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Field Notes #6
On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer
Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it. Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to what you need to continue existing as a writer, On Writing and Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role played by rejection in literary endeavors and contemplates failure as the essence of the writer’s life. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche offers stories from the history of writerly failure, from Ovid’s exile and Dostoevsky’s mock execution to James Baldwin's advice just to endure, where living with the struggle and the pointlessness of writing is the point.
88 pages, Paperback
First published February 14, 2023
39 people are currently reading
835 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Marche
19 books183 followersStephen Marche is the author of The Unmade Bed (2016), The Hunger of the Wolf (2015), Love and the Mess We’re In (2013), How Shakespeare Changed Everything (2012), Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (2007) and Raymond and Hannah (2005). He's written for nearly every newspaper and magazine you can name.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 113 reviews
April 11, 2023
I don't normally rate DNFs, but this one deserves it. Part of me was determined to finish because it's so short, but then it's also so freaking asinine that it is not worth my afternoon.
One of the things most frustrating about this book is how much the author contradicts himself. Many time, he asserts: "It is stupid to say writers need to suffer." But then this book is only about writers who have suffered an indignity or great loss or political oppression. "Don't whine," he says, while cataloguing the whining of other writers. But they are right to whine: he has assessed their suffering and deemed it worthy of whining. We are wrong to whine. It spoke of an enormous privilege, to believe that most writers are only whining because they are wrong, not because they suffer some injustice.
At least at points, there is a glimmer of self-awareness, where he admits that while he doesn't want to believe that "brokenness as insight", he nonetheless does. But there are so many times he denies it, while then glorifying the suffering of others. It's tiresome, endless. You can't assert that you don't believe that "suffering exalts", and then, "it may be that the best work forms itself in degradation and fear."
He goes onto to say that looking at certain forms of success, such as Rowling, is like presenting winning the lottery as a retirement plan. That we should look at real failure. Then, he presents people who died destitute or in obscurity, but are now some of the biggest names in literature or poetry, whose art endured. Okay, so it's not like the lottery as a retirement plan, but it is presenting a state funeral as a viable option to the average Joe, in my opinion. It's the other side of the coin: it's okay that you're failing now, don't worry, you will be exalted after death. No, most of us won't. We'll die in obscurity, and we'll continue into obscurity after death, not even a footnote in history. Let us not glorify failure as if it will be worth it in the next life. That's just as unhelpful a stance to take.
I hated the way Marche links Solzhenitsyn's leaving America to return to Russia, with writing at large. He writes, "The freedom, so long hungered for, turned to emptiness in his guts. The moment he could return to the country that had tortured and condemned him, he went. For many writers, home is where the suffering is." I imagine it is less about the suffering, more that Solzhenitsyn suffered also in America, did not enjoy the culture, and missed the aspects of his home country that were not a brutal regime. It's such a banal way for someone to talk about Solzhenitsyn's life, it genuinely made me kind of angry.
It's also a very male book. There are some women discussed, but they are few and far between, notable because of how little interest he has for female writers at large, and there is just a quality of maleness to it all. The dick measuring contests he talks of, the fear of castration, etc. that serves to talk only of his fears.
I did enjoy how much he clearly hates Allen Ginsberg, though. I have no strong feelings on Ginsberg, just mild indifference, but the amount of scorn in Marche's descriptions of him made me laugh quite a bit.
One of the things most frustrating about this book is how much the author contradicts himself. Many time, he asserts: "It is stupid to say writers need to suffer." But then this book is only about writers who have suffered an indignity or great loss or political oppression. "Don't whine," he says, while cataloguing the whining of other writers. But they are right to whine: he has assessed their suffering and deemed it worthy of whining. We are wrong to whine. It spoke of an enormous privilege, to believe that most writers are only whining because they are wrong, not because they suffer some injustice.
At least at points, there is a glimmer of self-awareness, where he admits that while he doesn't want to believe that "brokenness as insight", he nonetheless does. But there are so many times he denies it, while then glorifying the suffering of others. It's tiresome, endless. You can't assert that you don't believe that "suffering exalts", and then, "it may be that the best work forms itself in degradation and fear."
He goes onto to say that looking at certain forms of success, such as Rowling, is like presenting winning the lottery as a retirement plan. That we should look at real failure. Then, he presents people who died destitute or in obscurity, but are now some of the biggest names in literature or poetry, whose art endured. Okay, so it's not like the lottery as a retirement plan, but it is presenting a state funeral as a viable option to the average Joe, in my opinion. It's the other side of the coin: it's okay that you're failing now, don't worry, you will be exalted after death. No, most of us won't. We'll die in obscurity, and we'll continue into obscurity after death, not even a footnote in history. Let us not glorify failure as if it will be worth it in the next life. That's just as unhelpful a stance to take.
I hated the way Marche links Solzhenitsyn's leaving America to return to Russia, with writing at large. He writes, "The freedom, so long hungered for, turned to emptiness in his guts. The moment he could return to the country that had tortured and condemned him, he went. For many writers, home is where the suffering is." I imagine it is less about the suffering, more that Solzhenitsyn suffered also in America, did not enjoy the culture, and missed the aspects of his home country that were not a brutal regime. It's such a banal way for someone to talk about Solzhenitsyn's life, it genuinely made me kind of angry.
It's also a very male book. There are some women discussed, but they are few and far between, notable because of how little interest he has for female writers at large, and there is just a quality of maleness to it all. The dick measuring contests he talks of, the fear of castration, etc. that serves to talk only of his fears.
I did enjoy how much he clearly hates Allen Ginsberg, though. I have no strong feelings on Ginsberg, just mild indifference, but the amount of scorn in Marche's descriptions of him made me laugh quite a bit.
