Financial Wizards and Fantasy Governments

Malcolm Gladwell’s just published a new article in The New Yorker on the theme of David and Goliath, which I think is worth a read. Especially so for Ireland, due to what it has to say about how you succeed when the odds are stacked against you, which no-one can deny is the case for us at the moment.

Gladwell uses two key models to illustrate his points: basketball, specifically the unlikely success of a teenage girls team in California, and the equally unexpected victories of T. E. Lawrence and his Bedouins in 1917. In both cases his examples should have lost – the basketball team were less skilled than almost all their opponents and the Bedouins were much fewer in number and untrained in comparison to the Turks. But they didn’t lose, because they did something that should be obvious, yet isn’t: they chose not to play by the accepted rules of the day. Now, that sounds both obvious and a preamble to another terrible U2 profile, but it doesn’t seem to have been so.

I’m going to use another model, writing and writers, to help me explain what I think is interesting about it. When we think of underdogs, we fundamentally misunderstand what the term means, romanticising the wrong things and downplaying more relevant information. J. K. Rowling is one of the most noted ‘overnight successes’ of the last 10 years, but every profile and interview misconstrues what she represents. The standard narrative runs thus: single mum in Edinburgh has eureka moment when she invents an orphaned wizard called Harry on a train journey, then writes the manuscript over cold tea in local coffee shop. A few foolish publishers had their Decca (the label that famously turned down The Beatles) moment, until the agent Christopher Little plucked it our of the slush pile, sold it to Bloomsbury and the rest is muti-million pound royalties and castles in Scotland.

This is fine as far as it goes, and has galvanized many hopeful writers of future bestsellers, but it’s not, strictly speaking, the whole truth. The reality for novelists, whether for adults or children, crime, fantasy, SF, literary, romance or thriller, is that there is no money in it. A typical advance for a first-time novelist is €3000. An advance is all you will have until you ‘earn out’ meaning the royalties that you have notionally accumulated rise above the advance amount. Essentially, an advance is like being handed half of your monthly salary before you do your work with the other half dependent on whether or not your job is still there four weeks later. You may be able to sell foreign rights to your work, or movie rights, but there’s no guarantee that they will be even close to that advance. And that’s it. There’s no more.

Let’s say you took a year to write your novel – it took Rowling five years to produce the first Harry Potter, during which time she plotted the series in general terms and nailed all the odd details that captured the imagination. The average novel is 75,000 words long, so you wrote just under 1500 words a week. Perfectly do-able. That’s still €57.69 per week. You couldn’t get a mortgage in a war zone for that these days. If you earn out, you may start seeing a good return. Rowling did, after all – why not you too? But if you don’t, you may not even get another chance at the windmill. The publishing world is littered with the cautionary tales of mid-list novelists whose efforts went without promotion and sank without trace. A great number of big deals were announced during the boom years, but few ever made good on their financial promise. This is largely because most of those six-figure advances were given to books that, well-written or not, were sold on the basis that they were thematically as close as possible to Rowling or other bestselling authors.

If you go to any bookshop and look at the children’s section, you will see walls of books all aiming for the Potter market. Every second children’s book grabs for that elusive magic in the hope that the author will break out and become another Rowling. But when Harry Potter came out the landscape was very different. Apart from the acknowledged classics from Dahl, Tolkien, Blume, Lewis and Blyton, most fiction aimed at Rowling’s 10-14 (the initial presumptive range) was what we might call ‘issue-based’. If you are under 40, you will remember very clearly what this means: stories about real issues (teen pregnancy, abuse, homosexuality, divorce, coping with disability, etc), all rendered so real that you could feel the driving rain and itchy polyester school uniforms through the pages.

It was a worthy idea, borne of a desire to render the reality of a world in a way that would be acceptable to children and teenagers – or the idea of them that held sway in the minds of parents and social workers of the time – and blast the stereotypes of Blyton and the like out of the water. The only problem was that children didn’t actually want to read them. If only the authors had aimed older: the confessional stories of magazines like Now and Women’s Way show there is a frighteningly huge market for misery-lit. So Harry Potter arrived in a world where his only competition was twelve-year-olds coping with their parents divorce and where no-one had any financial expectations of success. Hindsight is handy for these sorts of things, but it was a no-brainer.

But this is not the same world that the descendants of Potter arrived in. Children’s books were hot properties, expected to do big business and now there was enormous competition for the same prize. Yet both the publishers and the authors expected that the rewards would grow exponentially. They didn’t.

