When Trying Feels Like Failing

My good friend Juliana L. Brandt and I talk every single day, most of the time about writing and the publishing world, which allows us to keep a pretty close eye on each other’s moods. So when she pointed out that lately I’ve been a little negative about writing, I knew she was right.

The only problem was…I didn’t know what to do about it. In fact, when she first told me, I got defensive. “I’m not negative,” I said. “I’m just realistic about the challenges I’m up against with my book.”

But I was lying to myself, blaming my book for causing my unhappiness. In actuality, the truth was that my book wasn’t failing me…I was failing my book.

My particular situation is this: I’ve been working on SIGHTLESS for almost a year now, and recently I came up against a series of plot problems. I was so stressed out, so furious with myself for letting these problems exist, that I ceased to be able to see a way through them. I whined a lot. There was some blank staring. And then…my friends shone a bright light of hard truth in my face: your book isn’t broken, it just needs some tweaking  You can take a break from it, and that doesn’t mean you’re giving up (thanks, Kiersi, for that one).

And that was when I realized that I was misinterpreting the business of writing (the ups and downs, the ins and outs) as small, daily failures to create a perfect book. And that’s not just a bad way to make art, its a bad way to live. 

I’ve seen a lot of blog posts that talk about the benefits of failure, but it isn’t until recently that I really started to understand what that meant. Sometimes you need to try and “fail,” to really understand what it is you’re trying to do in the first place.

Are you guys familiar with the Beckett quote “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better”? It’s pretty famous in some circles, and I’ve always loved it. But again…I’m just starting to truly understand what it means. If you try something, and you fail, and then you try again…did you really ever fail? In my eyes, “failure” implies that you’ve given up, that what you’ve done was the last attempt at success, and now it’s all over.

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So here’s the awesome news: I took my friends’ advice. I put SIGHTLESS aside (not trunked, just…aside), and started working on another book. And lo and behold, I feel GREAT. I allowed myself to “fail” a little bit by putting the book aside, and it helped me to discover what a fantastic concept I’ve been sitting on. And when I’m done with this draft, I’ll go back to SIGHTLESS, and I’ll take a long hard look at what it is I want to accomplish. And then I’ll get back to that wonderful business of failing better…until I succeed.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.
Lauren

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