A Cinderella story

On Friday, Betsy Morais, an Atlantic Magazine writer, asked "When does a writer become a writer?"

Some writers appear to come out of the chute as successes (see previous post about Jeffrey Eugenides). But many are the stories about writers who weren't appreciated or didn't achieve significant recognition until after they'd died.

Some writers, including Franz Kafka and Anton Chekov, are driven to toil away in what spare time they find outside their unrelated day jobs, seemingly with little hope of being published and even less of receiving awards or achieving bestseller status. Alexis Jenni was such a writer, filling pages with prose on the weekends when he wasn't filling young minds with information about physiology, ecology and the theory of evolution. So the 48-year-old was stunned in early November when he won France's top literary prize; it wasn't even on his radar.














Morais writes:
"In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or the conviction of having something to say. A writer is not defined by his career, but the simple act of writing regularly. And authors who found success through the muck of making ends meet have taken that approach for some time now, in practice at least."

I guess the answer to Morias' question is: when someone practices "... the simple act of writing regularly."

An interesting aside: Jenni apparently received his share of publishers' rejections and then didn't bother to submit one manuscript. He sent his award-winning manuscript to only one publisher, which took a chance on Jenni. But many also are the stories of the rejections received by now-famous authors, including Kurt Vonnegut and Vladimir Nabokov. The Atlantic has compiled a few such gems as evidence that publishers don't always recognize what they receive in the myriad of manila envelopes that cross their desks. Or in the plethora of PDF files that fill their inboxes.