January 26, 2023
Writing and failure go together like a horse and carriage. Would-be writers see it as romantic, or life-saving, or at very least remote work. But ultimately, it is all about failure says Stephen Marche (citing George Orwell) in his book On Writing and Failure. Marche is a successful (in my mind) writer who plumbs history for examples of incredible suffering, frustration, poverty and rejection that is the life of writers. It’s a lifetime struggle, even, if not especially, for what readers would consider successful ones. The book is one long essay that makes for a very short book, but it is packed with real life stories that come with a warning at the end of many of its paragraphs: “Why would it be different for you?”
Throughout the eighty pages here, Marche keeps saying “No whining” and “No complaining” because young writers, old writers and would-be writers spend all their time doing just that. He tells of major successes like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who considered himself a failure and drank himself to death, complaining all the way. He even goes back to Socrates and Confucius, whose writings not only didn’t make for successful careers, but demonstrated failure at every turn.
First off there is rejection. Marche has stories, including his own, of collecting rejection letters. He says he stopped at two thousand of them. Publishing is a totally irrational business, run by tastemakers with no taste. One example of rejection not in the book is something I will never forget, and which deterred me from a writing career as a primary pursuit very early on.
In the early 1970s, some Harvard students took a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Painted Bird, and laboriously retyped the whole thing onto plain paper, double-spaced, using a manual typewriter (as there were no word processors or scanners). They made copies and submitted them under their own names as new manuscripts to several dozen publishers. As I recall, they received about twenty responses back, all of them rejections, including one that attempted to be encouraging by saying the style was reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinski.
Rejection is a way of life for writers. It hurts and it changes them, and not for the better. Marche says even when they succeed, they fail. Immediately following the publication of a story or a book, the writer knows with certainty that a rejection is on its way for the next effort. For most, it never gets any easier. Writers need a thick skin, but the skin gets thinner and thinner with experience and age, he says. The most famous of the famous live with continual rejection.
In 2014, I watched a documentary on my favorite cartoonist, Gahan Wilson, possibly the most established cartoonist since Charles Schulz and before Gary Larson. It showed him getting on a bus in Sag Harbor, Long Island, for the two and a half hour slog into Manhattan, where every Tuesday he had to present twenty new cartoons to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, in the hopes they might publish one of them. They often didn’t. Then it was back on the bus to dwell on his rejections for the long ride home. And this was eighty year-old Gahan Wilson.
It has stuck with me for the wrong reason. Every week, for decades, there were twenty Gahan Wilson cartoons that I (we) never got to see. All that creativity, all that humor, all that effort, never saw publication. A lifetime of it. After the rejection and before the bus, he would get together with all the other New Yorker cartoonists who had come in for rejection day, and they had lunch at an Italian restaurant in midtown near The New Yorker offices. Everyone was in the same boat – maybe getting one cartoon accepted if the stars were aligned that day. It confirmed my decision of not following the fulltime creative path. Which is no easy feat when you are a creative person. Very frustrating. This book has the same effect, and the whole book is dedicated to it. That it is well written and a very smooth and fast read is beside the point. As I would have said fifty years ago, buzzkill.
The message is to write if you must, with must being the key word and requirement. Marche has plenty of stories of writers who simply had to write, including one in Russia who could not put anything on paper, and got friends in the same prison to memorize lines for her that could be written down at some future date in some other universe.
As for fame, consider that the best writers of every era have been completely forgotten. Research projects always reveal wonderful work by people the researcher had never heard of, but who were mega-stars in their time. They get cited in papers or books (epigraphs are a favorite spot), but no one actually reads them any more. Writing the great American novel will not confer immortality. It probably won’t even pay the rent.
I spent years collecting first editions of the best humorists of the Roaring Twenties. They were legendary in their time: Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman, James Thurber... I paid as much as $40 for a used book. Today, if you even know who to search for (and few do), all those works are readily available online for a couple of bucks — and no takers. But I digress.
At the industry level, Marche says about 300,000 books are published in America every year, and at most a few hundred could be classified as commercial or even creative successes. It follows that even new works by established authors are failures, he says.
He doesn’t stop at rejection. There’s writers’ block to consider. This is the period where despite or because of a looming deadline, the writer can’t think of what to type. Marche dismisses it with a little perspective: “It used to be called ‘not having anything to say.’” Marche is not sharing a table at the pity party.
He says writing itself is failure, that readers take it where the author never intended it to be. That there are several hundred thousand kind of jobs that pay better. That several famous writers never wrote another thing after they had a bestselling hit. “Success” totally changed them.
The stats are even more discouraging, as writers prove to succumb to mental health diseases more than the general public. There’s lots of suicide too, by people (eg. Kosinski, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Dorothy Parker – several times) that most would consider total literary successes. Depression and substance abuse are on public display far too often in the writing fraternity. Marche says he knows of many cases himself, and finds “zero romance” in them at all. It is so crazy that he can cite one writer who left a suicide note for his wife: “I’m not dying because I hate you – it’s because I’ve come to hate writing.” That’s a terrific description of the writing obsession.
The problems mutate as writers rack up successes. In Marche’s own case:
“I have no idea whether I’m successful or not. That’s the honest truth. There would be those who would find it ridiculous of me to consider myself a failure. I make a living from writing, and don’t even have to teach. I receive fan mail almost every day. Because of some ads for an audio series I made, I am regularly recognized in the street. Others would consider the idea that I might consider myself a successful writer equally ridiculous. I’ve barely been published internationally. I only earned out a couple of books (ie. made more than the advance). I alienated myself out of the literary community of my own country (Canada) as quickly as possible. I am unprizeable. By no means can I just do what I like. I only work on what I believe in but that’s a way of describing my own pride rather than any external achievement […] As I’ve proceeded deeper into the writer’s life, I understand less and less what success looks like.”
And why would it be any different for you?
