Something to prove

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice — they all make fine fuel.

Edna Ferber

So many fine writers were outcasts in high school. They were bullied, picked on, rejected, ignored. And so later, when they try their hand at writing, they carry a grudge. They want to show them. The jocks and homecoming queens have just gotten older, while these aspiring writers keep pushing to excel and make a name for themselves.

Edna Ferber

As Edna Ferber put it, resentments and a sense of injustice make fine fuel for writers, giving them something to prove.

The flip side of this is that early success for a writer can ruin a promising career. What else is there to prove once one has written a best-seller? Harper Lee provides a good example. She published nothing after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her childhood friend, Truman Capote, wrote more, but nothing important after the success of In Cold Blood. There are numerous other examples of authors who produced nothing of significance after an early success.

In his book The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes remembers, "A Pulitzer committee member once told me that they'd hesitated to award this prize to a gifted twenty-five-year-old because — based on past experience — they knew that winning a Pulitzer too young could make a subsequent career seem anticlimactic. Nobel laureates in literature seldom write anything major thereafter."

Having something to prove can inspire writers, or anyone else, to greatness. When it has already been proven, what's the point?