Since I got such enthusiastic feedback on Monday's piece, "Fail Better," I thought I'd carry on the theme today. Thank you, those who wrote back to me! I’ll ask now that instead of clicking Reply, you click Comment? Then the algorithm sees engagement and that helps us spread the word about Imaginative Storm.
Have you ever sat down to write something that seems very clear in your head, but you can’t get the words to line up right? (I know this feeling very well.) You think, why can't I do this? It seems so simple! And you conclude, obviously I can’t do this. I'm just not a good writer.
It’s an ugly feeling when you seem to be incapable of doing something you want to do, something you feel you ought to be able to do. The feeling of failure saps your self-confidence beyond the page. You feel uncreative—or worse, vaguely creative but unable to create. If the glory of humankind is our creativity, that means you must be, at base, an inadequate human.
But what if that feeling you think of as failure isn't failure at all? What if it's a necessary part of the process of producing writing that's fresh and original and satisfying?
If you write with us or have been reading this Substack for a while, you know that much of the problem stems from trying to write well, and from writing what you know. So, okay: what if you don't try to write well and write what you don’t know, as we recommend? Will that produce “good writing” every time? Or if not every time, at least reliably?
Nope. (Though it will help, massively.)
Most of us aren't arrogant enough to think that every word that drops from our fingers is gold. But most of us do expect (before we learn differently), that we should at least be able to see the flecks of gold among the dross. And if we can’t, that’s what failure looks like.
When, decades ago, I took Robert McKee's famous screenwriting course, the most useful thing I took away is that 90% of what you write is research. By research, he meant anything that doesn’t end up in the finished draft. Some of it might be what you think of as research: fact-finding, historical reading, character backstories, “free writing.” But that’s not only what he meant. Every draft that isn’t final is research into what the final draft might become.
As Thomas Edison said, I haven’t failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work. His ambition was to create a lightbulb, but he didn’t expect to create it each time he set to work. When the lightbulb didn’t glow gold, he didn’t call it dross. He called it research
.Your ambition may be to write well—whatever that means to you. Let’s say what you wrote today doesn’t meet your standard. It’s disappointing, sure, just like all those 10,000 non-lighting lightbulbs must have been disappointing. But disappointment does not equal failure unless you had an expectation to succeed.
I hope I’m managing to convince you that failure is not an objective fact. It’s just the result of misplaced expectation. You are the one who decrees what is failure and what is research.
When you put words on paper, you’re researching into your perceptions of living in the world, and how you want to express them. Your words won’t gleam and glitter and light up every time. So, which side will win: your hopeful, creative, insightful, exploratory self, or your disappointment? Can you prevent your energizing desire from calcifying into expectation?
You've probably seen that movie scene: frustrated writer yanks paper out of typewriter, balls it up, and throws it at a wastebasket, where it lands among lots of other balled-up sheets of paper on the floor beside the wastebasket. It’s all going so badly that he can't even throw his crappy writing away properly! Then suddenly the Muse murmurs in his ear and he's churning out page after page of effortless brilliance.
What I want to write here is: My ass. So I guess I will.
What are those balled-up piece of paper but lightbulbs that didn’t light up? Being willing to experiment, to try things without a success-or-failure benchmark, is a necessary part of the creative journey. The more you generate “throwaway writing,” the more likely you are to access something that you want to keep. Your imagination doesn't like being pressured any more than you do.
If you’d like to read Monday’s piece, “Fail Better” (originally written for Garage magazine), click here. That title wasn’t mine, and I didn’t know until yesterday that it comes from a quote by Samuel Beckett.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Thank you to Robin Marlowe for sending this to me.
So true. And no rejection is harder to take than self-rejection. You can imagine an editor a fool, but not so yourself in that role.
@allegra huston The boiling down process ... maple syrup doesn't flow from a tree. The sap may be sweet but it needs to be boiled down, concentrated to its essence. Thanks you for the reminder.