In Ireland – and the world – we thought we could lend and borrow ever-increasing amounts of money. We assumed that because a house on street A sold for €1 million that (a) €1 million was the base value, which could only rise and (b), if we knocked down another house on that street and built a terrace of four townhouses in its place we could make €4 million. It didn’t work that way.

This is the essential point. We allow outliers like Rowling to distort (massively) our perception of the day-to-day reality of an entire industry. The average children’s writer earns the same as they did when Harry Potter first came on the scene, which is to say: not much, But because the story of her success is so compelling, the outsize nature of it is distorted and we see it as more logical and achievable than it really is. In drawing that analogy with Ireland, we can see two things. First, that for Rowling, substitute the big winners of the boom – developers like McNamara and Dunne. They made it big, so we thought we could, Every chancer building a townhouse in their back yard or grabbing a buy-to-let in Bulgaria was traveling the same journey to fame and fortune as the Ballsbridge barons, as far as they were concerned. They were only a couple of well-timed deals away from their own glowing profiles in the Irish press. So the likelihood of success was amped up in people’s minds at the expense of understanding the irrationality of the whole enterprise.

All the emphasis was placed on the success of these guys, but little on long-term considerations. It was endemic. This is why we have a beautiful road from here to Galway, but no train line from Cork to Mayo. Or why we had a ‘socialist’ taoiseach but couldn’t manage to address the educational needs of the poorest amongst us. Like the starry-eyed writer of the 500^th Harry Potter knockoff, we reached out for our philosopher’s stone (a detached Georgian with a sea view, thanks for asking) while all around us the floor collapsed.

If you want to succeed at anything, two things will be helpful: talent and luck. If you have those, life can be much easier. But there is one thing that no amount of wish-fulfilling will avoid. There is no success without hard work. It doesn’t happen. The problem with our government’s response (and indeed the banks) to the crash since the beginning is that they got lucky on the basis of hard work done by others, over many years and in many countries. They didn’t make it happen and had no idea what to do when it stopped, so we have been like the long-suffering wife of a gambling addict who swears blind that everything is fine and bills are paid, etc, until it’s far too late and now even the family silver has to be sold to pay the debts. I’m not convinced that any of the opposition currently sharpening their stand-up skills on the benches have any real strategies for the future, but at least they haven’t spent the last six months pretending that they can turn the tide with a fork.

Actually a much longer post than I meant to write

I haven't been very regular so far with this blog, and probably won't be for a while as I'm spending most of my time trying to get freelance work or feeling down about not getting freelance work. It seems to me that there are two types of blog, generally speaking (and very possibly two kinds of journalism): the 'I feel' and the 'I do'. The 'I feel' sort is potentially great, but there are a whole lot of shortcomings. Many blogs that I read are all about how the writer feels about something, so the drama, the narrative becomes about how that person feels about the things that they are doing or not doing, and rarely the things themselves.

Alternately, the 'I do' blogs are: this happened, then this, then I did that, now I'm doing this and later I'm going to do something else as well. There's not a whole lot of room for 'I did this and here's a thought about how it feels to be me doing this', if you take my meaning. Someone who cleaves very closely to this is Malcolm Gladwell, who writes some books that I love very much, and who has always stressed that he is not in the business of telling you what he feels about the work that he does, or indeed, his life.

Your preference will likely suggest a number of things about what you want from a story. Maybe you like to be educated, to find out something new, to get the inside skinny as it were. So you read news reports, self-help books, academic treatises, textbooks, all that stuff - I know this is a little unfair, but let's help the nice blogger make his point. Whereas if you like 'I feel' more, you read celebrity magazines, gossip columns, columns, novels, autobiographies.

Of course, few people are one or the other. More importantly, the successful story must have both. When I was small, during the early Eighties, my father was an entrepreneur. He ran his own company and he liked computers, spending most of his free time (when not hanging out with us) teaching himself how to program, back in the days of the command line, when Basic and Pascal and C were kings. We had one of the first two IBM PC's in Ireland, apparently, which always makes me think that if only I had been anyway talented at it I would now be making lots of money. I would have gotten that interview at Google, for a start...

So anyway, my dad liked to learn about new things (and still does, I'm not building up to some horrible tragedy) but he always liked a good story. Being as it was the 80's and given that he was an entrepreneur, there were a lot of business strategy books about. The one I always remember was Lee Iacocca's "Iacocca: An Autobiography" (I was fascinated by the name and used to pronounce it in my head endlessly because I was and am strange). Iacocca was very successful in the US car business and his book was the best-selling nonfiction book of 1984 and 1985 (according to Wikipedia). I've never read it, but I think it offers a good example of how you can do both. Iacocca spent the first third of his book talking about where he came from - his early life and family, education, et cetera. Then he proceeds to his time in business and the successes and misfortunes that he experienced, bringing the reader up to the present day.

