Over the spring, I began physical therapy to correct some hip pain that was preventing me from practicing yoga, and my single, overbearing thought was: What are my chances of a full recovery through therapy alone?
Each week, my physical therapist focused on having me do hip-strengthening exercises and increasing the level of difficulty. Although unfailingly cheerful and positive, she didn’t give any kind of qualitative or quantitative reassurance, e.g., “I see people like you recover fully all the time!” or “More than 75% of people with this condition will improve within six months of therapy.”
Eventually, by the third or fourth week of therapy, I couldn’t help myself, and I asked the question that I knew was unfair, even if I did preface it with an “out” for the therapist: “I know every person is different,” I began, “but how likely is it that I can make a full recovery without surgery?”
Basically, I wanted to be ranked on scale. Tell me, Ms. Therapist, based on the many hundreds or thousands of patients you’ve seen, where do I fall on the spectrum? Give it to me straight, I want access to your years of experience and I know you can grade me.
But she can’t—not honestly—without making a string of assumptions about me. I know it from working with writers, who ask me to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 all the time—in terms of their idea or writing quality, the likelihood of publication, and even talent. It’s the question I dislike the most and that I try to avoid answering. It lays a terrible burden on me because what’s being asked is: Tell me my worth. Tell me if I should continue. Is my situation hopeless?
If I say you’re a 1, you’ll be discouraged and maybe give up. Such a ranking may lead you to completely disregard your own agency—your own attitudes, responsibility and discipline—as important factors, all qualities that can turn you into a 10 over time. Maybe the project you’re working on now is hopeless, but the next one is destined for greatness.
If I say you’re a 10, you may feel good about yourself and encouraged to redouble your efforts—and then later on, if you aren’t really a 10, you’ll likely encounter frustration, rejection, and other problems that may lead you to feel bitter or resentful when you’re not treated in the way you expect.
I don’t know how to rank most writers because I can’t say how well prepared you are to overcome the difficulties in the writing life. Your motivation or purpose for writing matters, as well as whatever distractions or obligations are pressing down on you. Plus everyone has potential to improve, to have moments of epiphany, to transform from a writer who’s going nowhere to a writer who is inspired or lucky or both.
My therapist had the smallest of windows into my life. She didn’t know the history of my body and what I’ve put it through (or might put it through in the future), and how hard I might work at healing myself. Maybe I will fully recover, and maybe I won’t—a lot of the story was written before I ever arrived in her office—and my outlook largely remains in my hands, not hers.
But I still understand the impulse, the emotional need behind the ranking question. At times we’re desperate to know: what’s my status in this game? How good do I look? It’s just that no matter what answer we’re given, it is unlikely to satisfy or last longer than the next moment of doubt or failure on the horizon.
Jane Friedman has spent nearly 25 years working in the book publishing industry, with a focus on author education and trend reporting. She is the editor of The Hot Sheet, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World in 2023. Her latest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal. In addition to serving on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund, she works with organizations such as The Authors Guild to bring transparency to the business of publishing.
Great article, Jane! Yes, we can work hard, do all the right things, etc but whether it’s our body, our writing, whatever, there are too many variables too have a definitive answer. The hopeful, motivational words of your therapist, along with your own hard work, can be key to achieving your goal. Like writing, it’s success depends on honing skills, hard work and often, motivational and supportive words from other writers. I’ve got to do the work myself but the constructive support from my writers group helps me immensely. Good luck on healing your body, Jane!
[…] It’s the question I dislike the most from writers, and that I try to avoid answering—because it lays a terrible burden on me. […]
I had something like this in the office last week. The conversation [full and frank professional discussion] went:
A: “We don’t have any information on this.”
B: “We can’t just say ‘don’t know; decide for yourself’. The enquirer is relying on us for advice.”
A: “But how can we advise when we haven’t any information?”
B: “We can extrapolate. We’re supposed to be the experts. If we don’t know, who’re they supposed to ask? We’re the end of the line.”
