To an answering chorus of jealous tweets, Lionel Shriver has been writing about the perils of becoming a successful novelist. As well as rehearsing the familiar plaint that you can't make any money from it these days, she lines up some fresh troubles that await the author whose books win acclaim and sales.

Once you've finished your festival appearances, she says, then you need to settle down to writing any number of unpaid features to keep your name in the limelight, as well as doing interviews with anybody who's mildly interested. Then there are the panels, the blurbs for other writers, those important questions about your "lifestyle" for feature fillers on the model of Private Eye's Me and My Spoon. And don't forget to keep scattering crumbs of inspiration into your Twitter feed and reminding your Facebook fans that you love them.

All of which gets in the way of doing what you've dreamed of for so long: writing another novel. Shriver says she's "grown perversely nostalgic for my previous commercial failure – when my focus was pure, and the books were still fun to write, even if nobody read them".

And as that last quote hints, media and marketing distractions are not the only things to fear about becoming successful. First of all comes the enormous pressure that weighs upon your next book once the first one is bathed in golden limelight, and critics are describing you as bursting with "promise". No wonder Ralph Ellison, having written Invisible Man, which was almost immediately recognised as one of the great books of the 20th century, was effectively paralysed for the rest of his career.

To his many curious and admiring readers, he explained that he was working on a second book that would improve on the first. For the remaining 40 years of his life he scratched away at a second novel following the career of a light-skinned child raised by a black preacher, who later "passes" as white and becomes a racist senator. Ellison wrote thousands of pages towards what was published, after his death and uncompleted, as Juneteenth.

Another model of gilded failure is F Scott Fitzgerald. He had something of a thirst on him already, but the combination of enormous fame and pots of cash sprung by the success of This Side of Paradise when he was just 24 must have helped tip him into the alcoholism that eventually killed him.

Some writers get drunk on praise. It's always tempting to have a go at Martin Amis, but the chorus of acclaim that attended his early books, rising to a crescendo with the publication of Money, seems to have led him to take himself a bit too seriously. He took on the fate of the planet, then the Holocaust – perhaps a bit much for a gifted comic novelist with a good turn of phrase. Similar folie de grandeur expanded Norman Mailer's books and inflated his ego, but didn't do much for his achievements in the wake of The Naked and the Dead.

A few writers are unlucky enough to be ruined by success even before they've published: Harold Brodkey, for instance, was widely touted as the next great American novelist well before he'd published a book. Not only did this mire him in anxiety and give him writers' block, but the long-gestated work was a disappointment that eclipsed the early excitement.

By way of sad but happy contrast, there are those writers whose work quietly marinated and matured in neglect. Could Kafka have developed such original vision in public sight? Could Bruno Schulz? Furthermore, a good number of the greats – Henry James, Herman Melville – got steadily better as their reputations and sales declined.

All of which provides some consolation for the many writers who haven't yet been published. Think of Samuel Beckett, who declared that his whole subject was failure, but he managed to reinvent both modernism and theatre while tucked away in obscurity. Not for nothing did his wife greet news of his Nobel prize as "a catastrophe".

"Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better" is one of his great phrases, but could also be seen as an inspiring motto for the writing life. If you can fail from success, you can also be a very successful failure.