The (Illusory) Accessibility of the Literary Path to Celebrity

In considering the motivations for becoming a writer Upton Sinclair in Money Writes!, if possessing the highest regard for literature and those who go about the task heroically, did not mince words about the crasser side of the matter--indeed taking a rather sneering view of many of those who do try to become writers. As he acknowledges, living in a society where most can expect at best an objectively crummy working class life, constantly tantalized by the thought of how much better others than they were living, and told not to expect anything better or fairer by way of a change in society and instead look to their own efforts to raise themselves up within the hierarchy--to, as drawing on Pestalozzi he puts it, grow from fish into pikes--they credulously look to do just that. With celebrity the only alternative to crime as a way of dramatically changing their fortunes they try to become such, with many of them hitting on "becoming a writer."

Considering this it seems fair to attend not just to the attractions that writing has for many (a writer's independence, etc.) but also the seeming accessibility of the path. In contrast with, for example, being a musician, where one needs to at least know how to play an instrument, a would-be writer, strictly speaking, would seem to need only the literacy that has become universal to make a start. The material requirements (something to write with, a place where they can get some quiet and some privacy) may be hard for some to get, but are at least low in comparison with a musician's need for instruments and a place to practice, or the more specialized material and work space needed by many a visual artist. They may want and benefit from the help of others, but compared with a musician looking to organize a band, an actor organizing a troupe, a budding filmmaker trying to get together the cast and equipment for even the most bare-bones production, it can seem a thing they can do without if they must. And certainly in contrast with those in the performing arts they are under less pressure to bear the expenses of travel, let alone relocate entirely to a possibly unfamiliar and distant place on what may be very slender resources and few prospects of a living wage (it is no accident that so many of those who managed to become actors, even when their biographies do not indicate any significant help from connections, hail from the southern California and Tri-State areas), only their manuscript needing to travel--all as, indeed, they never have to stand in person before an audience.

Of course, what followed was rarely as tidy as those who thought his way expected. Then as now the writer's path was far and away most likely to prove a walk down a boulevard of broken dreams. But the start at least seems more plausible, and may seem to have become more so since Sinclair's day, with most of the likely candidates having some access to a computer, and the research resources of the Internet, and the option of submitting their work electronically, at no marginal cost. (I recall editors insisting on those wretched Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes long after e-mail became a practical alternative and explaining this in public statements by saying that the added hassle and expense of mailing them was a way of eliminating "the bozo factor"--making those submitting to them waste their time to no useful end in that way idiot entitled authority figures love to do with those over whom they have power, and for whom they have only contempt. But they have become fewer with the years.) It has also been the case that those who get their fill of the form rejection letters, as mechanical and inhuman and demoralizing in our time as they were when young Martin Eden faced them, now have the option of self-publishing a book in print and electronic editions for no marginal cost at all, provided they are willing to do all the requisite work of turning their manuscript into a book themselves. Still, given what "the wages of writing" tell us about the returns to effort here the odds of a career have only worsened, not improved--so much so perhaps that, especially as alternative paths to celebrity unheard of in Sinclair's day beckon, it seems to me very plausible that people are losing interest in being writers someday, looking past the books telling them they can teach them to be a writer to the ones telling them they can teach them to be an online "influencer" instead.