What Price Fame?

Gwyneth Box

Recently I read a letter in a poetry magazine from a poet who, over a period of three years, had had work included in forty-two anthologies at a cost of over £800 and had spent a similar sum on publishing four books of his own verse.

These figures didn’t seem to include the price of competition entries, magazines, postage, stationery etc. and I suspect that his real financial outlay was well over £2000. What’s more, I’m sure that he is not alone.

How do non-professional part-time writers do it? Or perhaps a better question would be: Why do we do it?

Why do we continue to write when we know that there is only a one in a million chance of finding success? Or, given that all too often we tell ourselves that we write to fulfil an inner need, why don’t we find the writing itself a sufficient reward?

If it were money we wanted, would we be writing poetry and short stories? Surely we would focus our efforts on commercial articles instead. We would concentrate on becoming experts in one or two specialist topics and spend our time on research which could be turned into articles and sold over and over to different magazines in different countries.

But no, we write ‘creatively’ to satisfy that inner compulsion.

Yet even so, we are not satisfied until we think that other people have recognised us as writers. We are so determined to see our names in print that we are willing to pay to participate in competitions and then pay again when our work is selected for publication.

Is it a question of insecurity that makes us need to reinforce our self-image by pursuing the appearance of fame, even if we have to finance it ourselves? Or is it the gambler’s mentality that drives us? Having started out entering occasional competitions and perhaps winning commendations or minor prizes, do we keep on, convinced that the next one will be the big break?

And if we scooped a major prize, what would we do? Rest on our laurels? Retire honourably? Quit while we were ahead? I doubt it. I suspect any winnings would be reinvested in further competition entries, further copies of anthologies which are only sold to contributors. Maybe if there was enough money we’d go so far as to self publish a selection of our work though, ignorant of marketing, we may not sell more than a dozen copies.

Of course there’s no harm in it if we keep our expenditure in line with the size of our pockets. Everybody is entitled to a hobby, and if I choose to spend money on poetry competitions while my husband spends his down the pub, that’s my decision.

My point, though, is that it is worth stopping every once in a while to consider just how much we are spending, and what we really hope to achieve by it all.