Failure is bullshit anyway - it's just part of the natural cycle of breathing and not breathing. There's no getting around it; might as well embrace it. Failure (however you define it) happens. Success (ditto) happens. All of it feeds the individual toward critical mass.
Plei! Wanna see! And a suggestion? Ask Pete if he will be a nice nice nice man and show you an astonishing piece he did; tell him, it's the thing with the lady and the tree. Quite, well, very, um, amazing and intense.
Here's a link, from a friend in my writers group. I reproduce both email as explanation, and a link (I'm not eligible, as you'll see):
There's a writing competition being sponsored by London Book Fair that I am entering and thought others may be interested in. Send in the first 10,000 words of a novel by Jan 23. The winner gets a ton of exposure (Brits as well as non Brits may enter). Those submitting can not have been previously published (sorry Deborah).
Here's the link:
[link]
Plei! Wanna see! And a suggestion? Ask Pete if he will be a nice nice nice man and show you an astonishing piece he did; tell him, it's the thing with the lady and the tree. Quite, well, very, um, amazing and intense.
Ooo! I will ask him.
I'll be insending in a page or two (when a page or two more is written, that is) for you to look at.
I'll be insending in a page or two (when a page or two more is written, that is) for you to look at.
(bouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebounce)
I think part of my problem (as in, the reason why I'm doing newsletter stuff I hate instead of taking a chance and writing stuff that doesn't numb my brain) is the whole fear of failure thing. It's good for me to remember that to write is to fail.
When I started Lucy, it'd been four years since I wrote fiction. I have stacks of unfinished novels from my teens, and the beginnings of a fantasy epic from my 20's. (The teenaged stuff is decently well-written, but it's utter crap. Mary Sues galore. The fantasy epic is quite good, if I do say so myself, but my worldview has changed so much in the 7 years since I've worked on it that I doubt I'll ever go back to it, though I might find a way to use some of the cultures and characters I developed.)
Anyway, I'd given up on ever thinking of myself as a writer. But one of the things that changed my mind was deciding that if by the time I die I've never published a novel, I'd rather it be because I tried and failed than because I never completed one. So I wrote again.
Ooo! I will ask him.
Suuuuuuure. The next time you're by. Not something I can mail to you, ya see.
'allo, Pete.
I asked Nic if he was up for a nice game of Scrabble. He left the room with more haste than was strictly necessary.
I don't blame him. I lost 5 games out of 5!
t /natter
(consolingly)
But two of them were close games, very close, in fact - down to the wire.
(end consolingly)
I think the question writers need to ask themselves is, "OK. If I fail, so what?" Why is that such a horrible thing?
Do you want an honest answer from me?
In an immediate way, it would mean I wasted my time. I took several hours out of my busy life of playing online and watching movies to overcome my shyness/fear of people, report on something, and write it up and in return I got exactly nothing. (Yeah, experience, but experience and $3.10 will get you a skim latte.) The few times when my articles have been killed for one reason or another, I've been pissy for this reason -- it's not so much that I thought it was the greatest article of all time as it is the time I put into it.
On a grander level, it plays into my ongoing insecurities. I've read enough and written enough to know that I'm ... spectacularly mediocre as a writer. I'm good enough to be a working writer, in that I can put sentences together and understand the basics of how published writing is structured. Am I good enough to be published as a freelancer? Probably not, especially since I suck at coming up with ideas for articles. You may need to try to succeed -- but it seems to me that you also need to try to be a failure in the world, as opposed to only in your head.
Sorry to vent. I'm just really annoyed with myself because I keep going in circles on this -- I hate what I'm doing/The only way out is freelancing/I'm afraid to freelance/Okay then.
I assume at some point in my life, I'll get out of the circle and stop being so goddamn miserable whenever I think of my "career." I'm just having a hard time picturing myself taking that step.
Why does it matter? It's just my identity.If I blow that, I'm just another SSI recipient with unrealistic goals. Or the Dumpster Sex Gal.(actually I prefer that one...I created it.) It would be like admitting that my writing is really technically sophisticated masturbation.
No pressure, huh?