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
April 7, 2025
A short work about a big topic. Failure is something everyone encounters, no matter the endeavour. Marche suggests that writers must deal with failure at every turn, and even when becoming somewhat "successful" it just means "failing" at a different level.
Dealing with rejection, bad reviews, indifference, jealousy — all of these are challenges writers face.
Marche presents his writing career as a series of failures, at one with the world of publishing as different elements (such as a monthly magazine column) become outmoded.
The subtitle here is important, since the essence of failure, or rather the core of the response to failure, is "peculiar perseverance" – some might call this approach delusional, but really it is the only one that (sometimes) works, no matter the field.
Dealing with rejection, bad reviews, indifference, jealousy — all of these are challenges writers face.
Marche presents his writing career as a series of failures, at one with the world of publishing as different elements (such as a monthly magazine column) become outmoded.
The subtitle here is important, since the essence of failure, or rather the core of the response to failure, is "peculiar perseverance" – some might call this approach delusional, but really it is the only one that (sometimes) works, no matter the field.
December 4, 2023
I don’t remember how I came across this little book, perhaps on LitHub. I ordered it from a small Canadian press, it was a bit costly for such a small book, and it took a long time to arrive. How could I, who has a long and frustrating history of trouble with writing, resist though?
Employing a humorous tone, the author recounts his own experiences with writing and especially with failure. In fact he says that “Failure is the body of a writer’s life”, right on the first page. Ah, I thought, here is a kindred spirit.
I read the slim volume straight through in only an hour or two. I won a writing contest in 7th grade for a short story. I went on to write many songs but never won a songwriting contest (though I did write a personal essay about entering a songwriting contest.) I have written countless book reviews, some of which I was paid for. I have been working on a book about my own life for more years that I would like to admit. Sometimes I get so bored by it, I take long, long breaks. Still, I always go back to it eventually.
In the end, Mr Marche tells us that perseverance is the only answer. I suppose that is right, I say to myself with a sigh. But it also helps to have such a delightful writer tell me so.
Employing a humorous tone, the author recounts his own experiences with writing and especially with failure. In fact he says that “Failure is the body of a writer’s life”, right on the first page. Ah, I thought, here is a kindred spirit.
I read the slim volume straight through in only an hour or two. I won a writing contest in 7th grade for a short story. I went on to write many songs but never won a songwriting contest (though I did write a personal essay about entering a songwriting contest.) I have written countless book reviews, some of which I was paid for. I have been working on a book about my own life for more years that I would like to admit. Sometimes I get so bored by it, I take long, long breaks. Still, I always go back to it eventually.
In the end, Mr Marche tells us that perseverance is the only answer. I suppose that is right, I say to myself with a sigh. But it also helps to have such a delightful writer tell me so.
March 26, 2023
HEEEELL YES!!!!!! For all creatives. This one is actually honest.
March 4, 2024
Remarkable little book on failing better all the way to suffering. He butchered the section on Jesus and sort of missed the point of Boethius, but it’s a great little book on how suffering makes the life of the writer.
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March 30, 2023I read this during a major depressive episode, grasping for straws in the self-help aisle. I'm not one to write bad reviews. I can't even bring myself to give it one star because writing is hard and who am I to criticize and hey, the writing itself was technically very good? But this was such bitter, masculine bullshit that it snapped me out of my depressed state. It was so dreary that I laughed out loud. Maybe I should give it 5 stars!
But instead, I advise anybody thinking about reading this to go outside. Walk your dog. Get engulfed in pollen. Sneeze. Watch Vanderpump Rules. Bask in masterful storytelling. Life is beautiful.
January 30, 2023
A book on writing that is not self-serving without eschewing the sublime. Very concise, uplifting, and funny. Learnt about a bunch of writers whose work I'd love to delve into
March 5, 2025
It's funny how a book can come along at exactly the right time...twice.
I picked this up only because a customer in the bookstore where I work had brought it up with a few other books, saw the price ($16 for 80 slim pages), and told me they were passing on that one. I hadn't even known of the book's existence prior to that moment, but it stood out as something I might like to read. I set it aside and purchased it that day.
Then it sat on my shelf, in the order with all my other TBR books. And it's time came this morning, which is good, because I've been struggling lately with my writing.
And this eminently quotable little book? It gave me the kick in the butt I've needed, by also giving me a different perspective that I also needed.
This is a good book.
I picked this up only because a customer in the bookstore where I work had brought it up with a few other books, saw the price ($16 for 80 slim pages), and told me they were passing on that one. I hadn't even known of the book's existence prior to that moment, but it stood out as something I might like to read. I set it aside and purchased it that day.
Then it sat on my shelf, in the order with all my other TBR books. And it's time came this morning, which is good, because I've been struggling lately with my writing.
And this eminently quotable little book? It gave me the kick in the butt I've needed, by also giving me a different perspective that I also needed.
This is a good book.
January 31, 2025
A pithy long-form essay with lots of good quotes but little of anything new or useful to say. Write if you want to write and if you aren't writing, maybe you don't want to be a writer.
"I sometimes wonder if writer’s block should be received as a blessing. It’s treated as a pathology, a disease. Maybe it’s a sign of health, or at least of a cure taking. It’s the writer’s brain saying, “You don’t need to do this anymore. Go do something else with your life.” If writing involves failure in its essence, is not-writing the final sign of success?"
"I sometimes wonder if writer’s block should be received as a blessing. It’s treated as a pathology, a disease. Maybe it’s a sign of health, or at least of a cure taking. It’s the writer’s brain saying, “You don’t need to do this anymore. Go do something else with your life.” If writing involves failure in its essence, is not-writing the final sign of success?"
May 14, 2023
A hundred million dollars is worth having, to be sure, but it doesn’t protect you from the sense that you’ve been misunderstood, that the world doesn’t recognize who you are.
