It All Comes Down to Luck

So after forty years earning a living in the creative arts, I have one primary insight to offer:

It all comes down to luck.

Luck matters more than talent.  I know any number of extremely gifted writers who just had shitty luck, and whose careers failed on takeoff or blew up in midair.  Likewise I know any number of less-than-gifted writers who just wrote the one right book at the right time, and whose career took off.  I know others who basically blundered their way to success— they were never in charge of anything, they just jumped in the pool and hit their nose on a gold brick.

I’ve known writers who had a carefully-built career plan that cratered.  I know other writers who followed a well worked-out plan that succeeded.

My own career has had wild, unpredictable luck swings.  I was lucky enough to be paid for writing my journeyman fiction, and then that whole career crashed when there was a shift in the market and I had to find another career.

I never set out to be a science fiction writer. (I didn’t think I was good enough, for one thing.  Grow up reading Delany and Zelazny and Russ and Disch and you might just find yourself a wee bit intimidated at the prospect of joining that company.)  That I’m a science fiction writer, and not a mystery writer or a writer of literary fiction or a writer of epic historical fiction is entirely a matter of luck.

But if I was going to be an SF writer, the 1980s was the best time to do it.  Publishers were putting money into science fiction, starting SF lines with a host of savvy editors.  Tor was a new company, and my career grew with Tor.  But Tor, it seemed to me, realized at some point that it was easier to poach another company’s successful writers than to try to build new writers of its own (which is always an iffy business).

So I jumped to another publisher, for more money.  Good luck, right?  But the bad luck outweighed the good, because the new publisher’s publisher was batshit crazy, and I had to hire a lawyer to get my ass free.

Also, I ended up in a multi-year trademark litigation with Wired Magazine over the word “Hardwired,” which they claimed they owned.  I lost all the savings I’d built up over the years and was barely hanging on, but I really had no choice— you have to defend your intellectual property, or get out of the game.  Fortunately Wired went bankrupt before I did, which must have surprised us both.

So was that good luck, bad luck, weird luck, what?  All I know is that it was luck.

And then there was The Rift, which was my shot at the big time bestseller— and it would have been a bestseller, if the Powers That Be at the publisher hadn’t deliberately sabotaged the book, and in fact the entire SF line, and cost their company millions of dollars for reasons that surely must have seemed good to them.

(It’s my bestselling ebook, now it’s an ebook.  So, y’know, fuck them.)

So.  Luck.

I won’t go into my subsequent career, save to point out that one publisher had a nervous breakdown and forgot to send my manuscript to the printer, and that another book which was expected to do well came out at the height of the 2008 recession when nobody was buying hardbacks, and that fiasco took down two other books with it.

Yah, go right ahead, make a plan for your fabulous writing career.  Don’t forget to factor in publishers’ nervous breakdowns, the malice of strangers, the incompetence of a whole other set of strangers, and the economic cycle.  Factor your agent dropping dead while you’re at it.  And be sure to predict all those factors five or six years ahead off time, and be ready for them.

But speaking of being ready— there are ways to sort of tilt the luck factor in your favor, and they come down to readiness.  You can’t predict when you’ll get lucky, but you have to be ready for the piece of luck when it happens.  I had no idea of becoming a science fiction writer, but when my career tilted that way, I took the ball and ran with it.  (Mixed metaphor but what the hell)

Likewise you might not be able to predict what specific disaster might happen to you, but you can be reasonably confident that, over the course of a long career, disasters will happen, and you should try to be flexible enough to survive the bad luck when it finally catches you.

When bad luck happened to me, I didn’t give up.  I had faith in my talent and faith in my writing, and even if nobody was buying my work at the moment, I kept increasing my page count.

And by all means make a plan.  It won’t do any harm, and it might work.  (My plan was to write whatever the hell I wanted, and it worked for quite a number of years, right up till the moment it didn’t.)

But while you’re making a plan, don’t forget to make a backup plan.  When some catastrophe happens to your career, have some idea what your next career is going to be, and what new name you’ll use for a pseudonym. (Carrie Vaughn wrote a very entertaining Facebook post a while back about what happened when her career plan blew up on her, and she had to improvise a new plan that took advantage of the fact that she was in a complete panic.  Panic can work for you, if you can just direct it in the right way.)

I’m not the sort of person that panics easily.  Instead I just get pissed off.  That’ll show you, asshole, I think as my keyboard slams into overdrive.

And be sure to take nothing for granted.  Because it can all be taken away in an instant.

Don’t stop thinking.  Don’t stop writing.  And know that, whatever happens, luck will change.