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I call shenanigans on the whole idea of publication as a success metric. I say this as someone who made a very successful career out of publishing for fifteen
by lisper 2y ago
I call shenanigans on the whole idea of publication as a success metric. I say this as someone who made a very successful career out of publishing for fifteen years. I was publishing non-fiction (scientific papers) rather than novels but I think the underlying social dynamic is the same: there is a small group of gatekeepers (peers in my case, publishers in the other) who decide your fate, and their decisions are not necessarily based on any kind of objective merit. In fact the whole idea of objective merit in fiction is highly questionable IMHO. Personally, I find most fiction to be unreadable, and "literary fiction" especially so. It's pretentious, designed more to be a virtue signal than anything else. You put the book on your shelf to make people think you've read it rather than actually gaining any value from reading it, just as you cite the paper not because you think it has merit but because the author of the paper you're citing is on the review committee. It's not all politics, but it's a hell of a lot of politics. At best the literary emperor is wearing a thong.
- chubot 2y agoI also felt it odd to hold up Silence of the Lambs as some kind of a paragon of achievement. I saw it when I was a kid once, and I recognize the memes/lines from it, and I know it occupies a certain place in culture ... but otherwise I don't think about that movie, especially not 2 or 3 decades later. For me personally, it would be OK if it didn't exist. I don't plan to watch it again, ever I'm very sure the author would say the same thing about what I'm doing -- i.e. "Who cares? It's OK if it doesn't exist" I think the lesson is: don't take yourself too seriously, and don't take your own personal perspective too seriously. I get where the author is coming from, and there are some very well-written sentences in this blog post. But I also think that to adopt this world view is a recipe for misery. It's one view of things, not absolute truth
- stnmtn 2y agoI don't think it was Silence of The Lambs specifically - it was the experience this author had of watching that movie at 14 years old. Do you have a movie you watched at a young age, and through it you saw a window into adult life you were certain you would step into? Silence of the Lambs is just this author's version of that. Mine is a different movie - but the way the author talked about silence of the lambs resonated deeply with me about how I feel watching "my" movie at an older age, and comparing it to how I thought when I watched it at 14.
- asdfman123 2y agoYeah, but that's the perspective of a veteran of the industry and not an "up and coming author." We have this narrative that people get rewarded for their virtue and not their ability/willingness to play the silly little game, and it takes a while to see through it especially if you tend to be more idealistic.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lisper 2y ago> that's the perspective of a veteran of the industry Yes, of course. The target audience for that comment is today's version of my younger self, the one who thinks that if you haven't made ten million dollars by the time you turn 30 (or won a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal or published a novel or had a screenplay produced or whatever) you're a failure.