Think you’ve got a book in you? Keep it in there

When I was asked by a state writers’ centre to give a talk, I declined, saying the only thing I could honestly tell prospective writers is: don’t bother. These are my reasons.

The book marketplace is oversaturated, and sales are low (and declining).

While casting around for a suitable metaphor with which to represent the business of Australian letters, I stumbled upon the rise and (very sudden) fall of Franz Reichelt, a 33-year-old Parisian tailor with a very big moustache who ­dabbled in parachute making.

One day in 1922, he arrived at the Eiffel Tower to test his new, wearable parachute. Grainy newsreel shows him proudly modelling his suit before ascending the tower, climbing onto a handrail, looking over with a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time expression, spending 40 seconds trying to convince himself to jump, before leaping.

Stephen Orr warns against the writing life. Unfortunately – or maybe fortunately – most writers can’t stop writing.

And that’s what I’m interested in. That fraction of a second before he finally jumped. Because it helps me understand what motivates a person to write. To give up thousands of hours of valuable time to scribble a story, when the reality is:

a) one in many hundreds of novels might get published;

b) very little to no money will be made from the venture;

c) the writer won’t end up joining the pantheon of authors they’ve admired since childhood;

d) the process will take time away from partners, children, friends, as well as the carrying out of otherwise sensible (paid) work;

e) the process of writing will keep raising a bar which, by attempting to reach it, will only cause it to rise even ­further.

And yet, every day, hundreds of new plays, novels and stories are begun, each author believing something new, untried, ground-breaking will make it onto the page and change lives.

According to Steven Piersanti (Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2021), too many books are now being published (three million or more per annum in the US alone). The book marketplace is oversaturated, and sales are low (on average, a few hundred copies, and declining). And so, when recently I was asked by a state writers’ centre to give a talk about writing, I declined, saying the only thing I could honestly tell prospective writers is: don’t bother (which probably isn’t the message they want their paying members to hear).

Two of Stephen Orr’s novels.

 

But after nearly 30 years of scribbling, a dozen published novels, half a dozen unpublished novels, as well as short stories, it seems what started off as good and noble ends with a Lasseter’s Reef-sized feeling of dread.

In his famous Harper’s essay, Why Bother?, the novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote that “the available evidence suggests that (a writer) becomes a person who’s impossible to live with and no fun to talk to … you ask yourself, why am I bothering to write these books?”

I suspect writers are born, not made. This is my problem with writing courses, degrees and workshops. They are the equivalent of giving a classroom full of year 9s their first vodka (or line). If a writer really wants to write, they will. I started off reading Asterix, and I still remember sitting on my Hillcrest back lawn on long, summer nights tackling my first Agatha Christie. It always seemed important to find out who’d killed the maid. I was always around books. Over time they became a manual on how to survive an otherwise dull, suburban life.

This led to Crime and Punishment, The Vivisector, the feeling the ever-present shittiness of the world could be explained (and maybe ameliorated) through stories. I was, writers are, hard-wired to see the world this way. So it makes sense that at some point they think, “I could do that”.

Because they can – anyone can – and if we are lucky enough to at some stage produce something publishable, and it gets read by family, friends, a few kind strangers, this will give us enough encouragement to keep going. At some point (with literary greatness still eluding us) we decide we’ve invested too much time and effort in this gig to give up. You can’t, after all, return a half-eaten Big Mac and say you never really wanted it. Better to keep eating.

Maybe that’s what Reichelt thought, standing on the handrail, looking down at his supporters, all of them pretending to believe in him as much as he believed in himself, before he hit the ground, and became a corpse.

You thought that was grim? In the past few decades, the Australian publishing industry has become a washed-out junkie searching for a cheap literary hit, publishing derivative books about happy dragons, and alcoholic detectives. The big, ambitious stories have gone, replaced with trembling yarns about our endless insecurities, managing, at the same time, to alienate any reader over 30. More books by fewer authors with (ironically) less-diverse stories; less (or no) risk-taking in content and form; a drift towards biographies of ball-kicking Aussie icons.

