Unfortunately, I would still like to win things
More specifically, how do you measure a serious achievement in a creative field?
This was not a problem I had when I was employed. Corporate life, for all its many crimes against the human spirit, is remarkably considerate in this particular department. It tells you where you are through titles, promotions, salaries, bonuses, performance ratings, awards, and invitations to meetings you previously weren't important enough to attend. There is an entire infrastructure dedicated to answering the question: Am I doing well?
Then I decided to become a writer. What an idiotic profession to choose if you enjoy measurement. I have been writing seriously for a while now, and I still cannot tell you what constitutes a serious creative achievement.
Is it getting published? That seems too easy because, technically, I am published. Is it getting published somewhere prestigious? Fine, how prestigious?
Maybe it is winning a competition, except then I have to decide which competitions count. Maybe it is selling a thousand books, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand. Maybe I need an important critic to review me, an invitation to a literary festival, or, for the ultimate delayed gratification, someone to write a thesis about my work twenty-seven years after my death. At some point I realised I had simply recreated the corporate ladder, except this one had no HR department kind enough to publish the promotion criteria.
This is inconvenient. Especially because I apparently still want a promotion.
The seductive little scoreboard
Fortunately, the internet has attempted to solve this problem for us by giving us numbers. Followers, subscribers, likes, views, shares, sales, rankings. Thank God, finally something I can put into a spreadsheet.
There is something enormously comforting about numbers because numbers remove ambiguity. If 3,000 people read something I wrote and 300 people read something else, presumably the first thing was ten times better. Except, of course, it wasn't. Anyone who publishes things online for long enough eventually encounters the deeply irritating experience of watching something they spent three weeks writing disappear quietly into the internet while an observation they typed on the toilet receives more attention than anything they have ever made.
The market has spoken. Unfortunately, the market appears to be drunk. Still, that doesn't mean I can conveniently declare numbers meaningless simply because I don't like what they tell me.
Selling books matters if I would like writing books to eventually pay for things. Readership matters if my intention is to be read. Recognition matters because publications, prizes, editors and other people with audiences can introduce my work to people who would otherwise never encounter it. But these things seem to measure circulation more reliably than they measure achievement.
I think I had confused the two.
Perhaps seriousness is institutional
There is another answer I find much more attractive because I am unfortunately susceptible to official-looking things. A serious creative achievement happens when somebody credible says it happened. A literary prize, fellowship, residency, respected publication, or publisher choosing your manuscript from a pile of manuscripts certainly feels more legitimate than accumulating likes.
There has, supposedly, been judgment involved. Someone whose taste we have collectively agreed to respect has looked at the work and said: Yes. This one. I won't pretend this means nothing to me because it means quite a lot.
Rejection also means quite a lot, despite every creative person insisting that it shouldn't. There is a peculiar psychological torture involved in making something privately and then submitting it to strangers whose identities you may not even know. You send them a piece of yourself disguised as a PDF attachment, and several months later receive an email beginning with some variation of Thank you for your submission. You already know how the next paragraph begins.
So yes, being chosen matters. But I have also spent enough of my previous life inside institutions to know how frighteningly ordinary the rooms in which important decisions are made actually are. There is no divine apparatus inside them.
There are people. People have preferences, get tired, disagree, misunderstand things, champion things for reasons other people don't understand, and occasionally overlook something wonderful. A jury can contain expertise without becoming an objective measuring instrument. The existence of judges does not transform taste into mathematics.
Which creates an extremely annoying possibility: you can make excellent work and lose. You can also make mediocre work and win. Fuck. There goes that scoreboard too.
The achievement nobody can see
There is another category of creative achievement that is almost impossible to announce publicly without sounding ridiculous: you became better. That's it. Something you couldn't do before, you can do now.
Last year you couldn't write a dialogue and now you can. Six months ago you would have explained what the character was feeling; now you know when to shut up. You finally deleted the beautiful paragraph that was destroying the story. You learned that sometimes the clever sentence is the exact sentence that needs to die.
You learned how to finish things. You also learned how to abandon things, which turns out to be an entirely different skill. Your taste improved faster than your ability, you suffered terribly in the gap between the two, and eventually your ability moved a little closer.
Most importantly, you wrote something that would have been impossible for the previous version of you to write. Nobody gives you a trophy for this. There is no LinkedIn notification announcing Hanifah Ahmad has reached 5 years of not over-explaining metaphors. Congratulate Hanifah!
And yet this might be the most consequential form of progress available to a creative person. Prizes expire, algorithms change, publications disappear and people forget books. But once your standards have changed, it becomes very difficult to return to not knowing what you now know. Your internal floor has moved.
That seems serious to me.
Unfortunately, I would still like to win things
Here is where essays about creativity usually become dishonest. Having established that external validation is unreliable, I am now supposed to announce that I have liberated myself from it. I create for myself, I don't care about recognition, the work is the reward, et cetera.
Lovely. I would also like to win.
I want the publication. I want the prize. I want someone whose work I respect to read mine and think it is good. I want strangers to encounter something I wrote without knowing who I am and decide that it deserves their attention.
I don't think wanting these things corrupts the work. Ambition isn't automatically vanity, and pretending not to want something does not make you more artistically pure. I suspect it mostly makes you annoying.
The danger begins when recognition becomes the only evidence that the work was worth making. Then every creative project becomes an application, every story is secretly auditioning, and every essay sits around waiting for applause. Eventually you stop asking Is this interesting? and start asking Will this succeed?
Those are not the same question. Worse, the second one is usually impossible to answer.
So what counts?
I think I have arrived at an irritatingly plural answer. A serious creative achievement probably requires several scoreboards operating simultaneously. For someone who spent almost two decades scoring things I should have expected this from the getgo.
There is craft: Did I make something better than I could have made before? There is completion: Did I actually finish the fucking thing? There is risk: Did I attempt something whose failure would at least teach me something?
Then there is recognition: Did people with informed judgment find value in it? There is reach: Did the work travel beyond the room in which it was made? And perhaps most importantly, there is continuation: Did making this create the conditions for making the next thing?
None of these alone seems sufficient. A thousand unpublished masterpieces sitting permanently in someone's drafts folder constitute a strange kind of achievement. So does producing fifty commercially successful books while never attempting anything that frightens you. So does collecting awards until you become terrified of writing something unworthy of the person who won them.
Perhaps seriousness isn't a particular outcome at all. Perhaps it is accumulated evidence. A body of work exists where previously there was none.
The work becomes more ambitious. Some of it fails spectacularly, some quietly works, and occasionally somebody notices. Years later, you look backwards and realise that the person who made the first thing could not have made the latest thing.
And then you make another one.
Creative life, rather inconveniently, requires building your own ladder and then deciding whether the height you're climbing towards was ever worth reaching in the first place.
Maybe that's what makes it serious.