March 21, 2024
Writing sounds like an ideal job. Indoors, no heavy lifting, you can set your own hours, and you can tie it in with a bit of surfing the web for research… But it turns out that it isn’t that easy, and yet people still do it.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.- Neil Gaiman
If you do manage to turn that blank space into your best work yet, you then have to satisfy the whims of an editor who is highly likely to reject it. Who’d be a writer?
It is a cruel way of baring your soul to the wider world, but yet people still do it. Reading through the short essays in the book I was struck by how a number of authors suffered from mental health problems, perhaps the words need to be forged in the inner pain. And in all that suffering, we, the readers, have some insight into the mind of another person. A different perspective of someone you have never met.
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard. – Neil Gaiman
I did like this, but I thought that this was brutal at times, Marche does not hold back in his thoughts on the struggles of writers, but in that bleak outlook is a dark humour that really appeals to my sense of humour. I had wanted to be a writer many years ago and even signed up for a course, but now I don’t think that I could, the fear of rejection is too much, just writing reviews on a blog is enough for me. I did think that there wasn’t a wide enough spectrum of authors in here.
I kind of want to pass this to an author that I know, but don’t know how it will affect them; though I suspect they would agree wholeheartedly with it.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.- Neil Gaiman
If you do manage to turn that blank space into your best work yet, you then have to satisfy the whims of an editor who is highly likely to reject it. Who’d be a writer?
It is a cruel way of baring your soul to the wider world, but yet people still do it. Reading through the short essays in the book I was struck by how a number of authors suffered from mental health problems, perhaps the words need to be forged in the inner pain. And in all that suffering, we, the readers, have some insight into the mind of another person. A different perspective of someone you have never met.
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard. – Neil Gaiman
I did like this, but I thought that this was brutal at times, Marche does not hold back in his thoughts on the struggles of writers, but in that bleak outlook is a dark humour that really appeals to my sense of humour. I had wanted to be a writer many years ago and even signed up for a course, but now I don’t think that I could, the fear of rejection is too much, just writing reviews on a blog is enough for me. I did think that there wasn’t a wide enough spectrum of authors in here.
I kind of want to pass this to an author that I know, but don’t know how it will affect them; though I suspect they would agree wholeheartedly with it.
April 7, 2023
A New Favorite on Writing
This one is going on the shelf next to Pressfield's The War Of Art and Lamott's Bird by Bird. Encouraging by virtue of its sharply honest recognition of the difficulties.
This one is going on the shelf next to Pressfield's The War Of Art and Lamott's Bird by Bird. Encouraging by virtue of its sharply honest recognition of the difficulties.
November 26, 2023
Provocative, thoughtful, fantastic, brief. Probably not for anyone who has an allergy to very male writing.
March 12, 2023
I stumbled upon “On Writing and Failure” (insert the subtitle that peaked my interest here) when I was scrolling through my public library’s latest ebook releases. I’ve lived a pretty nomadic life over the last handful of years and, as a result, I pretty much stopped purchasing books. However, I am off to buy a physical copy of this one and I plan on reading it over and over again. (Or so I tell myself as I almost never reread books.) Stephen Marche failed to fail with this creation.
August 26, 2024
Some brilliant observations driven by utter bitterness. Then again, what else would you expect with a title like On Writing and Failure?
Well, I was personally hoping for a more zen-like response, reflecting on how failure is the greatest teacher. Marche does cover this point but his favourite refrain while doing it seemed to be 'Stop Whining'. This is stoicism as it's most tetchy.
Nevertheless the examples he cites are very apt and educational. Reading them made me realise that I haven't read enough biographies about classic authors and that they contain important lessons. It even covered Eastern writers like Confucius, Li Bai and Du Fu who don't get paid anywhere near as much lip service as the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wallace. Mind you, Marche seems singularly focused on the failings of literary novelists. I'm sure genre writers have suffered similar obscurity and worse.
Regardless he draws on so many histories to make his point. Setting out to be a writer will lead to more failures than successes and we need to get used to that reality. I would say I am and still 'throw myself at the door' as Marche suggests. One of these days that door might just fly open.
On Writing and Failure is a very bitter pill soured further by some of the author's prejudices, but I do think writers in a rut should swallow it. If you're in the mood for a long, shouty revolutionary essay, give this one a try.
Well, I was personally hoping for a more zen-like response, reflecting on how failure is the greatest teacher. Marche does cover this point but his favourite refrain while doing it seemed to be 'Stop Whining'. This is stoicism as it's most tetchy.
Nevertheless the examples he cites are very apt and educational. Reading them made me realise that I haven't read enough biographies about classic authors and that they contain important lessons. It even covered Eastern writers like Confucius, Li Bai and Du Fu who don't get paid anywhere near as much lip service as the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wallace. Mind you, Marche seems singularly focused on the failings of literary novelists. I'm sure genre writers have suffered similar obscurity and worse.
Regardless he draws on so many histories to make his point. Setting out to be a writer will lead to more failures than successes and we need to get used to that reality. I would say I am and still 'throw myself at the door' as Marche suggests. One of these days that door might just fly open.
On Writing and Failure is a very bitter pill soured further by some of the author's prejudices, but I do think writers in a rut should swallow it. If you're in the mood for a long, shouty revolutionary essay, give this one a try.
March 3, 2023
Really, really wonderful. It's a beautiful anti-pep talk, and it's more than a gimmick. It's a poetic statement of plain fact for the writer who is, or was, might have been or may yet be: there's no rhyme or reason to any of it, and if you're in, you'll be all in, and it may kill you, and there won't be any sense or reward in that either, but if you are a writer, you've got no choice but to persevere.
It's like a love letter soaked in venom. It's like the warning label stamped at the end of a sexy commercial for a toxic pleasure product. It's holding the values of nihilism and rose-sniffing in your head at the exact same time.
