nature and nurture has given you more of a talent for word-wrangling and story-telling than the next writer logging into Submittable:

  • an ear and a tongue for writing those words down

  • an instinct for what makes stories and characters compelling

  • a mind that can catch thoughts and feelings and ideas, and layer them up and over and among each other -

  • and still keep the reader awake far into the night, wanting to know what happens next

  • a knack for recognising which of those skills you lack, and working out how to acquire them.

As the images of quadrigae suggest, controlling all four horses at once isn’t easy.**** Yes, like David Mitchell’s take***** on writing a novel as a rickety, end-of-the-pier, horse-race game, the four horses (or elephants, or lions) all move forward. But sometimes Hard Work surges ahead, sometimes Talent wants to charge off at a right-angle, sometimes Persistence goes lame, sometimes Luck baulks completely.

But as my last bullet point about talent suggests, the stronger and more adaptable any three of your horses are, the more you can use them to compensate for the misbehaviour or sickliness of the fourth.

Hard work and canny persistence can make the most of a modest talent; developing your resilience and persistence can compensate for lack of luck in what you naturally write best, or for lack of helpful privilege; having a blazing talent that everyone knows when they see it can, in the long term, make up for a can’t or won’t of hard work, persistence or bad industry luck.

And that’s why no aspiring writer, nor any author who’s just parted company from their agent or publisher, or lost money on their latest book, need despair. Which of your horses is strongest, fastest, cleverest, most biddable or most brave? Which is the tricky or weakly one today? How might you work with all your four, to make the most of your particular team?

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*Answer: ‘If my surname were what it takes to bag me a book contract, there wouldn’t be five perpetually unpublished manuscripts with that name on it, under my bed.’ But of course I’m not complaining: not only some helpful publicity, but the book contract for This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin, have come out of my relationship with my surname.

**According to Karen’s post, Ray Bradbury definitely did say, ‘3,000 words a day for a year or 1,000 words a day for three years and you’re home free’. He also said, ‘Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come’, which is so true, and which unfortunately I didn’t have room for in my Ten Wise Sayings about Creative Practice.

***I absolutely understand why authors who publish their own work think of themselves as indie publishers, by analogy with indie musicians. But because indie bands are generally released by independent record companies, and ‘independent publishing’ can also mean publishing companies (OUP, Faber, or Holland Hous Books, say) who are not owned by a larger corporation, it gets confusing. So when the point is the kind I’m making in this piece, I’m sticking to self-published as the most technically accurate term.

****And what happens when you need to get your four side-by-side horses through a gateway? Even the dimensions of the Space Shuttle, apparently, track right back to the width of two - not four - chariot-horses’ rumps.

*****I can’t find the quote to check it, but IIRC, David has five rickety horses: Character, Structure, Plot, Language and Ideas, which to my mind is in itself is a very useful checklist, or at least a thought-provoking taxonomy.

Image credit: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Arnaldo Dell'Ira (1903-1943), project of mosaic for a School of War, 1939-1940. Livorno, Italy, Archivio Dell'Ira, at Wikimedia Commons