Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a post up today on “How Writers Fail”; the topic is “competition.” Specifically, the thesis is that viewing yourself as competing with other writers will tend to provide excuses not to write, because there’s always a worse writer doing better than you. If you’re competing against someone less skilled and they do better, then the game must be rigged; and no one wants to play a rigged game.
To be clear, the point of Kris’ piece is it’s not a game; you can’t win or lose at writing. (It’s long, my quick summary can’t do it justice, go read it.) Which maybe explains why I’ve been at it so long with so little, career-wise, to show for it.
I’m not immune to the jealousies she talks about. There are authors it’s taken me forever to read because I watched them come up while I was struggling to sell my first short story. Maybe more insidious are the metrics. China Mieville sold his first novel as a grad student. Mary Robinette Kowal made her first professional sale the same year I did (or so I once calculated, she may in fact have been a year or two earlier). I look at authors’ ages a lot, as if being a few years younger than someone who’s been successful for decades is some weird sign that it’s not over for me yet. Catherynne Valente is about a year older than me. Ta-Nehisi Coates is five years older. Lin-Manuel Miranda is I think a few months younger. Emily Oster is actually exactly my age, like born on my literal birthday, and has tenure at an Ivy League university. Zachary Jernigan is my age and someone called him the new Gene Wolfe in a blurb.
You don’t hear much about Zachary Jernigan these days. I can’t stress enough how even remotely dunk-adjacent this isn’t; it’s just a fact that he’s not gotten as famous as the other people I mentioned. If this were a game, he’d be beating me, but not them.
Man, though. Writing to evoke Delany, Zelazny, Wolfe? Like, isn’t this stuff I should be laying eyes on? Doesn’t this sound like what I want? One of those authors I wouldn’t read for jealousy… when I finally read her work, it gave me my nickname for my oldest daughter. I still use it, nine years later. I mean, what a thing to miss. Right?
And I think… I mean, everyone metabolizes these toxic comparisons in their own way, and mine is avoiding. But, for me, this is the real damage, the angle Kris doesn’t quite talk about. I’m too old for “you’re going to be a failed writer” to have much sting; by any objective metric I’ve failed already, but the good news is there are no objective metrics and nothing actually stopping me from killing it tomorrow.
But I got into this because I know the value of the right book. And depriving myself of that is no way to live.
Anyway, resolved: I should learn to write shorter posts. And I should pick up No Return, by Zachary Jernigan. (Even if Tamsyn Muir is actually the new Gene Wolfe.)