Writers' careers

Barry Malzberg to Mike Resnick, in the Summer 2005 issue of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Bulletin:

"...as my friend Carter Scholz noted years ago "There is no career path for writers" and that cannot be uttered strongly or repetitively enough. There is no career path for writers, most writers, as Nelson Algren said, kind of fall into it, come to writing as a means of not having been successful (or not feeling successful) somewhere else and even then they just kind of wander around. Careers begin, advance, go into inexplicable retrograde, collapse, soar, seemingly out of the writers' control; they are unpredictable most of all to those having them and yesterday provides little clue to tomorrow in career terms (maybe a little moreso in terms of fulfilling contracts). That dense and tangled wood in which Dante's protagonist found himself distinctly resembles the world of the writer. . . Dr. Angst makes home visits. Of course you will deny this circumstance in your own life, but, as a I wrote a long time ago...you write from the authority of success, I from the authority of failure, and failure, old pal and comrade, can teach you a few goddamned things that success never will."