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

However, the thought which has been expressed more than once in my previous books for writers is this: Can this overwhelming ambition, which is present in almost every writer breathing, be entirely healthy?

It was with that question in mind that I recently re-read, after a gap of 45 years or so, W. Beran Wolfe’s classic book, How To Be Happy Though Human. Wolfe was a colleague of Alfred Adler, and is a respected figure in the history of psychology.

Having reread Wolfe, I thought I would share with you some of his comments on the subject of ambition, and see where we go from there.

Dr Wolfe, I have to say, was less than enthusiastic on this matter. Here are a few direct quotes:

‘A word about ambition, which rates as a virtue in the copybooks, but on investigation, betrays itself as a vice in nearly every instance....’

‘The ambitious man has very little time for the communal fellowship that is so necessary for true happiness....’

‘Beware of ambitious men and women… The unsocial nature of their striving is apparent the moment its goals are examined....’

‘More often than not [ambitious individuals] ask a prestige which is entirely incommensurate with their actual contribution....’

‘The ambitious are constantly in a state of tension....’

‘Nearly every neurotic is an individual whose ambition has been frustrated. This is almost axiomatic. Just because ambition is so generally egoistic in form and meaning, its goal is one of personal superiority which runs counter to the commonweal and the logical laws of common sense.’

‘Sooner or later the ambitious individual is forced to admit that he is beaten and frustrated..... He must either retreat, or shift the blame for his failure to some external circumstance over which he seems to have no control.’

‘If you pride yourself on your ambition, take a mental inventory of its ends, and ask yourself whether you desire to attain those personal ends and forego the opportunities of being happy, or whether you prefer to be happy, and forego some of the prestige that your unfulfilled inferiority complex seems to demand....’

‘The only normal goal for human ambition is to know more about the world we live in, to understand our neighbours better than we do, to live so that life is richer and fuller because of the quality of our co-operation. All other ambitions end in death, insanity, or the tragic crippling of body and soul.’

End of quotations from Dr Beran Wolfe.

So, not very encouraging about ambition, was he?

Wolfe took the view that ambition is motivated by a sense of inferiority. And here we immediately run into an emotional reaction. People don’t like the suggestion that they might have an ‘inferiority complex’. It makes them feel insulted. And yet Wolfe (basing his ideas on Adler) would argue, I think, if he were here, that feelings of inferiority are perfectly normal and indeed inevitable. The human child demonstrably is inferior, physically and mentally, until quite a few years have gone by.

The trick of living a successful and happy life, if we are to believe Wolfe, is somehow to get a realistic and true picture of the nature of that inevitable inferiority, and not to let mistaken and misunderstood ideas about its nature dominate your life and disrupt it.

Easier to say than to do.

For my part, after a certain amount of introspection, I have come to the conclusion that my own ambition was fuelled by a basically flawed interpretation of certain facts and events in my childhood.

Am I going to share these details with you? No, I’m not. What I am going to say is that now, in my seventies, I feel much more relaxed about those twin impostors, failure and success, than I did as young man.

As this book has demonstrated, I hope, even a brief acquaintance with a few publishing statistics will prove that achieving a career as a full-time writer is a rare achievement; it’s an ambition which is about as likely of fulfilment as becoming a member of the US Senate. It happens, but not often.

What then, if anything, is to be done? For what it’s worth, here is my two cents’ worth.

The ambitious writer should examine the motivation of her ambition carefully, and would be well advised to identify its cause.

Identifying the cause of ambition is certainly possible, at least in my own experience. Hint: consider your fantasies. And I’m not talking about sexual fantasies, but fantasies relating to success as a writer. Thinking about the situation which will arise from having achieved your imagined success will, I believe, give you some guidance as to whom, or which group of people, you seek to impress.

Having identified the impressees, so to speak, you may then be able to work back and identify the events and circumstances which made you feel inferior to that individual or group. Those events and circumstances are likely to lie in childhood or adolescent memories. And then you can ask yourself, with the benefit of hindsight and some adult insight, whether the sense of inferiority which you then felt was actually justified or not. And even if it was justified, and not based on some misapprehension, does it really require that you should devote endless hours of time, money, and effort, sacrificing much else along the way, in order to ‘prove’, through achieving success as a writer, that you are no longer inferior?

Such self-analysis may prove valuable. It certainly did for me.

The completion of such analysis does not necessarily mean that you have to abandon all interest in writing. Far from it. You may now be able to undertake writing with a more relaxed attitude towards the outcome, taking a greater pleasure and satisfaction in the actual work. And who knows – your work may be all the better for it.

A final thought. I would not wish you to think that Beran Wolfe regarded all creative work as selfish, antisocial, and not conducive to long-term happiness. Far from it; he himself, for example, was a sculptor.

Here’s his conclusion about the value of creative work:

‘There is a certain quantum of creative energy, in every human being, which is not absorbed by the business of a work-a-day world. Even people who are engaged in some eminently satisfactory occupation have some creative energy left over.... We must all create something – or class ourselves as human vegetables. No one can be happy who does not find some channel for this creative energy.’

I hope that’s clear enough. It’s perfectly OK to have some ambition – because it motivates hard work; and preferably you should understand its causes. And it’s perfectly OK to be ‘creative’. But you just shouldn’t let these things get out of hand. That’s all.

4.3 Clarifying your goals

In the second half of the twentieth century, it became almost the norm for organisations to clarify the reason for their existence, and to write down that purpose in the form of a ‘mission statement’.

One of the earliest and most famous thinkers behind this practice was Peter Drucker, who in 1954 published a book entitled The Practice of Management . It was this book which first popularised the concept of Management by Objectives – a buzzword phrase which soon became a cliché in the business world.

To oversimplify enormously, Drucker’s idea was that companies should sit down and work out in detail what their objectives actually were. Then they should list all the things they had to do to achieve those objectives; and finally they should check up periodically – perhaps once a month or once a year – and measure how they were actually doing in practice. Repeat as necessary until your company is a world leader.

For what it is worth, I once wrote a book about this kind of thing, insofar as it affects educational organisations. But the book is long out of print, and not available in ebook format, so you are spared any further reference to it.