{"id":31852,"date":"2025-07-29T13:00:16","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T13:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/31852\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T13:00:16","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T13:00:16","slug":"is-pitching-a-novel-all-that-different-from-shark-tank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/31852\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Pitching a Novel All That Different From \u201cShark Tank\u201d?\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books & the Arts<\/a><\/p>\n

\/
\n July 29, 2025<\/p>\n

Alex Higley\u2019s True Failure, which dramatizes one man\u2019s dream to pitch his business idea on reality TV, slyly compares this bathetic task to publishing literary fiction.<\/p>\n

Ad Policy<\/a><\/p>\n

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An episode of Shark Tank, 2015. <\/p>\n

(Adam Rose \/ Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

One recent morning, looking for a distraction, I devoted myself to the spreadsheet where I track my fiction submissions. I added some new literary magazines and deleted the defunct ones. I updated submissions windows and word counts. I categorized the nice rejections I\u2019d received: the generic (We enjoyed this), the semi-personalized (This one made it to our final round), and, finally, the ones that included a specific critique\u2014which at least served as evidence that some human somewhere had read what I\u2019d written. The spreadsheet, which always bums me out the longer I spend time with it, would help me determine where to send my latest short story, the first one I\u2019d finished in months. But by the time that I was done\u2014having spent all this time laying out plans for placing this new story somewhere\u2014it was suddenly lunch, and I hadn\u2019t done any actual writing. When I\u2019m in the spreadsheet, I forget what I originally set out to do: I find myself believing that my ultimate goal is to publish, when I know the real goal is simply to write something good.<\/p>\n

This confusion\u2014about what it means to succeed\u2013\u2013is at the heart of Alex Higley\u2019s True Failure. Ben, the novel\u2019s protagonist, sets out on a quest to audition for Big Shot, a Shark Tank\u2013style reality show, even though he has no real idea to pitch. Ben is an out-of-work accountant, but he resembles a writer. He spends his days in a library carrel, staring at a computer; he procrastinates, struggling to dream up an invention or a business plan. Gradually, True Failure comes to seem like an allegory for the writing life today.<\/p>\n

Publishing a literary novel with a big press, after all, is perhaps not so different from making a successful pitch on Shark Tank\u2014your success is based solely on whether your \u201cproduct\u201d will earn money. Fiction writers today find themselves in a bind: The professionalization of creative writing can make it feel like the only reason to write is to publish, since publishing is what will keep the engine of your career moving. At the same time, the corporatization of book publishing has made the process of publication increasingly fraught, making it all the more tempting to write what an imagined audience or editor might want. Higley\u2019s novel dramatizes the effect of this market logic, showing how an obsession with external success can distort the creative process itself.<\/p>\n

One source of this distortion is the image of success we get from social media. This is where Ben\u2019s quest to get on Big Shot begins: Scrolling on his phone, he sees \u201cremembrance posts for a former college classmate,\u201d Trevor Crant, who once appeared on the reality show and successfully pitched a \u201cnatural odorless spot eraser\u2026packaged in tiny orange keychainable bottles.\u201d Ben doesn\u2019t linger on what prompted the posts (his classmate\u2019s death by suicide). It doesn\u2019t matter, for Ben, if Trevor\u2019s success before his death made him happy; what matters is that he appeared successful. What Ben wants out of Big Shot, he admits later, is \u201cundeniable public success on his own terms.\u201d The key word here is public: the idea that success is only real if other people can see it.<\/p>\n

Perhaps because photos of Word documents or typed pages are boring, the writing life, as it appears on Instagram, is made up of well-ordered desks, stylish notebooks, expensive fountain pens. It\u2019s not just influencers I\u2019m talking about: While many famous writers\u2014or famous creative people in general\u2014have online presences that are friendly, wholesome, and encouraging, the images they share have a certain allure. When I see a photo of a writing shed\u2014from Alexander Chee on Instagram, from George Saunders on Substack\u2014I can\u2019t help but feel some envy: I\u2019d like to write there\u2026 I\u2019d love to have a space like that. I think back to the experiences in my adolescence that made me want to write\u2014namely, reading books that I loved, books by Saunders among them\u2014and it somehow isn\u2019t hard to imagine young writers now embarking on a writing life with this image of success in their heads: a writing shed with a view, a solid desk, a stack of leather notebooks. There\u2019s nothing wrong with wanting those things. But as motivators to write, they\u2019re empty, unlikely to spark much good work.<\/p>\n

Another danger is to lose oneself in logistics and to obsess over the end goal\u2013\u2013of publication or, in the case of Ben, televised recognition\u2014rather than embracing the process. \u201cI\u2019m less concerned with what I\u2019m going to pitch than with how it is I\u2019m going to get on the show,\u201d Ben tells his wife, Tara. It\u2019s fun to think up dumb inventions\u2014a favorite imagined app in my household is Dog Uber, a service that would allow us to walk the dog to a restaurant, then send him home in a cab\u2014but Ben is less interested in the fun part of imagination; he just wants to win the show. His research consists of reading interviews with past contestants and looking up producers and casting directors; he even considers how best to fit his pitch into an April Fools\u2019 Day episode. He wants to find a hack, some way to game the process.<\/p>\n

