I was filling out the GiftAid form at an Oxfam bookshop when the shop assistant/manager said: “Oh. I know that name. I've read your books!”
It was Christmas Eve. I was exhausted, on a day off after joining the Down for the Count Swing Orchestra on a very pleasant, very full national tour (TL;DR: it's part of my job now). This total stranger's remark, on the tail-end of a mostly difficult twelve months, felt like a fever dream. I may have thanked him too much before floating away.
I'm doing that thing where I'm reflecting on the year.
I generally try not to dwell on the past, or the passage of time. I prefer to see years as no more than an arbitrary collection of days containing events or non-events. But something about 2024 provoked extreme emotions and responses in me, so here I am reflecting on them.
While it's been a year full of beautiful moments, I think it will always be characterised in my mind as the period when my mental and physical health took an unexpected backflip downstairs. Yes, I did more travelling than I've ever done in a single year before. I had reunions with multiple old friends and made lots of lovely new ones. I was cast in two plays, was nominated for an award, recited poems at poetry nights and told tales at storytelling nights, and was invited to lecture and hold writing workshops with uni students. But for every such high came countless more days of feeling lost, directionless and hopeless. And that’s apart from my emotional response to Trump’s return and Palestine’s obliteration by Israel.
The new novel I've spent years working on has led to nothing but dead ends. Being rejected, ghosted or even ignored by publishers and agents is nothing new to me, but this one simply felt like one blow too many. As I always do, I put it on the back burner to focus on a new project. I then felt my spirits soar as I started work on a brand new one-man show. A topic I’m passionate about! The chance to play with form, and multimedia! SCORE!
But then came another blow: my two London performances of a horror storytelling set brought me a grand total of twelve audience members. I know there are many reasons why people might not attend: it's an expense during a cost-of-living crisis; they might get freaked out by scary stories; they might be otherwise engaged; due to Musk and Zuckerberg's algorithms, there's even a high chance they saw none of my posts about it. But I know that many more than a dozen people did see them. My show cost a fraction of what the average person spends at a bar or pub. I'd been promoting for months. Shelled out cash I could've saved on Facebook advertising. To be plain, I lost money. With this knowledge came that niggling thought: the vast majority of my solo performances do not attract a crowd. Even in group events, when I do a reading or recite poems or tell a folktale, there is generally nobody in the audience who's come for me. It's a harsh truth to accept, but admitting harsh truths to yourself is something masochists like to do.
“You're still working a day job?” more than one person has asked me incredulously in the past few years. “I thought you were writing full-time.”
How? How can a person write full-time when, on the one hand, writers get paid farthings from their published works (unless they're topping the charts for weeks) and on the other, people don't buy their books or attend their performances? People rarely succeed without support. Creatives need all the support they can get.
I don’t say this with the intention of Mediterranean-grandma guilt-tripping. I know the pain of having to decide what to spend money on (personally, I choose to travel because it's an escape — that makes me happy, that's worth something). Obviously, money helps a struggling artist, and I'll ramble more on that another time. But so does a ‘like’ on a post, a share, a rating, a recommendation. It doesn't take much to alter someone's odds. Maybe people assume I don’t need this support, because they incorrectly assume I’m rolling in cash from books that aren’t troubling the charts and shows that aren’t filling venues.
It's a disembodying thought that on paper, on a phone screen, I may look “successful” to the untrained eye. There have certainly been moments where I've known success. This year alone: unexpectedly having thirty-five people attend the debut performance of my very personal storytelling show about Cyprus, which went on to be nominated for an award at Buxton Fringe. Bowing to the applause at the end of ‘Strangers On A Train’, a show not written or directed by me which people attended. That head-spinning moment in the Oxfam bookshop.
I feel I’ve been open about my failures, however cringe that makes me and despite being advised not to. There are people who'll want to spin my first two books going out of print as a success story, in that I managed to get them published in the first place. This attitude feels, to me, more indicative of laziness (“Don't know how to make you feel better, here's a platitude”) or a desire to be absolved (“I never bought your flop book either”). Refusing to see my first two books as successes is not, in my mind, a sign of ingratitude on my part but of realism. It’s not self-pity but plain speaking. (OK, maybe with a bit of self-pity.)
Of course, I'm grateful that they were published. But it's also true that they weren't successes. They came out, had little to no effect on the literary landscape, and now they're out of print. Yes, it's unhealthy to compare yourself to other creatives — different folks will be on different paths, it’s true. But when others’ work gets national coverage, featured on numerous lists, or talked about on social media by people who consumed but never did the same for your own work, you can delineate success and arrive at your conclusion: you've failed to make your mark, while they haven't. A harsh truth to accept, but truth it is.
The tricky thing is those goalposts, because they do move. I've heard authors and theatre-makers complain about things I wish I could complain about — and I'm sure I'm annoying the fuck out of writers who've come close but not achieved a published, or even completed, novel. But I try not to begrudge anyone their gripes. You have to set a bar for yourself about what counts as a success in order to feel you're making progress. Otherwise, you risk stagnating in the self-congratulatory complacency of “You're a winner for trying.” But when the only time people show interest in your work is when it's been mentioned in a magazine or been nominated for a prize, it only reinforces the height of that bar. Or the width of those goalposts, whatever the metaphor is here.
Confronting and analysing failure means understanding what's worked and what hasn't. Which doesn't necessarily point to lack of quality or graft. But it means possibly knowing which projects to prioritise, and where you can conserve energy. And that might mean postponing or even retiring what hasn't worked, or will likely lose you more time and money than it's literally worth.
Maybe, for me, peace and contentment lie in ditching the one-man shows. To make things only for my own consumption, for the sheer enjoyment of doing so, in cute cafes overseas. But without audiences or readers, I'd still need some way to measure my success. It may be the internalised capitalism talking, but I want to know I'm getting better at what I'm producing. Otherwise what's the point?
This was all a roundabout way of saying that you can make a success of failure. Or: without failure, how can we ever know we've had success?
Thank you, kind person in the Oxfam bookshop. May you have a good year.
Hi Polis, I'm so sorry you've had such a difficult year. There seems no logic sometimes as to who 'makes it' and who doesn't. It certainly doesn't always seem related to talent or merit. People who say you've just got to keep going, or do it for yourself because it's something you love doing, have no idea, I mean, what is the point in shouting into a void? Unfortunately, social media has facilitated so much free art, that people now expect it for nothing, and stuff that is free is never valued. AI is only going to feed that demand. I hope you find a form/ platform this year that fulfills you, with less self-promotion required, and a decent level of remuneration that satisfies you. I hope 2025 is the year for your star to rise. 💕
As one of those dozen, I was very happy to see you perform your new show. I understand not wanting to rest on past laurels, but I wouldn't want to see you give up entirely. Happy to chat about maybe alternative ways or formats your one man shows could take, if that's of interest? Chin up ❤️ and happy new year.