And it means something because it's all true. Anyone who's ever written knows it.
It's like a love letter soaked in venom. It's like the warning label stamped at the end of a sexy commercial for a toxic pleasure product. It's holding the values of nihilism and rose-sniffing in your head at the exact same time.
And it means something because it's all true. Anyone who's ever written knows it.
August 23, 2023
Ugh. Wow. Yes. And ugh. Some great lines: "the marketplace doesn't test talent, it tests timing," and "rejection is the evidence of your hustle." I've got A LOT of evidence of my hustle! I tell myself this and I appreciate Marche's perspective.
November 18, 2024
This hilarious essay reflects on how all writers are failures because even if success can be defined (it can't) and achieved (it won't), all of the "successful" writers are all failures, too, miserable, cagey, and scrambling for something that can't be found. Case by case, he then describes the most horrific, humiliating, and degrading outcomes for the most famous writers that humanity has yet produced. He then asks, why would it be any different for you? The author implores the reader to discover his reason for writing (money? fame? ego stoking?), and then ask if there is a better way to achieve the same outcome, because in every case, writing is the worst way to go about getting it. And yet, the underlying assumption is that writers will continue to write, because something that perhaps cannot be understood compels them to do so. The essay forced me to think about why I write, and what I hope to achieve. My reason is to secure a place in history, however obscure; perhaps to be a footnote in an essay like this one long after I've left this world.
October 4, 2023
I was recommended, very kindly, to give this a read last week, while in the midst of the usual bout of authorial fretting. Happily, we already had it on the shelf at work and I was able to dive right in with little delay. And boy, did it give me food for thought.
Stephen Marche's essay here explores the twin notions of success and failure and the inevitable interplay between the two in the life of a writer. What makes a writer a success? What makes them a failure? Examined with biting wit and a sort of no-nonsense humour, Marche reminds the reader (and specifically the writers) that you can never have one without the other. Like light and dark, you cannot recognize success without knowing failure, and vice versa. And they're both quite wobbly terms anyway, aren't they? Is it still a success if others recognize it as such, but you, in all your self-doubt and deprecation, do not? And have you really failed, if the chance of future success remains? As I said, food for thought.
Over the course of the essay, Marche tells anecdotes of famous writers, from James Joyce (unable to land a job teaching English at a technical college in Italy) to Dostoyevsky (traumatized by his mock execution and continuing to write nonetheless) to Margaret Atwood (defensively, and totally needlessly, reminding someone of her successes); in so doing, he reminds us that all of these great writers are, in Marche's words, 'chancers' like the rest of us. Writing, he insists, is perseverance. To write is to throw your shoulder against the door, again and again. It's an image that resonates.
So, like the person who recommended it to me, I highly recommend this to any writer out there who finds themselves fretting about success (or as is more often the case, failure). So, I suppose, every writer out there.
And if none of that convinces you, there's a very entertaining bit all about Hemingway and Fitzgerald's literal dick measuring contest. In a show of writerly prowess, Stephen Marche manages to turn even that into a thoughtful lesson: Your opinion of your own worth often comes down to the way you hold the mirror.
Stephen Marche's essay here explores the twin notions of success and failure and the inevitable interplay between the two in the life of a writer. What makes a writer a success? What makes them a failure? Examined with biting wit and a sort of no-nonsense humour, Marche reminds the reader (and specifically the writers) that you can never have one without the other. Like light and dark, you cannot recognize success without knowing failure, and vice versa. And they're both quite wobbly terms anyway, aren't they? Is it still a success if others recognize it as such, but you, in all your self-doubt and deprecation, do not? And have you really failed, if the chance of future success remains? As I said, food for thought.
Over the course of the essay, Marche tells anecdotes of famous writers, from James Joyce (unable to land a job teaching English at a technical college in Italy) to Dostoyevsky (traumatized by his mock execution and continuing to write nonetheless) to Margaret Atwood (defensively, and totally needlessly, reminding someone of her successes); in so doing, he reminds us that all of these great writers are, in Marche's words, 'chancers' like the rest of us. Writing, he insists, is perseverance. To write is to throw your shoulder against the door, again and again. It's an image that resonates.
So, like the person who recommended it to me, I highly recommend this to any writer out there who finds themselves fretting about success (or as is more often the case, failure). So, I suppose, every writer out there.
And if none of that convinces you, there's a very entertaining bit all about Hemingway and Fitzgerald's literal dick measuring contest. In a show of writerly prowess, Stephen Marche manages to turn even that into a thoughtful lesson: Your opinion of your own worth often comes down to the way you hold the mirror.
January 4, 2025
1/3 of the way through I thought i was gonna give this 1 star because the writing style is unadorned / sometimes cliché. not very “literary” but i was kind of sold by the end because of the fun stories (did not know that Dostoevsky was literally fake executed) and the occasionally beautiful sentences. don’t complain and persevere, fellow writers! (or complain beautifully and without entitlement)
May 24, 2025
3.75 ⭐️
April 9, 2023
"Failure is big right now--a subject of commencement speeches and business conferences like FailCon, at which triumphant entrepreneurs detail all their ideas that went bust. But businessmen are only amateurs at failure, just getting used to the notion. Writers are the real professionals."
January 1, 2024
Brilliant. Right up there with “The War of Art” for me. Which is to say, I now consider it scripture.
March 26, 2024
Stephen Marche does a good job hammering down the fact that writing is perseverance. Who cares if what is written is good or salient or proficient or world-changing or absolute drivel? Keep throwing yourself at the door and eventually something will budge.
The message is a tad paradoxical at times, but also hauntingly beautiful in exclaiming that Marche’s main goal in writing is simple: to be with you. I hope to secure that spot one day too.
