Write Good or Die

a man who does not see himself as a success because he has not achieved his own dreams and, sadly, for this character, who believes he is not capable of achieving those dreams.
    So defining success is hard. The definitions are individual and generally, they come from somewhere deep. If you ask each and every one of us, we’ll all have a glib answer about what we believe success to be.
    When asked what he wanted—by anyone, acquaintance, waitress, stranger—a friend of mine would say, “I want to be rich and never have to work again.” He meant it, but he also had other dreams, other measures of success. He certainly would never have attained that kind of wealth by robbing people or scamming people or lying to people. He had specific dreams of ways to make himself that wealthy.
    But within that glib answer are some traps. What’s “rich”? Could my friend have gotten by on one million dollars? Five million? Two trillion? What does “never have to work again” mean? Does it mean having a day job where you work for someone else? Or does it mean sitting on your ass all day, having people take care of your every need?
    I don’t know. I’m not even sure my friend knew, deep down.
    Sometimes your own definitions of success surprise you. In 2000, my novel Dangerous Road (written under my Kris Nelscott pen name) got nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel of that year. When I got the call (and they do call you—which is a great courtesy), my knees literally buckled. I fell into a nearby chair. I always thought buckling knees were literary hype, but they’re not. I’ve experienced it.
    At that point in my career, I had been nominated for many awards—Hugos, Nebulas, World Fantasy Awards. I’d won quite a few as well, including the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers’ Choice Award for Best Short Story of the Year which is a hell of an honor. But the Edgar was something else to me.
    It took me a while to figure out the difference. From childhood on, I went out of my way to read novels marked “Edgar nominee.” I hadn’t done that with any other award, not even the Hugo (although I did buy Dune because it mentioned the Hugo on the cover). Edgar nominee was, in my mind, the rubber-stamp of approval, a sign of high quality. I never even dreamed of being nominated for an Edgar—I thought it was so far beyond my skills that I couldn’t even look at that achievement as possible.
    So when it happened—and, that same year, my short story “Spinning” was also nominated under my Rusch name—I just about came undone.
    I had achieved the impossible. The mystery field had branded me a success—in terms I understood. I felt…honored. But I also felt like a fraud. I was a science fiction writer who just “dabbled” in mystery. I knew nothing about the field. But the two nominations in the same year under two different names made the success hard (impossible) to discount.
    Why would I want to discount success?
    Good question, mes amis , which I shall leave for Part Two. (What I have just done is what some writers call suspense, but we experts call it withholding information to create false tension. Yep. Guilty. I don’t want to get sidetracked from definitions here.)
    The point of my Edgar story is twofold. First, I had achieved success as I defined it but second, I hadn’t even realized that definition lurked within me until the success happened.
    Success can ambush you that way. It’s happened to me a few other times as well. My first full-page review in The New York Times made me feel like a “real” writer, even though I’d been a full time freelancer for twenty years at that point. What had I been before? A fake writer?
    I had the same response to my first ad in The New Yorker—there was my name in an ideal spot up front, along with reviews of my book and all kinds of laudatory quotes. Never mind that the ad had no measurable effect on the book’s sales. Never mind that the ad wasn’t a favorable review or even a short story published in their pages. It was the sight of my name in the New Yorker.
    Obviously, within me, lurks a writer with vast literary pretensions. I mostly ignore her because I don’t think of myself as vast or literary or pretentious. But that person is clearly there.
    Yet if you catch me off-guard and ask me what success is for me, I’ll tell you that I believe a successful writer makes a good living, year in and year out, writing fiction.
    I do believe that. It