How To Kill Your Career
Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm
Winston Churchill
Back when, back then, when I was a young man with some keenly dodgy habits, I left Africa for London with one backpack, two manuscripts, and a dream as big as the African sky. In less than a year, my dream came true when I was invited to write a short story for Picador’s “young writers to watch” series.
And then came the career-ending kapow.
How? Well, remember those dodgy habits? They proved to be an excellent trigger. The fuel for the impending explosion meanwhile was my ego (Olympian, and swelled by the rapid success that had come my way), insecurity (world-class), and a chip (hunchback-sized). Oh, did I mention the dope?
It all made for a combustible mix. I failed to submit anything—of course I didn’t—and by the time I woke up a decade later, I’d washed-up in Manhattan living my best substitute life.
Manhattan at the turn of the century was kind to this Italian-African immigrant. The dollars were easy enough to come by and, eventually, almost twenty years after I’d deep-sixed my dream of a writing career, I finally got around to writing another novel (which was published in 2014).
By then, I’d discovered a few truths about myself and my writing journey. (Here’s the part where you skip to something else, but hey-ho, I’m committed now!)
The biggest lesson?
Whatever you do, don’t ever imagine you’ll get more than one big break in this industry. Talent isn’t that rare.
Net result? Failure. Epic, beautiful, crushing failure.
… but … but … there’s failure and there’s failure.
In the end, what I learnt was this: your relationship to your art is your own. If you want to write that bestseller, chances are you need to find a mainstream publisher who will pump the marketing budget to match your dreams.
Me? I owe no one anything. And that means I get to be true to my vision and my stories. Do I self-publish? Christ, no, that would require all sorts of business acumen! (Though I do self-publish my old books [here’s why] and short stories [because I’d rather trawl a sewer on my belly than have anything to do with that market in 2024].)
The truth about writers these days? Most of us are doing (and subsidising) our own PR and marketing anyway. So given that, a small indy publisher will afford you a certain freedom to stay true to your vision. And that suits where I am in my life these days.
Of course, there are downsides. Big ones at that. The worst is when I finish a novel and know that I’m going to have to start whoring myself on street corners with agents and publishers … again.
But that’s okay. It’s part the journey. It’s the job. The rejections and the eventual acceptance, that is the job, so learn to enjoy it. You can’t take any of this seriously. Except your work. That’s always serious.
These days, emotion and a love of prose seem to run counter to the current tastes of the gatekeepers of the literary world. Those also happen to be my calling cards so the mainstream publishing world is out of reach. But still, I’m crazy enough to imagine that somewhere out there, someone will give a damn about my novels and the stories I have to tell.
The success of Tracks, I tell myself (with absolutely no data to back it up), was an indicator that there is still an audience for beautiful prose and emotional stories. Finding you is the hard part. But if you’re here and reading this, thank you.