The message is a tad paradoxical at times, but also hauntingly beautiful in exclaiming that Marche’s main goal in writing is simple: to be with you. I hope to secure that spot one day too.
February 25, 2023
Back in 2013 I blogged a glowing review of a short story collection by an aspiring author. The book, while certainly not perfect, showed promise, and I felt it was fair to offer the writer a word or two of encouragement. Unfortunately, so far from boosting a talented newbie’s career, the review had the effect of turning them into a monster; an insufferable, swell-headed egomaniac. For years this legend-in-their-own mind has flaunted that tiny scrap of affirmation as if it were the Nobel Prize, trotting it out ever so often as if to say “See! This proves I was a great writer once upon a time!” Never mind that that review was written by someone (me) who, by any conventional metric of literary success, must be considered an abject failure—or that that self-anointed “great writer” has written next to nothing ever since. One is reminded, sadly, of a pathetic has-been (or, in this case, a barely-ever-was) cadging drinks in a dive bar based on a tenuous brush with some minor celebrity decades before.
Well, I’m certainly glad they liked the review, even though they received my plaudits largely on credit all those years ago. Perhaps I was too hopeful in assuming they had more than one book in them. (Many don’t.) It’s true that often, in order to persevere in this madhouse of a profession, writers have to find whatever way they can to believe in themselves: The brutal reality of the writing life is that no one will ever care about your work as much as you do—and if you aren’t passionate about your own work, how can you expect anybody else to give a damn? Still, that young writer might have benefited from a reading of Stephen Marche’s short, engaging essay ‘On Writing and Failure or: On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer.’ If nothing else, it might have given them a much-needed sense of perspective; encouragement, yes, but encouragement with a healthy does of realism.
The odds are daunting for even the most serious writers today—and a realistic set of expectations at the outset hardly helps. As Marche point out:
“Three-hundred-thousand books are published every year in the United States alone. A few hundred, at most, could be called financial or creative successes. The majority of books by successful writers are failures. The majority of writers are failures.”
No one wants to be regarded as a failure—even less, think of themselves as one. No wonder the absurd lengths writers often go in order to project an image of success: Making virtues of everything from how fast they can churn out a piece of genre fluff, to the number of drab 50,000-word potboilers they’ve had traditionally published (while never reading a word of anyone else’s work), monthly pages read on Kindle Unlimited, or the somewhat dubious distinction of once having broken onto the USA Today or New York Times best-seller lists. (In fact, it took surprisingly few sales to land on either of those lists, and, as Marche notes, “…the marketplace doesn’t test talent. It tests timing.”) Others make endless hay out of once having had some pithy remarks retweeted by a famous author, or spend their whole life brooding on what might have been if the respected, now-dead literary figure who once sent them an encouraging postcard would have only followed through and publically championed their cause.
“‘Might have’ is the cry of every artist who has to hustle, who has to reconcile the dreams of art with the realities of shifting marketplaces. Writers want to be judged by what they could have written. The world insists on judging them by the reception of what they have written. Careers are circumstances. Others treat them as the unfolding of an inner truth.”
We dread failure, and yet we cannot escape it. “Even in the face of massive success,” Marche says, “a little part, maybe a big part, maybe even the biggest part of the writer’s heart, dwells in failure.” And how could it be otherwise when talentless hacks can fake it till they make it, and AI-generated schlock gluts the marketplace, while genuinely gifted flesh-and-blood creatives labor in obscurity, forced to scrimp and shift until they perish in poverty? But even in these much-troubled times of dizzyingly rapid paradigm shifts in literary culture—what Marche astutely refers to as a “period of radical turbulence” —things may be no worse on balance than they ever were.
Consider the case of Herman Melville, “whose fate was like the sick joke of some cruel god. The better he wrote, the more he failed.” By the end of his life, the now- celebrated author of ‘Moby Dick’ was little more than a wraith on the fringes of literary life, so poor that he could not even self-publish what may have been his true masterpiece, ‘Billy Budd.’ The irony is that far-less gifted authors ended up getting the money and the temporary fame, while Melville, who died in drunken squalor and despair, is spoken of today in tones of reverent awe. “No amount of success is a protection from the spectre of obscurity,” Marche observes. “There’s no amulet against oblivion.”
Depressing stuff, no? Yet somehow Marche’s many anecdotes of cruel rejection, grinding poverty, brutal political oppression, mental illness, willful dissolution, and gruesome self-slaughter have the effect of making us feel a little better about our own struggles—a little more self-assured about the petty indignities we all have to put up with. I, personally, take the Stoic’s view, accepting that failure and oblivion are my lot as a writer, in life and in death, and there’s nothing to be done about it other than altering my perceptions—learning to regard the manure life gives me as fertilizer. What will fame or money mean a century after I’m dead anyway? Yet, I’ll continue to write no matter the frustrations, because writing is how I make meaning in the here and now.
No, Marche’s essay is not an exercise in discouragement or despair. If anything, he lets writers know that they are not alone: Offers a healthy dose of realism to starry-eyed youth, and a knowing pat on the back to those of us who have persevered against all odds into old age.
“The condition of failure (may be) a constant in writerly life; a life” —Marche tells us— that “demands a peculiar persistence.” Yet we continue to strive to write well, “doing so for its own sake, with a vague, not particularly sensible hope that it will somehow resonate.”
Enthusiastically recommended!
Well, I’m certainly glad they liked the review, even though they received my plaudits largely on credit all those years ago. Perhaps I was too hopeful in assuming they had more than one book in them. (Many don’t.) It’s true that often, in order to persevere in this madhouse of a profession, writers have to find whatever way they can to believe in themselves: The brutal reality of the writing life is that no one will ever care about your work as much as you do—and if you aren’t passionate about your own work, how can you expect anybody else to give a damn? Still, that young writer might have benefited from a reading of Stephen Marche’s short, engaging essay ‘On Writing and Failure or: On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer.’ If nothing else, it might have given them a much-needed sense of perspective; encouragement, yes, but encouragement with a healthy does of realism.
