Failure is Our Muse—a New York Times Sunday Review essay on Writers—Fails to Address Muse

Stephen Marche says that “Three hundred thousand books are published in the United States every year. A few hundred, at most, could be called financial or creative successes. The majority of books by successful writers are failures.” He says that a writer’s greatest virtue may be persistence, but considering the likelihood of failure, it is a virtue almost “indistinguishable from stupidity.”

However, that’s not the worst of it, since even literary success may be ultimately attributable not to the writer, but to the writer’s muse (or, in Henry James’s phrase, “the madness of art”). And this is not just with “literary” novelists. A successful detective novelist may speak of discovering her books—that her future books may already have been written—since her muse always knows what’s going to happen next before she does.