The Iceberg
A letter to all writers
It is well-known that because ice had a density of 0.92, a lump of it will float in water with more than nine-tenth of its volume under water. Which explains the meaning of the expression ‘tip of the iceberg’. The iceberg is an excellent metaphor for that which one doesn’t see.
Take our own trade, if I can call it that: writing. We write mainly because we are impelled by forces within us, which we cannot control. It is said that everybody has a novel in them, although the majority among us will write nothing more than letters or notes of absence for one’s children. Some of us call ourselves writers, although the great majority do not write for a living. Only a small minority, perhaps less than one percent of writers aspirant ever get published, and of these a very small fraction will gain fame and fortune as a best-selling author. For every writer who makes it, a hundred more are toiling at the chalkface, driving a bus or stacking shelves at Tesco’s.
The bulk of us write and collect rejection slips. We spend a fortune on fees to enter our stories, poems etc in competitions. Should we win one, we might be lucky and meet a literary agent at the prize-giving ceremony, and a door is open to us, but writing competitions are commercial businesses, whose aim is to make money for their owners or share-holders. Typically the well-known ones will receive 20,000 entries bringing in £15 each, and will have one winner and perhaps three runner-ups. Do the Maths.
It is a common belief among aspiring authors that (a) many successful writers, here meaning those whose books get published and they make a lot of money, are not really all that good, and (b) many who never get to see their work in print are very talented, but were unlucky, in that they could not get a literary agent, or their oeuvre remained on a massive stack, unread in the dusty basement of publishing houses. Both these hypotheses have some truth, but realistically it must be true that a successful book must have been written by someone with talent, and that an unpublished book was probably not up to scratch, however great the effort put in its creation.
I assume that like me, you would claim to be worthy of publication, but have not yet struck gold. And very likely never will. So have we been losing our time and making ourselves sick with envy and depression, nursing grudges against the whole world for not recognising our genius?
I claim the answer is no.
True we might deserve recognition and success, and have missed out, but that was not a tragedy. It is a fact of life. The material success, the money, the fame, the prizes, the interviews, the pictures in the glossies, are the tip of the iceberg, the part of the process of writing which is visible to the whole world, but who can measure the other components? The joy of coming up with an idea, the pleasure of sitting at one’s desk and writing out the first line of a story, the elation as a character in your story becomes more credible, the rapture as the second line bursts forth and the rest gushes out, the ecstasy of stumbling on a new and apt metaphor. The relief and joy as a defective paragraph is amended into a healthy one by dint of nurturing, chopping and changing_ a process akin to convalescence of a sick child. The feeling of being alive as the story takes a life of its own and dictates itself to you until the end, every aspect credible and viable, at least to you. A feeling akin to procreation. Not a human life, but the next best thing, a fully developed idea. The euphoria at the end when what you have produced has become a credible entity, even if it’s only to you, even if no one else will read it. All these form part of the invisible nine-tenth that will forever stay hidden to the outside world.
