What If Failure Is All You Get?

Someone on Twitter asked "What if failure is all you get?" in response to my post on Three Cheers for Failure.

Our lives are not like the lives of characters in a book. We get born, stuff happens along the way, we die. We only put "The End" when it literally is "The End" - ie you're dead. You may have "failed" at 20, 30, 40, 50...but who's to know what's going to happen when you're 60 or 70?

I know several people who have first got published in their 60s and 70s - are they failures because it happened late to them? Or terrific success stories because they persisted?

I'm struggling to finish my current novel. Deadlines have come and gone and I still can't get the b****r done, which is probably suicidal in the current climate. Is that failure? Will, a couple of years down the line, I be laughing over the champagne as I read my amazing sales figures? Or will I be watching the clock to get to the end of my shift at the check out in Sainsbury's?

Who knows? It's likely to be somewhere in between - a recent programme on chaos theory said that it was impossible to predict what you'd be doing 5 years ahead, even if your life looked ultra stable and solid now. You may be "failing" at the moment, but if an acceptance letter or phone call arrived in the next 5 minutes, you'd consider yourself a success.

Stop focussing on the end, because it won't be the end. Getting an acceptance will lead to more problems to be solved, more failure, more success. It's a bit like being pregnant and only preparing for the delivery. Wake up! You've got the baby around for at least the next 20 years, more if you're unlucky (or house prices continue to rise).

Enjoy the journey, even when it's tough and hard going. Failure and success are only words, they're not states of being and the ending is only the ending when it really is The End. There's plenty of time for living until then.

Three Cheers for Failure

A friend of mine is trying to move from journalism into fiction.  He's a very talented writer: I love what I've read of his work.  He's aiming high and wants to be a Booker prize contender, which is a fine ambition.  The trouble is, his ambition is preventing him from moving forward.  

He has problems finishing work, endlessly re-writing and editing.  When a short story is finished he won't send it anywhere - he says doesn't want to send it to competitions because there might be issues over copyright should he want to publish a short story collection later on. He also worries that he hasn't yet found his voice.  He tries different styles, different genres.  He destroys a lot of what he writes.  He researches agents and publishers, but somehow never finds one that is suitable for his work - he tells me that it's very important to start as you mean to go on and the wrong agent or publisher can kill your career before it starts.  Well, yes, but... 

What it amounts to is some beautiful writing which only gets read by a select few (I am now off his reading list after I ventured some criticism).  I think it's great when writers write just for themselves - but this writer is ambitious.  He wants to be launched in a blaze of glory. He doesn't want to follow the ordinary path, or so he says.  

I suspect he doesn't send out because at heart he is frightened of failure.  He has set his sights so high that he will be very lucky indeed to succeed.  Ambition is a good thing, but it can also cripple you.  Easier to say 'I'm not ready' than risk being turned down.  

But failure is part of any creative endeavour.  Without failure we can't judge our strengths and weaknesses.  Without failure we won't grow.  Without failure we stay in the same place and stagnate.  Failure means development.  If a writer gets 99 rejections but an acceptance on the 100th, is that writer a success or a failure?  A success even though if they'd given up at 98 they would have been a failure.

I believe that we are all on the same road.  Sometimes we move faster or slower than others.  Sometimes we get a lucky break and jump a section, sometimes we go through bad times and slip backwards.  Luck plays a big part, as does hard work.  If you fail - that is, get a rejection - then you slip back a bit, but you only come off the road if you stop writing and stop trying to move forward.