Writing to Win

By Tim Parks

The New York Review of Books - January 11, 2014

One of the great mysteries of the writer’s life is the transformation that occurs when he or she passes from being an unpublished to a published novelist. If you are looking for a textbook case, check out the career of Salman Rushdie. Here he is interviewed in the Paris Review in 2005:

Many people in that very gifted generation I was a part of had found their ways as writers at a much younger age. It was as if they were zooming past me. Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin—to name only a few. It was an extraordinary moment in English literature, and I was the one left in the starting gate, not knowing which way to run. That didn’t make it any easier.

It’s a competition. Pick up a copy of Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (the pseudonym that aligns Rushdie with two of the greatest writers of modern times) and you find that almost every relationship, whether it be with friends and rivals at school, with his wives and partners, with fellow writers, and finally with the world of Islam is seen in terms of winning and losing. And at the painful core of these struggles, at least early on, is “his repeated failures to be, or become, a decent publishable writer of fiction.” This is the competition of competitions. Publication. Eventually, Rushdie decides that this failure is tied up with an identity question and “slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand…”

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