The Siren Call of Money and Prestige

Mark Pettus of The Bluff made a comment on my entry "If a Book Falls in the Forest":

My writing actually suffers because I'm successful - if I hadn't figured out how to make a living writing non-fiction, I'd probably be working much harder producing fiction. To my local readers, I'm Mark Twain, and I catch myself enjoying their compliments and recognition a bit more than I should. In my heart, I'm a novelist, not a reporter. But, the money seduces me, keeps me working on stories that people throw away when they are finished reading.

I bet a lot of writers can relate to this tension between writing something successful (by critical or monetary standards) and writing what's important to them. I find myself tempted away from my fiction by writing that is easier and more immediately rewarding, like blogging or technical writing. It helps to re-examine my priorities and remind myself that, yes, I would much rather finish my novel than anything else. Tapping into desire can help keep me on track.

Paul Graham has a great post on How to Do What You Love. He mentions prestige and money as two of the distractions that can take us away from the work we love:

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.

Mark Pettus has a double-whammy: his non-fiction writing brings money and prestige! Hopefully he can resist the siren call enough to get that Dickensian novel written.

Here's one of Paul Graham's yardsticks for whether your dream work is a genuine desire or just a sign of laziness:

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

It's a tough job, finding and doing the work we love. But considering how much of our lives we spend working, I think it's worth the effort.