The most important thing a writer can do for themselves is define their own success. That word immediately resonates differently with different people. Is it selling millions of copies? Ruling BookTok? Or is it writing the books you want to write the best you can?

What is success to you as a writer?

There are a million ways to achieve success. There is no one answer except perhaps there is no one answer. That’s why you have to know what success means to you because if you don’t, someone else will define it. You will almost certainly never meet their standard.

Your standard is all that matters.

When we first act on the artistic impulse within us, it’s pure. You want to tell a story. Maybe you simply love story. Maybe you like to make people laugh or cry or think. Whatever the case is, you are doing what you are made to do. Later, this gets complicated. You want to be a good writer. A great one, if possible.

Someone has told you that you are and you need to get an MFA because there is no money in writing but you can teach. Or perhaps someone has told you that you aren’t any good and you’re going to prove them wrong one way or another. Perhaps you see your favorite authors achieve critical and commercial success and think, I can do that. I want to do that.

How do I do that?

When I was younger, I wanted commercial and critical success. Really what I wanted was validation and recognition, because there wasn’t any in my life. I was manifestly intelligent, with an advanced reading level that served me as a writer, but I got tagged with being ‘lazy’ and ’stupid’ early on because I didn’t understand things. I took too long to do them. This was because I was autistic.

Except no one knew it, including me.

I could never tie my shoes. Even now, in middle age, it remains the white whale of my existence. I can do it, but it’s kind of like me wrapping presents. You don’t want me to do it. On the first day of kindergarten, I struggled greatly with completing an assignment. The first assignment ever! We each had to take a box with an activity in it and then put it back. I understand that now; I didn’t then because Ms. Phoebe didn’t explain it to me. At least in a way I understood. Finally, toward the end of the day, I figured it out and finished. This repeated a pattern throughout grade school; I finished assignments until the last minute, leaving teachers to question my engagement, my intelligence, and worse.

I was never going to be successful in grade school. The system in the 1980s ensured that. Regardless if I had been diagnosed back then, I would have suffered the same struggles. It was only when I got to university and I could structure my own education to some degree that I found any equilibrium.

Even then, I struggled with doing too much or taking the wrong courses because I couldn’t ever untangle what I wanted – to become a writer – from what I thought I had to do – become a successful writer. I had to sell a novel by a certain age (25, and then 30, and then…). I had to find an agent. I had to prove that I wasn’t lazy or stupid or a fool for pursuing a dream I would never achieve.

And I was well-positioned to achieve my dream.

I graduated from the University of Iowa as an undergrad (the famed Writer’s Workshop never took undergrads into the MFA, at least back then). I studied with the Irish Writing Program at Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland. I made great friends. Met wonderful writers. I had opportunities. I had talent. It was unformed and ingrown thanks to being an undiagnosed autistic, but I had potential.

That potential produced some success in the early 2000s. I sold several short stories and then on a pitch, my first novel, in 2006. I was on the track that I expected to be on. That track derailed in 2011 when it became clear that the publisher would never release the book and had misled me every step of the way. The fallout induced a block in me that nearly undid me as a writer. I was hurt, humiliated, confused, and much of that stemmed from a sense I had failed at achieving success as it had been prescribed to me. Sell stories. Sell a book. Get published. Conquer the world.

It didn’t happen.

All through that experience and college as well, I bumped up against those expectations. I bounced off them the same way I did Ms. Phoebe’s aggrieved boredom with my inability to complete this simple activity. I desperately wanted to complete it, to get Ms. Phoebe to like me. Success; validation.

I also didn’t care at all.

This didn’t make sense to me at the time. Nothing in school, on the playground, at home, or in the spaces between made any sense to me. None of the expectations life held for me interested me, either. I only wanted to do the one thing and one thing only I am good at in life.

I wanted to write.

When I see writers today of any age or background struggle and suffer, I feel for them. I know what that is. When you work your entire life, every day, to realize a dream you have held onto since before you can remember, failure does more than bruise. Failure breaks. The sad reality is for most of us that we will never achieve the kind of success that some authors do. We will never be bestsellers; we will never win awards; we will never get published.

In the past, the odds against success proved more suffocating than they do now. So many more options exist for writers and artists of all stripes thanks to how technology has democratized the arts. You can self-publish and make money. You can be a best-seller. You can produce a book no agent or publisher could ever make sense of, but it’s yours, it exists, someone will love it.

You can author your own destiny in a way you simply never could before.

That’s why defining what success means to you is so critical. For me, I always knew I wanted to write the books I wanted to write (i.e. strange things that straddle the lines between genres). I lucked out, in some sense, in selling a book at all. I may still sell to a traditional publisher in the future, though that hasn’t been my goal for a long time. My goal is to write the books I want to write the best I can. I want to create. I want to produce books and make something that never existed before. I want to make my own way, like I always did, regardless if Ms. Phoebe, my mother, or anyone appreciates it.

Ask yourself a simple question: What do you want?

Be honest. Do you want to write a bestseller? There are plenty of resources available to help you do that. They will also in most cases tell you there is only one way to do it. You will be chasing a market that is already eighteen months ahead of you in the publishing cycle. That will narrow your prospects for success even more and only heighten the sense of failure when it most likely doesn’t happen.

Do you want to be the best writer you can be?

If you do, if you want to invest in the most valuable aspect of you – you – then there are no prescriptions. I can’t help you. Nor can any YouTuber or blogger. You can help yourself by reading. Read everything. Read things you don’t like and discover how your taste develops by putting things down. Take your favorite short story and transcribe it. Learn the patterns. Rhythms. Mechanics. Then forget about it.

Listen.

Listen to the world. The world is speaking to you. It’s giving you inspiration and energy and life. If all you’re listening to is how to do a very specific thing, you won’t hear all the possibilities singing around you.