Who Gets Institutional Support and Who Doesn't
Ethan McCoy Rogers recently posted this (emphasis mine):
How Substack grows resentment:
Substack brings writers who wish they were read into contact with writers who are. People with thirty subscribers (full disclaimer: like me!) can comment at people who have institutional recognition—people who publish with the big five or write for NYT or New Yorker. Brought together, unsuccessful and successful writers realize that they are more alike than different. The sense of similarity breeds resentment and defensiveness because it makes the difference of institutional recognition seem all the more arbitrary.
You can get page views by writing against the establishment: to understand is not necessarily to forgive.
This note was inspired by Tocqueville who suggests that class resentment explodes at exactly the moment when class distinctions are vanishing.
This is a keen observation. There is no obvious difference—at least, no literary difference—between those who are lauded and those who are ignored. For each person selected to receive institutional support, there are 20–50 who are equally good and who never will; this is true at the level of commercial work that just barely clears traditional publishing’s bar, and it is true of Nabokov and Melville and their hundreds or thousands of unread peers. There is not, contrary to traditional publishing’s cherished narratives, a level of writing at which discovery becomes inevitable or even likely.
A chemist who achieved single-digit yield in every experiment, year after year, would be fired. Yet we tolerate such performance from traditional publishing, so long as we see that they are occasionally doing the work. If one good author is discovered every year by these people, we consider it better than we deserve.
This all said, it is neither arbitrary nor random who is selected for institutional support. As it is mostly uncorrelated with talent, skill, or anything else we might care about, it often feels that way. Glory is handed invariably to mediocre people, but most mediocre people get no glory at all, so the appearance is of a lottery, rather than the ideological soft surveillance that actually exists.
What gets a person picked? What do you have to do if you want your mediocre ideas, as opposed to someone else’s slightly different versions of those same mediocre ideas, printed in The New Yorker or backed by “Big 5” publishers? Well, the sad news I must deliver is that you can do everything by the book and still get nothing. The following are necessary, not sufficient.
Understand that your job is to neuter ideas, not advance them. If you’re on the right, you must make conservatism appealing to corporate centrist-liberals—confess that you vote Republican, but strictly for fiscal reasons—so they can feel good about themselves for being tolerant. If you’re religious, make sure to sand down the edges and avoid metaphysics entirely. If you’re on the left, state opinions that would have required courage forty years ago but are mainstream today, and accept that the corporate centrists will take credit for all progress.
Never let on if you think you’re actually any good. Once people have been picked—and have kept getting themselves picked for twenty years—they’re allowed to have egos, but not before. If you’re trying to get in, you won’t even be rejected—you won’t even be read at all—and you’re expected to just accept this until someone’s drug dealer makes an introduction on your behalf. It may be true that bad writers mostly think they are excellent writers, but excellent writers often know they are excellent writers (except when depression does its thing) and this is something you must hide. A high self-opinion, even if an accurate one, shows a lack of social fluency that offsets any credit you might win by being an exceptional writer because, honestly, 99% of the people who will determine your career will never read closely enough to notice.
Never embarrass your superiors. The literary world is superficially more open and liberal than a typical corporate workplace. Memoirs about polycules and drug abuse routinely win awards; James Frey, who fabricated his vices to an extreme and fraudulent degree, would have remained a darling of publishing had he not been taken down by internet sleuths. This said, the one true rule of Corporate America also applies: Never make your handlers look bad, no exceptions. Abrahamic conservatism is condemnatory of far more actions than the secular centrism that characterizes the corporate world, but also makes space for penance, confession, and forgiveness. Institutional centrist-liberalism names fewer vices—challenging hierarchs might be the only thing that is truly disallowed—but is infinitely and eternally punitive of those who transgress.
Accept that the writing will not matter. When you hold low social status as a writer, someone’s decision not to read you reflects on you. Pitch better. When you hold high social status, it reflects on the person who has not read. This is the only real difference. People will not understand your work at a deeper level, and critics will hold higher expectations rather than giving you the benefit of the doubt, and neither the public nor the gatekeepers will love you in any meaningful way. More people will buy your book and never read it—valuable for your bank account—and far more people will pretend to read you, but the grand understanding you hoped to reach with the social universe will never come. On the contrary, fame is isolating. You will lose old friends, and struggle to make new ones, having ascended into the arena of capitalist superpredators. This is psychologically distressing and can produce high-profile volatility—something the people who parcel out institutional support prefer, even at the distance of indirect association, to avoid. You will only get their backing if, after psychological profiling, they conclude that you are detached enough from your own exertion to handle this with grace.
Know this: Writing a bad book is only the second-worst thing that can happen. You can recover from a shitty book. In three years, your life (outside of publishing, which may evict you, in which case you will be surprised by how much you do not miss it) will be very similar to what it would have been had you never written it at all. Bad books are numerous and forgettable. What is the worst thing that can happen, the disaster that should be avoided at all costs? Well, if the answer to that is not obvious, then I have not done my job.