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Midway through True Failure, Ben finally lands on an idea: He\u2019ll pitch \u201chis own Big Shot,\u201d only \u201con a local, more personal, smaller scale.\u201d Ben describes this idea as \u201cnothing\u201d; he will \u201ccouch his nothing,\u201d he thinks, \u201cinside a prank, an April Fools\u2019 pitch.\u201d He will ask the Big Shots to \u201cbelieve in [him], to invest in the person,\u201d since they\u2019re always saying on the show that they \u201cinvest in people.\u201d Because his pitch doesn\u2019t really matter to him, he\u2019s incapable of really believing in it\u2014he repeatedly insists that it\u2019s \u201cnothing.\u201d I thought of Jerry and George in season four of Seinfeld, pitching a \u201cshow about nothing\u201d: \u201cEven nothing is something,\u201d as Jerry wisely observes.<\/p>\n

Years ago, I drafted a novel with an opening that was heavily plotted, dramatic, and entirely ripped off from Colum McCann\u2019s Let the Great World Spin\u2014a novel I didn\u2019t even love, but which represented for me some ideal of mainstream success. I went through a phase of writing creative nonfiction\u2014not because I enjoyed reading memoirs or particularly wanted to write one, but because I knew that magazines receive fewer of these submissions. I tried writing flash fiction, because it seemed to me that magazines might find it harder to reject a 500-word story than an 8,000-word one. Of course, none of these attempts to write what I assumed other people wanted were successful. I\u2019m glad I learned this lesson early. A friend of mine spent several years writing novels that he thought would appeal to publishers\u2014novels he called commercial\u2014and it took the repeated rejection of these manuscripts for him to return to his roots, writing fiction that felt truer to his needs as a writer. Who knows if this work will be published, but at least he\u2019s writing what he believes in.<\/p>\n

One last danger\u2014especially if you have friends engaged in the same creative practice\u2014is competitiveness. When Ben, surprisingly, advances through the early stages of the Big Shot process, he lands at a mass audition. The scale of it shocks him:<\/p>\n

The sheer number of people trying to do what he was doing was overwhelming. His confidence had shifted into quiet, defensive anger. Who were all these fucking people? Much harder to delude oneself in the presence of so many others trying to do the same, alone with a computer being maybe the most conducive situation for delusion there is\u2014and Ben had had a lot of that lately.<\/p>\n

Here, Higley may as well be describing a writer\u2019s experience at the annual conference held by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where thousands of people gather in a convention center, gossiping and envying one another\u2019s successes. The goal of the event is \u201cbeing in community,\u201d as a recent e-mail blast from AWP put it, but the downside\u2014as anyone who has ever been in a writing workshop must know\u2014is that it\u2019s easy to feel demoralized and competitive in a room full of writers. What Higley captures about this environment is the way that a solitary pursuit, such as writing, suddenly feels like a sport. \u201cAmong the crowd,\u201d he writes, Ben \u201cnow [wants] it more.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Ben, throughout True Failure, offers a negative model for the writer, then his wife reveals an alternative path. Tara is a painter who hasn\u2019t finished a canvas in years\u2013\u2013not since she began to run a daycare out of their home. But midway through the novel, an \u201cimage\u201d comes to her: She will paint \u201cher street, Prairie Avenue\u2026and overlaid on that, a large black football helmet with a bowl set into its crown for chips.\u201d This \u201csnack helmet\u201d painting is personal and weird and definitely not what anyone\u2019s been asking for; Tara is creating just to create. When she finishes it, she inspects the canvas and thinks that it\u2019s \u201ca good painting\u201d\u2014and that is enough.<\/p>\n

Another positive model is Higley himself. His novel is prickly, strange, and difficult to imagine appearing from a Big Five publisher. (It was published by the venerable Minneapolis indie press Coffee House.) Then there\u2019s the encouraging fact that Higley, in real life, has created his own Big Shot on a \u201cmore personal, smaller scale\u201d: Great Place Books, a small press that aims to go \u201cagainst the grain of the industry\u201d and publish \u201cidiosyncratic and alluring writers whose voices might otherwise be lost.\u201d For those looking to publish such \u201cidiosyncratic\u201d work, there\u2019s also Dennis James Sweeney\u2019s How to Submit, a recent book that focuses on small presses and magazines, adapting how-to literature for those who write outside the mainstream.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Tara, though, whom I\u2019ve been thinking of lately when I open my spreadsheet. The column where I\u2019ve been tracking my latest story already contains 10 rejections, four of them nice ones. But I\u2019m spending less time on the spreadsheet, since I\u2019m trying to get away from seeing publication as the only measure of success and to focus on the fact that I finished a story\u2014which definitely isn\u2019t nothing. The other day, when I opened the Word document\u2014prepared to see something abominable, in need of drastic revision\u2014I liked what I saw. It\u2019s a good story. And that is enough.<\/p>\n

Ben Sandman<\/a><\/p>\n

Ben Sandman\u2019s fiction has been published in Story, Joyland, Stirring, and Stone Canoe, among others, and his criticism has appeared in The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

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Carol Schaeffer<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Books & the Arts \/ July 29, 2025 Alex Higley\u2019s True Failure, which dramatizes one man\u2019s dream to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-31852","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}