Writers and other artists are uniquely disadvantaged in the face of competition. We can pull the same hours as a suit on Wall Street, but unlike the businessman we’ll only be as productive as our inner muses will allow. You can’t just point at someone and go, “You over there–create art” and expect him to come up with a work of value. Art is a distinctly different entity from the artist. The artist can work as hard as he or she likes, but the art will take its own sweet time.

This problem is made worse by the fact that we live in a culture in which Warhol’s famous statement “everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes” has become literal. You create something, and people enjoy it. And then they move onto the next thing. And these days, the “next thing” comes every few minutes, if not seconds. So if you want to stand out, you must continue to create, and create again, and then create some more. And pray that your muse can keep up.

In a recent guest article for The View From Here Magazine, Incwriters founder Andrew Oldham spends some quality time discussing the detrimental effects of competition on craft:

It is a cheap lie that competition creates choice; it kills craft and creates carbon copies. Now, a whole new generation of writers and poets want to be next Terry Pratchett or JK Rowling. Rarely do they want to be the first of something new.
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Readers feel inadequate that they are not well read compared to other readers. Poets rage at why their poems are rejected while another poet they know is always published. Writers seethe at not being having that big but simple idea that Terry Pratchett or JK Rowling had. We call this competitive spirit. Wrong. Inadequate spirit. True.

These are excellent points. But what would be the alternative to our competition-addled culture?

I can’t help but imagine a world devoid of competition, wherein everyone collaborated and everyone supported each other. Every author had his or her work read, and in turn that author would read everyone else’s work. Kind of like literary communism. Rather than worry about fitting into a sort of literary mold that publishers know will sell books, writers living in this ideal world would have the freedom to just be themselves.

But then again: without competition, we wouldn’t have Joyce or Faulkner or Dickens. They wouldn’t have the opportunity to make their work known amidst the countless other works of fiction out there. Without competition, writers might be less motivated to hone their craft, because what would be the point if everyone’s work was read regardless of quality. Without competition, we might not have modernism, or dada, or surrealism. We might not have flarf, or microfiction, or for better or worse, Twitterature.

So what’s better: literary communism or, uh, literary capitalism? I tend to think competition has been far more beneficial to the art of fiction than it has been harmful. But that doesn’t mean our personal struggles with competition are made any easier.

Here’s another famous quote: Hemingway once said, “I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.” And yet he’s one of the best-known writers of all time. I’d like to believe that this is because Hemingway was a man of his own convictions, who put his passion for his craft above his desire to succeed. And because it’s considerably easier to change our personal mentality than to change the entire publishing industry, I suppose taking a leaf out of Hemingway’s book is the best thing we can do for ourselves as writers: concentrate on our craft first, and our careers second.