Michael Allen - A Writer's Guide To Everything Important - The Omnibus Edition Of Seven Essential Guides For Fiction Writers

The Life of Pi saga provides a beautifully clear demonstration of the random nature of decision-making in publishing. Here we have a book which was turned down for publication by numerous ‘good judges’. It was entered for the Booker Prize by a small firm which had no stronger candidates. And it so happened that the particular set of judges who were reading in 2002 happened to like it best. Or a majority of them did.

All rational observers will agree that Life of Pi, or any other Booker winner, cannot sensibly be described as the best book of the year in any absolute sense. The Life of Pi episode shows us, undeniably, that there might have been other books that year which were either not published at all or were published by big firms which were not able to submit them – books which could, quite possibly, have found favour with the judges if they had been submitted. The most that can be said of the book which wins the Booker Prize is that it is the one which (of those presented for consideration) the judges liked the best.

But observe, please, what happens when the winner of the Booker Prize is announced (in any year). What happens is that the media, the critics, and the public, all behave as if there is some absolute sense in which the winner is the best book of the year. They act as if the book has been held up against a ruler, a universally agreed scale, and has been found, indisputably, and scientifically, to be ‘better’ than any other. Clearly this is nonsense.

A friend once passed on to me a copy of the New York Review of Books , in which there was a lengthy review of the most recent Booker winner; the article ran to 108 column inches. Similar things no doubt happen every year. And this ‘star treatment’ will be repeated in newspapers and magazines throughout the English-speaking world.

It is the winning novel, please note, which is treated in this way – not the runners-up; and certainly not the good books which were not submitted by their publishers; and definitely not the books which didn’t even make it into print. It is the winning author who will be interviewed on television, invited to writers’ conferences, and made the subject, in due course, of earnest PhD theses by bespectacled young people who can think of nothing better to do with their time than waste it by deconstructing a novelist’s prose. This is the winner-take-all mechanism of publishing in its most unforgiving form.

The runners-up, the non-shortlisted books, and the unpublished books, all those are losers who disappear from our sight, never to be heard of again. And yet we know, beyond doubt, that but for the workings of randomness, which favoured the winner and disfavoured the others, there might be one, ten, or a hundred other books which could, in different circumstances, have proved to be more enticing to the judges than did the eventual winner.

The winner-take-all mechanism in the book world is thus shown to be brutal, vicious, and deadly.

There is no point in complaining about it: it is just the way things happen; the world in general, and the book trade in particular, is unfair, unjust, and patently absurd in its workings. But all those who work in the book trade, in particular those who write and sell novels, need to be aware of this situation. And they need to ask themselves whether a business in which randomness is so powerful a factor in the distribution of rewards (success!!!) is a business which sensible people should allow themselves to be involved in.

A few more thoughts on Life of Pi. If you search online you can find a review of the book by Dan Schneider. It turns out that he wasn’t too impressed by it.

Schneider points out that the book ‘comes in at 354 pages, yet is, at best, a solid-good short story of perhaps 25-30 pages, consisting of perhaps five of its first part’s 103 pages, twelve or so of its 215-page second part, and eight pages in its final 36 pages. Add in a few pages to connect and there you’d have it.’

Now that is a very cogent criticism. One can see the force of the argument. Dan has done his homework on Life of Pi, and done it thoroughly.

‘It took,’ he tells us, ‘just a quick online search to find out that Martel ripped off his plot from a South American novelist named Moacyr Scliar, who wrote a book about a boy on a lifeboat with a jaguar, called Max and the Cats . Martel acknowledged this steal by claiming he hadn’t read the book, but said he got the idea from a negative New York Times book review by John Updike; in fact, this ‘negative review’ never appeared. Yet, oddly, almost all the blurbs for the book [ Life of Pi ] declaim its ‘stunning originality’. Stunning, that is, unless you’ve done your homework.

In 2012, a film version of Life of Pi was released. This was reportedly both a critical and commercial success, thus generating more fame and money for the author, both directly and indirectly.

A final thought on the general unfairness of publishing and life in general. After I had published a similar article to the one you are now reading, an American reader kindly sent me a huge poster. On it are printed three words, in letters about four inches high.

Nobody Promised Fair

That’s what the poster says. As soon as it arrived I pinned it to the noticeboard in my office, as a constant reminder to me of an eternal truth.

PART 5: SUCCESS – The price we pay

5.1 A health warning

The world is not quite full of writers, but there are an awful lot of us about – and for the most part we are unpublished (in the traditional sense). For instance, without even trying hard, I can think of six friends and acquaintances who have each written a full-length novel; none of the six has succeeded in getting the book into print.

Writers tend to work individually, each in her own little room, typing away industriously; but collectively we do form a community. And while preparing this book I have been thinking about how best to characterise this community. Is it, in a sense, a bit like a football club, with a small team of professional players at the core, and a large mass of enthusiasts and spectators surrounding them? Well, possibly. That would be a nice, friendly, and inoffensive comparison to make. But it wouldn’t be true.

No, unfortunately the truth is a bit more painful. And the truth is that the community of writers is best compared with the crew and passengers of Das Narrenschiff – a sailing vessel of which you have probably never heard.

In 1494, the German writer Sebastian Brant wrote a poem about the Narrenschiff . Brant’s work was a satire on the vices and follies of his age. On board the Narrenschiff , the passengers and crew tell each other stories. Brant portrays these voyagers as a group of fuzzy thinkers, sailing out into an empty ocean in search of an unattainable paradise; and they all end up dead because of their misguided illusion. The Narrenschiff , in other words, is the Ship of Fools .

Brant’s poem inspired a number of other artists and writers to use the same idea. Hieronymous Bosch painted a picture of the ship. In modern times, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Paul Russo, and Gregory Norminton, have all written novels called The Ship of Fools . Sutton Vane used the concept as the basis for his stage play Outward Bound .

And this, I’m afraid, is the most apt description that I can give you of all those nice friendly people who make up the writing community. We all believe that we’re really talented individuals, and that we’re going places fast, but in practice we’re not. The unwelcome truth is that many of us are not all that talented, and that most of us, talented or otherwise, have writing careers which are going nowhere.