The odds are daunting for even the most serious writers today—and a realistic set of expectations at the outset hardly helps. As Marche point out:
“Three-hundred-thousand books are published every year in the United States alone. A few hundred, at most, could be called financial or creative successes. The majority of books by successful writers are failures. The majority of writers are failures.”
No one wants to be regarded as a failure—even less, think of themselves as one. No wonder the absurd lengths writers often go in order to project an image of success: Making virtues of everything from how fast they can churn out a piece of genre fluff, to the number of drab 50,000-word potboilers they’ve had traditionally published (while never reading a word of anyone else’s work), monthly pages read on Kindle Unlimited, or the somewhat dubious distinction of once having broken onto the USA Today or New York Times best-seller lists. (In fact, it took surprisingly few sales to land on either of those lists, and, as Marche notes, “…the marketplace doesn’t test talent. It tests timing.”) Others make endless hay out of once having had some pithy remarks retweeted by a famous author, or spend their whole life brooding on what might have been if the respected, now-dead literary figure who once sent them an encouraging postcard would have only followed through and publically championed their cause.
“‘Might have’ is the cry of every artist who has to hustle, who has to reconcile the dreams of art with the realities of shifting marketplaces. Writers want to be judged by what they could have written. The world insists on judging them by the reception of what they have written. Careers are circumstances. Others treat them as the unfolding of an inner truth.”
We dread failure, and yet we cannot escape it. “Even in the face of massive success,” Marche says, “a little part, maybe a big part, maybe even the biggest part of the writer’s heart, dwells in failure.” And how could it be otherwise when talentless hacks can fake it till they make it, and AI-generated schlock gluts the marketplace, while genuinely gifted flesh-and-blood creatives labor in obscurity, forced to scrimp and shift until they perish in poverty? But even in these much-troubled times of dizzyingly rapid paradigm shifts in literary culture—what Marche astutely refers to as a “period of radical turbulence” —things may be no worse on balance than they ever were.
Consider the case of Herman Melville, “whose fate was like the sick joke of some cruel god. The better he wrote, the more he failed.” By the end of his life, the now- celebrated author of ‘Moby Dick’ was little more than a wraith on the fringes of literary life, so poor that he could not even self-publish what may have been his true masterpiece, ‘Billy Budd.’ The irony is that far-less gifted authors ended up getting the money and the temporary fame, while Melville, who died in drunken squalor and despair, is spoken of today in tones of reverent awe. “No amount of success is a protection from the spectre of obscurity,” Marche observes. “There’s no amulet against oblivion.”
Depressing stuff, no? Yet somehow Marche’s many anecdotes of cruel rejection, grinding poverty, brutal political oppression, mental illness, willful dissolution, and gruesome self-slaughter have the effect of making us feel a little better about our own struggles—a little more self-assured about the petty indignities we all have to put up with. I, personally, take the Stoic’s view, accepting that failure and oblivion are my lot as a writer, in life and in death, and there’s nothing to be done about it other than altering my perceptions—learning to regard the manure life gives me as fertilizer. What will fame or money mean a century after I’m dead anyway? Yet, I’ll continue to write no matter the frustrations, because writing is how I make meaning in the here and now.
No, Marche’s essay is not an exercise in discouragement or despair. If anything, he lets writers know that they are not alone: Offers a healthy dose of realism to starry-eyed youth, and a knowing pat on the back to those of us who have persevered against all odds into old age.
“The condition of failure (may be) a constant in writerly life; a life” —Marche tells us— that “demands a peculiar persistence.” Yet we continue to strive to write well, “doing so for its own sake, with a vague, not particularly sensible hope that it will somehow resonate.”
Enthusiastically recommended!
December 19, 2024
An unvarnished treatise on the writing life, a rather different take on failure. Success is fleeting. "Fail better, fail gracefully because there's no such thing as success." "If you are not defeated in the end have you been fighting the right battle?" I can only summarize the book with these quotes.
September 23, 2023
Well, that was depressing.
March 18, 2024
I have mixed feelings about this little book. On one hand Marche’s viewpoint on failure in writing is refreshing at first. On the other hand, partway through this essay takes a turn for the morbid in way that makes me think that Marche needs to seek help.
TW: discussion of suicidal ideation
The first part of this essay is brilliant. It posits that failure is so overwhelming the main experience from writing that you should not even consider success when deciding to write or not. He touches on how few people will be published and that few published works are successes. Then he goes into what ultimately constitutes the bulk of the essay: that success still feels like failure to most writers.
This starts out brilliant too. He gives multiple examples of how successful writers don’t get to enjoy their success. He doesn’t use George RR Martin as an example, but let me use him to illustrate. George RR Martin has been wildly successful, beyond what any writer could possibly hope, yet it doesn’t seem like he’s getting to enjoy it much. He’s been stuck torturing himself to write the final two game of thrones books for the past decade. Marche gives similar examples and writes them much more deftly than I have. This part of the book is great. Where it gets odd is when he starts talking about suicide.
Marche seems to have an odd relationship with the mythos of authors as tortured genius. He rightly recognizes that mental illness is actually terrible and not good for creativity, yet he seems to have internalized a link between committing suicide and achieving posterity. I personally think this wrong. He mentions many famous authors who have committed suicide, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and David Foster Wallace, and the one thing they all had in common is that I’ve never read any of their works. I don’t think that’s coincidental either. I see suicidal ideation as contagious and as an adult, I tend to avoid reading things written by people who killed themselves. I think educators see suicidal ideation in a similar way, and so high school english teachers think twice before putting Wallace on the curriculum. In this viewpoint, rather than helping one’s works it makes them more obscure because high school is where everyone is introduced to literature.