Iacocca's book was popular first because he was a great success in business: then as now, there are lots of people who want to do likewise and by reading his autobiography, they too could tease out some of the strategies he took to get there and perhaps apply them to their own life. But Iacocca also talked about his life and the context for these great financial achievements, which I suspect made the book more readable and ultimately more profitable than had he written Iacocca's Eight Rules For Financial Success.

Gladwell, that great believer in 'I do' journalism also uses this technique, most recently in Outliers, his book on success. In almost every story he tells, Gladwell relies on how people feel about things to illustrate how they do them and so succeed or not. In one particularly affecting section, he discusses the smartest man in America (according to that ever so reliable measure, IQ) and how his achievements in life seem to fall so far short of what we expect from the gifted. I won't spoil the story as it's worth reading and in any case is better told by Gladwell than the likes of me, but what is interesting is that we come to any realisation and understanding, to Gladwell's larger point about intelligence and success, through the life story and feelings of that smart man. Gladwell could have told the story in a paragraph, but he takes a chapter. The time this takes means that you immerse yourself more fully in the story (and from that, the ideas) than you ever would were you presented with a bullet-point list of the reasons why some gifted people don't achieve their supposed potential.

It works both ways. If you read books even semi-regularly, you are aware that there is a thing called 'literary fiction', and then everything else. If you are reading something from 'everything else' you are not necessarily reading a proper book. You may be enjoying it, you may even love it, but you aren't appreciating real literary art in the same way you might were you to approach the foot of Mount Banville or scale the Cliffs of McEwan. Without starting a rant about the meaninglessness of these divisions and the consequences apparent for publishing and reading in general, the main complaint about literary novels, insofar as there are any, is that 'there is no story'. People feel all the time. There are acres of feelings in these books. There are thoughts deep and shallow, honourable and prurient, affecting and bland, but rarely is there a story to hang them on, to give them resonance.

It's hard to do. I recently read a first novel called 'John The Revelator' by a guy called Peter Murphy, who writes for Hot Press (I should declare an interest here: I'd like to be published, so I automatically hate everyone else who is, especially those who are recently published and who are friends of friends. It's a failing, what can I say. Declaration over). On one level, it's a classic lit novel, filled with symbolism and philosophical ramblings, alienation, loss and as they say in the best reviews, 'not much happens'. On the other hand, it's incredibly gripping and I read it in about 4 hours. The 'not much' that happens is actually all that the author needs to make his story work and help the characters who appear in it both real and interesting. More than that, both work together to help each other. Since the characters are so compelling, the story becomes that way too. The story has a strangeness of atmosphere that works on the characters to make something that on the face of it, you could tell in one page, a novel that sucks you in and rewards you for your time.

As you can imagine, I profoundly dislike the guy...

We've left the point. This is all a way of saying that I'm obsessed with Ira Glass and I think everyone should listen to his show, This American Life, on NPR in the US, but downloadable as a free podcast. He did a speech for something called the Gel Conference in 2007 (I can't be bothered findoing out what that is right now), which I link to here and I think (if you've read this far) you might enjoy. He talks about what he feels makes a story work and why that is the case. So from the perspective of aspirant writers, this may be worth a watch, but I think that it's a good view anyway.


via videosift.com

I don't know if that link is going to work, but here is a link to another series he did on storytelling that I enjoyed. There's a YouTube link out there somewhere as well...

Here's part 1.

So that link to Ira Glass, that mini-review of John The Revelator and indeed that digression on Lee Iacocca, my dad and Malcolm Gladwell amount to a declaration of intent for this blog (which hopefully hits the right balance of pretentiousness and humour), that while I will endeavour to write things that I do (posting articles that I have done and so forth) and talk about news that is relevant and interesting, there will always be lots of thoughts about everything, because I think that will make the stories and the blog more interesting. Whether you agree or not is up to you and you have my apologies, as ever.

New Idea, continued

So those were all the columns what I wrote.

I'm going to start making changes to this blog. I'll be putting up links to work I've done and doing the occasional column-style piece, because they're fun, and nobody's hiring me to do one anywhere else, to be frank.

The name is going to have to change, too. I'll try not to overthink it, but that and the overall design of the blog will alter over the next few weeks. Wish me luck in my new respectability. In the meantime, have a look at this clip from one of my favourite speakers:

I'm about 2 hours into this strategy...