Write Good or Die

died last week in a horrible dictionary accident. Grumph).
    Since I’m dissatisfied with these definitions, I’m going to look in one more dictionary (yes, I have a million of them. Or maybe only a thousand). [Writer walks her library, reads half a dozen dictionary definitions, invades her husband’s office, reads three more dictionary definitions, gives up, makes herself a cup of tea, grabs some pretzels and returns to her computer where she types…]
    Okay, that was lame. All of these dictionaries are obsessed with wealth and social standing. One says that success is the gaining (the gaining—what a construction) of wealth, fame, or power and/or (get this) the extent of that gain.
    That snobby dictionary not only measures success in wealth, power, and fame, but also in expanding that wealth, power and fame—and no, this was not the Oxford Dictionary. It was some paltry American wannabe.
    Look at this: I’ve just spent four hundred words attempting to define success—and here’s the really sad thing. While most of us would agree with those definitions in principle, they’re wrong in particular.
    In other words, each one of you—each one of several thousand people—has a completely different definition of success.
    For Reader A, success might be finishing a novel. For Reader B, success might be earning a million dollars. For Reader C, success might mean buying a house. And so on and so on.
    Most of us can describe what we believe success to be. Sometimes success is small—selling a short story, for example, or cooking your first soufflé. Sometimes the success is large—hitting The New York Times Bestseller List with not one, not two, but eight books in the same week like Charlaine Harris just did or running your own well-reviewed restaurant in Paris.
    But here’s the thing. Sometimes success means nothing to the successful. Nothing at all.
    Because, as I said, we all define success differently. Joyce Carol Oates examines this phenomenon in her excellent personal essay “Nighthawk.” In a parenthetical aside, she mentions something about the well-known writer Henry James, something I did not know:
    “…Henry James’s most passionate wish was to have been a successful playwright, not a practitioner of the highest Jamesian ideals in prose fiction. Writing the great novels of his mature career had been, for Henry James, a second-best alternative.”
    In other words, had you asked Henry James, the revered novelist whose work is still read nearly a hundred years after his death whether or not he was a success, he would have said no.
    Got that? He would have said no.
    There are so many examples from the world of writing, which is the world I’m familiar with. Remember, I’m the person who studies success and failure, and I do so primarily within my own profession, that of professional writer.
    So I know of Frederick Faust who labored over his poems each and every afternoon, sometimes writing only one or two words as he crafted each piece. He published a few poems in his lifetime—and none of you have heard of Frederick Faust.
    At least, not under that name. But all of you have seen his most famous pen name on the bookstore shelves, as well as on the credits of television shows and countless movies. For Frederick Faust became Max Brand so that he could pay the bills. He wrote Max Brand stories and novels in the morning to fund his poetry.
    Poetry which, by the way, was so bad that almost no one bought it. One editor who wanted another Max Brand story agreed, as part of the contract, to publish a Frederick Faust poem as well.
    Was Frederick Faust a success? He would have said no.
    Yet by the dictionary definition—wealth, fame, power—Max Brand had more success than he could have dreamed of.
    Milos Forman and Peter Shaffer produced an entire movie about this phenomenon. 1984’s Amadeus is a (clearly fictionalized) account of Antonio Salieri, the most acclaimed, successful musician of his day, who was jealous of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—not for his wealth or fame or power (Mozart did have fame, but no wealth or power)—but for his talent, a talent the fictional Salieri believed he did not have. (I emphasize fictional here because there is no evidence in the historical record that Salieri believed himself inferior to Mozart.)
    Most people see the movie as a story about professional jealousy, but if you go beyond that, you’ll see that it’s a film about a man whom the world perceives as successful,