Looking back, wanting to be famous was not a good ambition
How much time did that idea cost?
It’s difficult, when you’re good at something as a kid, to separate that from being told you’re good at it, and as such doing it more in order to gain the attention of others.
For my part I’m pretty sure that I would have filled notebooks with stories and poems and drawn violent comics even it were only a private secret passion, but as it happened being caught writing ‘Dreamlace’ or ‘Luize’ or ‘Fluffy’ – belated credit on the illustrations on the latter to my schoolfriend Nairn McBurney - was, once noticed in my small suburban Nottingham house, the subject of much maternal acclaim. So I did it all the more.
I’m trying to explain here how I arrived at university with the idea in my head that I could get famous through writing or at least being funny. I’ve written a lot about how that worked out for me (Spoiler: Not well).
Having thought it through carefully, I responded to this early setback of my desire to be famous with a desire to be famous at a later date.
As I’ve written about elsewhere, that sort of did happen a little, but the outstanding lesson I learnt from my few years of real limelight is that it tends to occur due to a confluence of things outside of your control, a combination of networks, timing and personal reputation. All the effort in the world can’t make up for an absence of even one of those factors, and I spent the decade which followed my brief early-2010s heyday pushing at London's firmly locked doors.
In the last few years, I have finally given up on the desire to be famous; I mean, for real, not just telling people I have because I didn’t want to jinx it.
This change of ambition coincided with this newsletter having a certain success – not fame, by any stretch, but certainly a dedicated enough readership to merit the term ‘persistent attention’.
Just like in those days of my pre-adolescent oeuvre, the acclaim motivated to me to keep going, these times even with a few quid thrown in, but above all what it motivated me to do was make the writing better. People are reading this, I thought, I better get it right. That wasn’t pressure. It was encouragement. And ironically, as the audience grew, I thought about its size less and less.
There was reputedly a maximum threshold of income, circa $75,000, after which an increase in money does not make a discernible impact on happiness. That conclusion is disputed, but it’s the kind of thing I’d like to believe. For I instinctively feel there may well be an audience size above which an increase in numbers brings only fairly marginal gains to a writer. Once you have enough people to make you feel you’re being read you’re basically a self-motivating writing unit. Additional people joining the party are, from that point on, much more of a ‘nice to have’.
What matters, once you have your people, is to deliver for them.
This is perhaps a rule for art. You start out with your talent – me with my scrawl-filled notebooks, six-year old Morrissey up on the table singing at family dos – and aim for the acclaim and love of the world. Maybe there’s something missing from your upbringing, or maybe love and acclaim are just intrinsically nice. You have energy when young, so the idea is that the ‘Look-at-me-ism’ of youth, coupled with its attendant physical vigour, carries you to some kind of celebrity; call this Bo Burnhamism, as it were.
Yet even for the biggest ham, if this attention is granted, the desire for it fades. Or is never satisfied sufficiently at all, and then the energy gradually fades to pursue it. I think of all the subjects most purely given to me as a writer, that transition from youth to adult maturity, and its sense of missing out, is most squarely my terrain.
It presents the question: Why, after the desire for acclaim has faded, continue to make art?