Giles Ryan--The Successful Writer

I don’t write for money, nor to please other people, and I’ve done both successfully for many years.

To be sure, I usually write with other people in mind, and usually my sons and grandsons are the audience I hope for, but I don’t write for them, and I don’t write to please them, and they’ll be the first to confirm this. I often send my sons new things I’ve written, and sometimes they express a liking for these scribbles, but at other times they’ll say they haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, and I try not to ask a second time. As for my grandsons, they’re still too young to ignore someone so much older, but in time they’ll come to it.

No, I write to please myself, and why not? — no one else will do it. It’s safe to say that I’m my only certain audience; moreover I’m confident no one would read my stuff a second time, whereas I always do. I’ve never had an editor, so my errors need more time to become obvious to the one who so enjoyed writing them in the early version.

This subject comes up because in recent years I often have emails or other messages suggesting I visit some web site where I will find all sorts of advice about how to be a successful writer. Naturally, I’m suspicious because I’ve come to understand that after a certain age — around sixty or so — America’s corporate entrepreneurs assume that I must be an idiot, and only need a little encouragement to share my bank account number with the wide world. I never fall for this, but in the spirit of dialogue I say to myself, I wonder what they mean by a successful writer?

Certainly, they mean financially successful because they are the sort of people whose values find expression in currency. For me, this is reason enough to ignore them, although candor compels me to note that no publisher today is likely to take a second look at anything written by me, an older white cisgender male, but I’m sure the money motive works for many and it’s easy to understand why. No less an authority than Samuel Johnson said, “No one but a blockhead would ever write for anything but money.” But this remark, I suspect, would have fallen under his own Dictionary’s definition of banter or raillery. To be sure, he expressed himself feelingly on the writer’s need for encouragement or favor, and famously scorned Lord Chesterfield for his failure to offer it when Johnson truly needed it. But even without patronage, I’m certain that Johnson took pleasure in his own writing. How could anyone write so astonishingly well and not enjoy it?

Expressing an alternative view, one of the most commercially successful authors of recent decades, John Le Carré said, “I write so that I’ll have something to read in my old age.” This is a notion that appeals to me and comes closer to my own truth. And yet I like to believe my old age is a long way off, and vanity would never let me wait, so I began reading my own writing in my forties, not long after I first set things down. Of course, sometimes I look back on earlier efforts and find an embarrassment of errors, but I use the opportunity to correct these failings — the unseen typo, the injudicious choice of word, the now questionable insight — and I console myself that these flaws will not be there the next time I look.

Still, it’s surprising how often I see something that pleases me or even makes me laugh, all the more so if it’s something unread for many years, and whenever this happens — and it will never happen often enough —I tell myself I just might be a successful writer.