Success Guilt

Once, when I was young and true,
   Someone left me sad - 
Broke my brittle heart in two;
   And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
   Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
   And that, I think, is worse.
                       --Dorothy Parker

I was going to talk about description today, but something has been coming up over and over in blogs and in my personal experience that I'd like to explore a bit.

This issue first came up on an agent's blog. I read so many that, honestly, I can't say which one it was. The essence of the problem is this: unpublished authors are finding that once their colleagues get published, they suddenly become far less friendly, less helpful, even catty. And yet, on another blog, I read the exact opposite: unpublished authors suddenly became far less friendly once someone became published, and started saying nasty things behind her back. My first thought was "surely that doesn't happen all that often." But I heard it often enough, and from enough different sources, that it became evident there really was a problem.

Part of the reason I found this so shocking is that most of the people I've met since entering this world have been wonderful. Not all of them, of course, but the vast majority. Yes, even the agents and editors. Prevailing opinion seems to be:

a) unpublished authors are jealous of others' success
b) authors are only using one another on their way to becoming published--once they no longer feel they "need" the others, they drop them.

Now, I freely admit to being a bit of a misanthrope. It comes from years in retail and food service. But at the same time I am always happy and excited to meet people and make new friends, which I think comes from years of being a teacher. I want other people to be successful. In fact, I've been told at almost every job I've held that I made those I worked with work better and harder. I just can't imagine not wanting the people you've been friends with to be successful.

So I prefer to think about some of the strain of relationships between the unpublished and the newly published as the result of something along the lines of "success guilt." I've had this a couple of times in my life. One example: I had a great meeting with during a pitch session at a conference. A woman I'd met at the conference was going to see the same agent and when she came out and met up with me later, she was terribly depressed and even angry. Her session had not gone at all well.

So what did I do? Well, not everything the agent had told me was positive, even though I felt the session was a good one, so I concentrated on those aspects of the meeting and tried to tell this woman that constructive criticism had to be seen in that light--as constructive. I got together with her and tried to work out some strategies for changing some of the issues the agent had spotted, along with telling her some of the issues the agent had spotted for me, and asking her opinions on how I might solve them.

But I didn't say a word about the better parts of my meeting, the parts I found exciting. For some unknown reason I felt guilty about being successful where she was not.

The second kind of situation that makes me feel uncomfortable, if not exactly guilty: At conferences and in industry-related social situations, I've met authors terribly excited about getting an agent/publisher and signing with them, but I know--often because I'm more internet savvy than the authors in question--that they are not going to be happy in the long run because either the agent is a scam artist (or merely incompetent and likely unable to sell the work) or the publisher is a front for a vanity press. I don't want to rain on these people's parades, but I also want them to find a better agent, a better publisher. Basically, I want them to be successful and happy.

I don't know how to deal with these situations, which, I must admit, is an oddity for me. Sure, there are plenty of things I don't know how to do. I am horrible at firing people. While it's hard for me to take rejection, it's much harder for me to reject someone else.

But I trained early in life to be the peacemaker, the teacher, the person who brought order to chaos. Hey, everyone has a job, right? Those are the roles I was given, and I took them on willingly. So I can kind of see, if I were suddenly to have been accepted by an agent and/or a publisher, how I might feel a bit awkward around those who had not, especially if they'd been rejected by that same agent or publisher. I like to think it's that awkwardness that creates the tension both published and unpublished authors seem to be feeling.

How about you? Have you faced any of these issues? How did you deal with them?