A: “Well, can’t we ask X?”
B: “The enquirer is X.”
Eventually, when all the wounds had been bound up and the broken furniture cleared away, we did give out advice. It was hedged by a lot of qualifiers, but when someone is relying on your advice to make an important decision in their lives, can you justify refusing to give them the benefit of your past experience/knowledge? Especially if you are holding yourself out as an expert, and that’s why they contacted you in the first place.
As adults, we are responsible for ourselves. When it comes down to it, there is a point at which you have to trust your enquirer (or client, or whatever) to do their own thinking, and to understand that you do not have a crystal ball.
You are not making promises – you are giving them a professional opinion, and that opinion is based on what you know and the situation as it now is. They can then take that opinion into account when making their own decisions, because when you’re lost, even a pointer in the right general direction is better than the equivalent of “Beats me, mate; figure it out for yourself.”
In the end, a professional opinion is the equivalent of “This is where I think you are now; this is where most people go from here, and this is where I think you’ll end up if you go on as you are.” If your client then sits down in the road and doesn’t stir another step, or goes off cross-country, then of course they aren’t going to end up where you predicted. But that’s their choice. Life is full of choices, and all we can do is give people the information they need to make informed choices.
By withholding that information, and the benefit of our experience, we are denying our clients the opportunity to make their own informed choices.
It’s scary – but then, is it fair to stay safe yourself and make the client take all the risks without any safety-net?
I wish all writers could read what you have to say here. I don’t shy away from giving market advice and offering a realistic look at how a writer may fair when approaching agents and editors with a specific project. I have directly told some writers their only hope of getting a particular book published is to do it themselves. So, from a hard-line business perspective, it’s not an issue. I offer professional opinions multiple times a day.
In the cases I mean to address with this post, writers are looking to wash away what amounts to a very difficult existential problem with a bottom-line ranking or verdict from a third party. They do in fact want to delegate their choice or their responsibility to my judgment—they want to be off the hook.
I know what a writer is looking for when they ask for a specific number or ranking, and it’s to eliminate the fear and risk they might make a wrong decision or get hurt. I can’t say definitively whether their pursuits will pay off and they should continue or if they’re unlikely to make it as a writer. It’s why I often end up talking with writers about their expectations and motivations for writing, what they want to get out of it, and how to look at the long-term nature of their writing and publishing career.
Yes. Essentially agreeing, what I think is important for people to understand is how empowering not getting a purely definitive answer is, because it gives YOU some degree of control. Absolutely, expert opinions are vital pieces of information on which to base decisions and actions, but at least those decisions and actions are yours and not thrust upon you by some rigid categorization that’s really unknowable anyway.
As a chiropractor, I try to express this to people every day. Yes, you have an injury and/or some degree of degenerative change in your spine, hip, shoulder (reality), that is something you will likely always need to manage (educated opinion), but there are LOADS of tools for your box to do so (medical therapies, alternative therapies, lifestyle choices, etc), and new ones being developed all the time. There will always be some progression of degeneration and limitation of matter, but at least you have some say in your prognosis.
As a writer, I sought an assessment of my memoir from a professional editor, which is more subjective than spinal degeneration for sure, but she delivered, not with it’s great or it sucks, or a scale of 1-10, but by saying “the bones are there” (as close to a literary x-ray as you can get, I think) but it needs work if publication is the goal (educated opinion), and these are some strengths, and these are some weaknesses to manage. (She didn’t need to tell me about the LOADS of tools in a writer’s box!) There will always be hurdles in writing, and limitations of ability, but at least I have some say about what my memoir will ultimately look like, and what my goals for it are in the first place.
As a person, I’ve felt challenged, but in control and hopeful, and I’ve felt utterly out of control and hopeless. It’s like the difference between climbing a mountain with proper gear and clear, if unpredictable, weather, and being buried alive. Control takes responsibility and effort, but I’ll take a mountain any day.
