What is success?

An email this morning ended with, "...and that's why you're successful."

Funny, I don't feel successful. No, that's not quite right. I feel more marginal and invisible than I was in the 1980s, for example, when I did feel successful. If I were "successful" today, I wouldn't meet people who were fans of my plays twenty years ago and who ask me, Are you still writing? Clearly I'm not as "visible" as I once was. My name isn't as widely known as it once was. I'm not the subject of magazine profiles as often as I once was. I haven't signed an autograph on a book in a very long time. Is all this a measure of success/failure?

There's one yardstick that would say, Not at all! My own. That is, in my own estimation of my own work, with all its inevitable biases, I'm a better writer today than I was 20 years ago. Visibility and size of fan base are other issues entirely, driven by forces unrelated to whether the work is "better" than before or not. Thinking you're better but also feeling more marginal is an irritant but not significant beyond that.

I suppose it's that question, Are you still writing?, that ticks me off. Another thing is, I was spoiled early in my career. Playwrights almost never, never, get the security of being a playwright-in-residence with a theater company, with a yearly slot devoted to their work, but I had this luxury through most of the 80s at two different companies. A hard act to follow!

Today, with a de facto video company that seems to have materialized without any plan to create it, I actually have more artistic resources and freedom than ever before, once again (as when a resident playwright) blessed to write for the talents of particular actors. The actor, after all, is the building block of script storytellers, whether writing for stage or screen. Now this feels like success.

And then there's the issue of money. Money is a standard measure of success in our culture. The income curve of any writer is uneven and often unpredictable, and that hasn't changed. I haven't written a "fat" project for a while, and I've abandoned journalism, long a significant source of income. The video projects are completely without commercial intent or projection. You don't make money writing posthumous plays ha ha. Income is only an issue with me in screenwriting, where I am consciously trying to write another "fat" project. But it's not something I lose any sleep over.

I'm in the best place of my career. So why this lack of feeling successful? I suppose, again, because I had so much visibility so early. The first one-act play I ever wrote placed in a national contest. I was flown across the country and treated like a big shot. This can be heady stuff. In the 80s, my work was treated by many critics and reviewers with admiration, respect -- and expectations which I didn't realize.

Expectations. One thing I can say about my career is that I've followed my own interests rather than follow up on potential possibilities. I began in fiction. When three of my short stories made the Roll of Honor in "Best American Short Stories," this suggested a future in fiction. So what do I do? I abandon it. I write plays. Even in the 80s, when my plays were getting attention, what do I do? I abandon traditional theater and spend a decade focused on hyperdrama, an upstream endeavor if ever there was one. I've never done what's "best" for my career if "success" as usually measured were a goal.

The thing is, I wouldn't change a thing. The 80s were great -- it was good to experience all that. It was good to have some stranger reporter call you on the phone and ask your opinion about something just because you are "someone." But it's easy to see how that would become a big pain in the butt if overdone. I'm not a very social animal. I probably don't have the constitution to be "successful" ha ha.

Our culture is a culture that rewards stars. The arts are star-driven, and that's a very small party. Anyone in a band, any painter, any writer, any actor, knows of someone more famous than they whose work is no better, and even worse, than one's own. It's a crap shoot, and if you're lucky, you get some attention. You get attention in small ponds or bigger ponds, a few even in major ponds. If you are a star like Doris Lessing, you write a new novel and send it to your own publisher under a pseudonym and get it rejected. It's not the novel they respond to, it's the name of the author, the star.

Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.

I suppose the best sense in which I am successful is that, even as an old fart, I am still doing what I do. And I can count on two hands the years in which I've held your ordinary 9 to 5 day job -- and in this culture, avoiding the daily work routine is surely a measure of something! Somehow or other, I've managed to survive doing mostly what I want to do the way I want to do it. Let's call this "success" and be done with it.