I've had money from writing. Quite a lot of it. I've had recognition and fans and editors who wouldn't alter a word I wrote, unless there was an obvious typo that had to be corrected. I was enormously satisfied when I received a letter in reaction to something I wrote that was important, and it happened more than once.

None of that mattered. It didn't change me for the better. It didn't make me any taller, or smarter, or better prepared to write again. I had a phone call yesterday from someone I've known for a long time -- a man who loves good stories. He took time to call me and say that I was a great writer. He was speaking of books that I wrote a decade ago.

Here's the truth about writing. You will have a career arc. It happens to athletes, actors, and scientists. Most of the truly great achievements happen in mid-life, especially the 30s and 40s. A few of us are late bloomers. That doesn't change the work of inspiration. We gather powers and spend it. It's not something that can be reversed or regenerated.

What publishers want is product. Not necessarily the awkwardness of achievement. Scott Fitzgerald earned nothing from his masterpiece "Tender Is The Night," and his second novel "The Beautiful And Damned" is seldom read. Hemingway died a suicide. If I told you that Eugene Manlove Rhodes was a genius, you'd say who?

We don't write because it's a happy life, full of satisfaction and acclaim and privilege. We write because there is an urgent purpose, an irresistible calling that obliterates days and nights and whatever the wife and children need. A writer departs the world and spends every ounce of his strength. Because he must.

My writing career is over. When the light goes out, it's gone. The little piece I posted here is a chapter from my last effort, over three years ago. I was able to write eight chapters -- and then quit -- because I no longer had the power and resilience of youth, and my aim was to transcend all my previous work, to be better than ever before. It remains an unfinished work. The arc of creative life matters, and I'm no longer ascending toward an apogee of achievement.

Okay, your mileage may vary, and I wish you every success. But I certify that genius is rare, and if you really want to reach for the highest and greatest of literary Valhalla, the competition is terribly good, and publishers can't sell the best of the best. Aim lower. Much lower.

--edited by Wolf DeVoon on 8/16/2013, 5:22 PM--

The articulate, well-mannered, writerly voice of experience. Thanks for contributing to this discussion, Wolf! Thought-provoking.

Only . . . I would ask you, please don't stop writing. Not entirely, anyway. Cut down the daily writing quota, sure. But cease-and-desist? No. No, you mustn't do that.

I know what writing is to a writer. (After five decades on this planet I can finally call myself a writer without flinching.) 

Writing practice is a prayerful probing into things known and unknown. It is, at its best, an interrogation of the self (through other characters, if one is writing fiction) for the benefit of the writer first-and-foremost and other people, secondarily.

It is like breathing: breath in, breath out. Center and focus. Money, fame, power--illusions; you've already let them go. Infantile traps for the spiritually retarded. 

Breath/world in; breath out/sentence down. 

Breath/world in; breath out/sentence down . . . 

We need you, Wolf.

--edited by Carl E Reed on 8/16/2013, 11:48 PM--