That is a very thoughtful response – thank you. It made me think that maybe the answer is to a) give a range (“I’d say about three to five”) rather than 4.125, and b) emphasize that this can only improve.
Ten years ago, I was new and had yet to learn the craft. Had I asked that question, I would have been discouraged by publishing experts. Oh, wait, I was (see: conference Read and Critique; see: premature submission to agents.) But what nobody could know was whether I was bullheaded enough to keep learning and trying. I was. My debut novel won an award. PS I hope you heal well and soon.
There’s always desk yoga.
But seriously, this is insightful. There are so many factors to “success” and nobody has a crystal ball.
Wow, Jane, I’m sharing this on FB and my website today. So thankful you put this out there. I know from my own quarter century of teaching creative writing that some of the people who initially exhibit the least talent later exhibit the most dogged discipline and go on to get into very competitive MFA programs, get published, etc. And some of the students who’ve had the most raw talent lack staying power, or are not interested in the long-term, hard, solitary, rejection-ridden work of being a writer. So while I believe a huge part of my job as a teacher and an editor is to ENCOURAGE, I also refrain from predicting the future for these writers, based on their early attempts. Keep at it, read voraciously, take classes, attend workshops and conferences, embrace revision, and don’t expect to be an overnight success in any endeavor. Ann Patchett addresses this in one of the essays in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage: “Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration? Chances are, any child who stays with an instrument for more than two weeks has some adult making her practice, and any child who sticks with it longer than that does so because she understands that practice makes her play better and that there is a deep, soul-satisfying pleasure in improvement. If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, “I’ll be playing in Carnegie Hall next month!” you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker. Perhaps you’re thinking here that playing an instrument is not an art itself but an interpretation of the composer’s art, but I stand by my metaphor. The art of writing comes way down the line, as does the art of interpreting Bach. Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story, learn from it, put it away, write another story. Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sediment. The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap. Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the freshwater underneath.”
I don’t know a better way to say it than that.
Neither do I! I need to go find that essay now. Wonderful.
This probably isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but here’s how one teacher answered this question, as told by Lawrence Block in “Telling Lies for Fun and Profit.”
https://touch.wattpad.com/16324712-yuffie's-writing-how-to's-do-you-have-the-fire-to
A fabulous parable.
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Jane, I love how you paralleled writing with health in this post. I think many writers who put in long hours understand pain and have had visits to the physical therapist. Yes, we are all different in our health journey. (I hope all goes well with your PT.) Your comment is so true, “I don’t know how to rank most writers because I can’t say how well prepared you are to overcome the difficulties in the writing life.” Overcoming the difficulties. Have you used this as a starting point in some of those uncomfortable conversations? I want to ask a bunch of questions but am stopping myself. Great post!
Thanks, Alonna. I definitely talk about the “long game” and that most people don’t see their early efforts succeed—or that it takes several manuscripts before they’ll hit on something that they would consider a success. For most, this is discouraging, but opens up a useful conversation about why one writes in the first place. As Patchett says (quoted above by Melanie), you have to be driven by reasons that outlast the setbacks and make the many years of work intrinsically worth it to you regardless of the outcome.
Thank you, Jane, for writing about two topics that affect so many of us: hip/back pain and this very difficult question. I understand why writers ask it, too—and still dread it!
In addition to the terrific stories shared by Melanie and Steve above, I found this piece by agent Kristin Nelson helpful. As she says, “Overnight success is a fabrication created by media outlets because it makes for a good story.” So true! http://nelsonagency.com/2016/05/what-is-your-magic-number/
This article from Writer Unboxed is also relevant. Though I have yet to send it to a writer who’s asked if she has talent, it reminds me how tough this question is to answer, and how I can always offer to help take her work to the next level, whatever this level may be. http://writerunboxed.com/2014/05/24/do-i-have-writing-talent-youre-asking-the-wrong-question/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WriterUnboxed+%28Writer+Unboxed%29
Both great articles, Sangeeta. Thank you!