But what if a writer has a few books published, makes a slight reputation, attends a few book festivals – what happens next? There’s no career progression. No progression. No career. The only thing Australians like better than ignoring culture is forgetting it. Now, even if you are the next-big-thing, you’ll still have a use-by date. Books are products, and you can’t keep selling Strawberry Pops when people want Tasty Bites. So you hit the mid-list. Here you have time to reflect on where it all went wrong. How people said such nice things at the beginning but now don’t say much at all. Our political class, too. I can’t remember the last time I heard an Australian politician extolling the virtue of an Australian novel. In the end, all we’re left with is the fag-end of a cultural phenomenon that peaked in the 19th century, prospered in the 20th, and now lingers in the S-bend of our national consciousness, and memory.

Writing’s like the guy who washes elephants. We only need one guy.

Writing’s like the guy who washes elephants. We only need one guy, but there’s a line of thousands wanting a go and when they do, they decide they really like washing elephants and that’s all they want to do. So they tell their friends, then their friends want to wash elephants, too. And then the guy who runs the circus says, Please, stop wanting to wash elephants – I can’t even afford to feed this one. So now all of these people have set their sights on washing elephants, but instead of saying forget the elephants, we say, Here, come and study elephant washing in more detail and you’ll have a better chance of getting a (the) job. We put an enormous amount of effort into learning the art of elephant washing (study tours, residencies and so on) but the job never comes up because the elephant dies and we’re all sad and some wannabe elephant washers even kill themselves. Why? Because humans are sick, self-deluded puppies. Even after the elephant’s corpse sits rotting in the sun for a few years, we keep washing it. And then, the failed washers sit around looking at beautifully ­illustrated books of elephants and tweeting wistful elephant quotes and saying, What if? But really, if you act like a grown-up and decide to do something apart from washing elephants, your life will probably be okay.

But even stranger than all this is the fact that even the people who did get a job washing elephants end up depressed. Maybe it’s because all writers are like this. Maybe we think that washing elephants will save us from ourselves? Take for instance the American poet John Berryman (of The Dream Songs). Early in his career (as a passionate poet and teacher) he’d explained the nature of the elephantine beast: “To write is hard and takes the whole mind and wants one’s whole time …” But just before his suicide he had decided: “Hosts of regrets come and find me empty. I don’t feel this will change … I don’t think I will sing anymore just now; or ever.”

All of which is why I tell you to forget the writing game. Anyway, it’s not like there aren’t enough books already. I mean, you might write something better than Anna Karenina, and I’m sure you’ll eventually write something beautiful, I’m sure the world will be a better place for what you’ve written, but will all of this make up for the time you’ve lost? Writers are optimists, trying to fill the void with meaning (or at least asking how this might be done). Hope being the last thing to die, all of that stuff about short rations, and we decide we can’t go on, but we go on because what’s the alternative if you’ve got a big brain? Or, as Flannery O’Connor ­explained:

People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything …

Either way, if we want to be optimistic, we should remember the world’s going to blow up in 4.7 billion years, and everything will be wasted. Also, 99.9 per cent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. How are we to know what any of those billions of organisms thought about the weather, sibling rivalry, why the sun kept burning, the price of bread, or even the eternity they now, exclusively, inhabit? Imagine if they’d written it all down! What’s it matter now anyway? The elephant didn’t ask to be washed. He, she or they liked being dirty. As it turns out, we were (and are) the bigger idiots. Despite their peanut brains, and our IBM computer-brains, true happiness can only be found rolling in sand. All of which is a long way of saying, if Reichelt had been honest with himself, he would’ve admitted there was a good chance the parachute wouldn’t open.

Stephen Orr has written novels, short stories and nonfiction. His works are set mainly in Australia, including coastal towns, outback regions and the suburbs. His first novel, Attempts to Draw Jesus (based on the disappearance of two jackaroos in the Great Sandy Desert in 1986), was runner-up in the 2000 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award.