On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche
Published 2023 · 73 pages · 19,969 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Memoir & Autobiography
How hard is On Writing and Failure to read?
On Writing and Failure scores 29 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 27 out of 100
- Marche writes in blunt, profane contemporary English—"fucked me over," "shit work"—alongside proper nouns drawn from world literary history (Ferdowsi, Sima Qian, Petrashevsky). The vocabulary itself rarely reaches beyond common usage; difficulty comes from unfamiliar names, not unfamiliar words.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Sentences alternate between clipped imperative fragments ("No whining." "Persevere.") and longer documentary sentences stringing together quotations and biographical detail. There is no experimental syntax, but the quotation-dense passages demand sustained attention to track whose words are whose.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The book advances a sustained philosophical claim—that failure, not success, is the true condition of a writing life—through a parade of concrete biographical anecdotes. Each vignette, from Johnson's poverty to Keats's death, functions as evidence for an abstract thesis about meaning-making and vocation.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Nearly every paragraph introduces a new writer, historical fact, or quoted source—Samuel Johnson, Richard Savage, Ezra Pound, Sima Qian, Machiavelli, Akhmatova, David Foster Wallace, Mishima—often with dates, sums of money, and verbatim quotations. The essay compresses centuries of literary biography into a relatively short book.
How On Writing and Failure is regarded
On Writing and Failure holds a literary regard score of 24 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.