As a teacher, I do not worry about the yucky little ego desires we all have as writers and students and citizens of New York trying so hard to get to that big big blockbuster status so we don't have to scrounge so much for time. (The cash money ego desires are less about finding that time to write actually--you can find that, if you want it, without a major cash infusion--than about avoiding all the interesting underbelly stuff, the vulnerability and fear of speaking the messy truth--those ego desires for huge bestsellerdom are far more often actually all about the desire for so much external approval that you're impermeable. Blech.)
When I teach my classes, I emphasize, instead, just really listening to the book that wants to get written, to what the right brain wants to say in the world. This endeavor is really the opposite of chick lit--and not just chick lit, but all kinds of books that are aiming to be a Botox doctor instead of an emergency room doctor.
Here, this is sort of what I'm talking about, from the New York Times:
Neither policymakers nor society at large need sympathize with the longing of millionaires to become billionaires. But we do need to worry about the effects on society as a whole when members of the educated elite think they are grossly underpaid. The more they feel as if they are losing ground against their peers, the more likely they are to ditch professions in which the pay is only good — like delivering babies — in favor of less useful careers in which the compensation is off the charts — like eliminating lines from wealthy people’s foreheads.
America has long had a problem attracting enough well-trained people to important but not particularly well-compensated positions, like public defender, social worker or teacher. But an era in which a cancer researcher moves over into health-care management consulting because the pay is better — as Louis Uchitelle reported in The Times this week — is something else entirely.
Part of the explanation is undoubtedly a tax code that has sent the incomes of the wealthiest sliver of the nation into hyperdrive. Another might be the spike in education costs, which send many new doctors, lawyers and scientists out into the world armed with a diploma and a six-figure debt. But the bottom line seems to be that in 21st-century America, more people can’t feel successful unless they’re making a killing.