He also sees suicide everywhere. He compares Hemingway and Fitzgerald and mentions that they both killed themselves in the end. Except this isn’t true, Fitzgerald had a heart attack. Say what you will about his alcoholism as a contributing factor, but a heart attack isn’t suicide. And now that I’m thinking about it, I became suspicious of his other claims. I ended up looking into James Joyce and he didn’t commit suicide either; he died from surgical complications.
So yeah, good book but odd focus. Also if you’re Stephen Marche or a loved one of him, please consider making an appointment with a mental health specialist.
TW: discussion of suicidal ideation
The first part of this essay is brilliant. It posits that failure is so overwhelming the main experience from writing that you should not even consider success when deciding to write or not. He touches on how few people will be published and that few published works are successes. Then he goes into what ultimately constitutes the bulk of the essay: that success still feels like failure to most writers.
This starts out brilliant too. He gives multiple examples of how successful writers don’t get to enjoy their success. He doesn’t use George RR Martin as an example, but let me use him to illustrate. George RR Martin has been wildly successful, beyond what any writer could possibly hope, yet it doesn’t seem like he’s getting to enjoy it much. He’s been stuck torturing himself to write the final two game of thrones books for the past decade. Marche gives similar examples and writes them much more deftly than I have. This part of the book is great. Where it gets odd is when he starts talking about suicide.
Marche seems to have an odd relationship with the mythos of authors as tortured genius. He rightly recognizes that mental illness is actually terrible and not good for creativity, yet he seems to have internalized a link between committing suicide and achieving posterity. I personally think this wrong. He mentions many famous authors who have committed suicide, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and David Foster Wallace, and the one thing they all had in common is that I’ve never read any of their works. I don’t think that’s coincidental either. I see suicidal ideation as contagious and as an adult, I tend to avoid reading things written by people who killed themselves. I think educators see suicidal ideation in a similar way, and so high school english teachers think twice before putting Wallace on the curriculum. In this viewpoint, rather than helping one’s works it makes them more obscure because high school is where everyone is introduced to literature.
He also sees suicide everywhere. He compares Hemingway and Fitzgerald and mentions that they both killed themselves in the end. Except this isn’t true, Fitzgerald had a heart attack. Say what you will about his alcoholism as a contributing factor, but a heart attack isn’t suicide. And now that I’m thinking about it, I became suspicious of his other claims. I ended up looking into James Joyce and he didn’t commit suicide either; he died from surgical complications.
So yeah, good book but odd focus. Also if you’re Stephen Marche or a loved one of him, please consider making an appointment with a mental health specialist.
May 12, 2025
Loved it. Preach! Very true. An uplifting book. No bullshit.
Some good bits:
"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance." - James Baldwin
"Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." - George Orwell
p 53: I do not believe that suffering exalts. I do not believe that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I do not believe in the dignity of poverty.
p 64-65: It's stupid to say that writers need to suffer, The biographies of writers do not fit a collective pattern, not even of suffering. ... So if anyone tells you that you have to be a certain way to be a writer, that you have to live a certain life, that you have to see the world or that you have to lock yourself away, that you have to abandon your people or that you have to love your people, that you have to suffer or that you have to forget your suffering, whatever, it's all bullshit. You have to write. ... You have to persevere.
p66: There does exist writing without perseverance, although it's rare... Success is an attire...
"Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer." - John Updike [Success destroys what gives success.]
p. 69: [T]he marketplace doesn't test talent. It tests timing.
p 83: As I've proceeded deeper into the writer's life, i understand less and less what success looks like. Or rather success as an idea, as a scheme, as a system of meaning, is dissolving in my hands, floating away, losing itself, like a language you learned in high school that you can't speak anymore. Success on what terms? Success compared to what?
p. 96-97: The quality of your writing will have very little effect on your career, and yet it is the only thing that matters. If you want to write well, the overwhelming majority of the time you will be doing so for its own sake, with a vague, not particularly sensible hope that it will somehow resonate. ... If you're writing well and ... submitting and persevering, there is no more that anyone can ask of you, even yourself.
Paraphrased cos not sure of page numbers: Rejection is evidence of your hustle. And your opinion of your own worth often comes down to the way you hold the mirror.
Some good bits:
"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance." - James Baldwin
"Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." - George Orwell
p 53: I do not believe that suffering exalts. I do not believe that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I do not believe in the dignity of poverty.
p 64-65: It's stupid to say that writers need to suffer, The biographies of writers do not fit a collective pattern, not even of suffering. ... So if anyone tells you that you have to be a certain way to be a writer, that you have to live a certain life, that you have to see the world or that you have to lock yourself away, that you have to abandon your people or that you have to love your people, that you have to suffer or that you have to forget your suffering, whatever, it's all bullshit. You have to write. ... You have to persevere.
p66: There does exist writing without perseverance, although it's rare... Success is an attire...
"Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer." - John Updike [Success destroys what gives success.]
p. 69: [T]he marketplace doesn't test talent. It tests timing.
p 83: As I've proceeded deeper into the writer's life, i understand less and less what success looks like. Or rather success as an idea, as a scheme, as a system of meaning, is dissolving in my hands, floating away, losing itself, like a language you learned in high school that you can't speak anymore. Success on what terms? Success compared to what?
p. 96-97: The quality of your writing will have very little effect on your career, and yet it is the only thing that matters. If you want to write well, the overwhelming majority of the time you will be doing so for its own sake, with a vague, not particularly sensible hope that it will somehow resonate. ... If you're writing well and ... submitting and persevering, there is no more that anyone can ask of you, even yourself.
Paraphrased cos not sure of page numbers: Rejection is evidence of your hustle. And your opinion of your own worth often comes down to the way you hold the mirror.
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