From Colin Dodds:
The other day, I tried to fob off the critical and commercial failure of my book What Smiled at Him on a marketing misstep (see “The Grip of Genre”). The other obvious possibility was that I’d written a book that wasn’t so very great. And that possibility got no mention.
But was it bad?
Whether or not something is actually bad is studiously avoided by the people who make those calls for a living. I’ve received thousands of rejections – and that’s one consistent theme. There are dozens of ways to say that an unwanted thing isn’t necessarily bad. They vary from “I loved it, but I didn’t fall in love with it enough in this market environment” to “it’s a subjective business.” I could spend an essay reading between the lines of the many permutations, but where would that leave us?
The people who write rejection letters may be genuinely frustrated with their inability to discern what’s actually good from what’s actually bad. Or they may simply want to discourage a reply. In the end, there’s no great way to give bad news. Failure stings. It has your name and your address. Failure, if you look for it, is everywhere in the arts.
10 degrees of failure
Here are the inescapable gradations of artistic failure. It starts from the most complete, though perhaps least painful, failure. It ends with the failure that looks the most like success, but may hurt the most.
- It never occurred to you: This is most painful when it occurs to someone else, and their version is good.
- You never got around to it: A vague regret, a recurrent ache, a repeated plan told to friends and acquaintances that makes you a bore.
- You never finished it.
- It didn’t come out like you thought it would. It’s disappointing. Whether or not your judgment is right is anyone’s guess.
- You never showed it to anyone.
- It never got made: That could mean no agent, no publisher, no gallery, no theater or no movie studio ever bought in and brought it to the broader world. Or you never had the money, time or conviction to do it yourself.
- It was made, but no one noticed.
- People noticed and cared, but it never made money.
- It made money, but no one thought about it afterwards.
- It set the world on fire, but even that didn’t matter: Think of Paul Cezanne refusing the Paris Salon after decades trying to get in, or Mark Rothko killing himself after months haunting a retrospective of his works at MOMA.
Hatchet jobs
Once in a while, a critic will have a real go at a writer or artist. This used to matter more in cinema. But movies are slow-moving prey these days. Most movies feel more like assets these days, with the risk-management of them overpowering the narrative or artistic aspects as to make criticism wildly beside the point. A lot of contemporary music seems to exempt itself from criticism for this same reason.
But in art in literature, the question of is this good? still resonates powerfully enough that you can only ask it at some personal and professional risk.
That’s what makes hatchet jobs thrilling. Someone climbing out on a limb, stirring up vitriol they know they can’t escape – the world they’re operating in is way too small. Here they are taking a sizable risk to say no, this is not good.
Wow. You can almost hear the upholstery creak as people scooch in to hear what they’ll say next.
Link to the rest at Colin Dodds – No Homework
