letter #9 from me (Gwenda Bond) to you (lovely people): failure, success, and related meanderings
Mea culpa for missing last week--the mister and I have been on deadline revising the first in our new middle grade book series. I don't know if I'm allowed to tell you this, but I'm going to anyway because we came up with a new series title for it this week. I think (unless it changes, it's always possible it'll change again) this will now be the Supernormal Sleuthing Service series, and book one is The Lost Legacy. Christopher heroically read all 8,000+ adjectives that start with S in the Oxford English Dictionary for brainstorming purposes. One of his favorites? Scombroid, or "resembling a mackerel." Anyway, the book will be out sometime next year! We turn in our revision Monday. We are EXCITED.
And so this week's topic of consideration may seem odd. But I want to talk about failure.
I did an event at a library not far from here this week. A casual, let's gab sort of event, where I talked about being a writer and my path to publication and since. As always, when I'm talking about things I've learned or believe about the writing life, most of them apply to life in general. When you're talking to a crowd that includes a lot of young people, many of them--most of them!--probably aren't there because they want to be writers (at least not yet; and I always ask). Some are, but some aren't and so my goal is always to make it as relevant to the entire room as possible. In this case, it was a very diverse group in all senses, including age.
Now, coming into a situation like this, people are there because of the high points of your career. Obviously. They're there because you had a book or books that did well, because of your successes or because you're perceived as a success. So it's always very important to me to talk about an essential part of being an artist (or a person) that never goes away, that is in fact an inextricable part of how you end up at the front of a room like this, and which people are often terrified of: failure.
First off, I'm not just talking about rejection here. Nos are part of life too, obviously, and sometimes they overlap with failing. Enough nos and you failed to do that specific thing. Fine. A few nos here and there (nineteen, a hundred, depending), that thing might still happen. So rejection and failure are related, but not the same. But what I'm about to say applies to both.
What does failure mean? Does it mean that you will never be good enough to do a thing? Does it mean that you obviously don't deserve that thing, that it's not for you? Does it mean you suck and will suck forever? Does it mean that any success or achievement you had was a fluke? Does it mean you should just throw in the towel?
I hope you're thinking of course not, but I know all too many creative people (and other people!) who spiral around these kind of questions over and over again. Here is what failure means in my view:
Failure means you wanted something enough to try for it.
Success, usually, means the same thing.
The outcome isn't the important part here. The wanting is. Because wanting things enough to try for them? Is a pretty great way to go through life. It makes for less regret, and hopefully for less bitterness. You don't have to wonder. You tried. And you'll try again. Because the worst thing that can happen, usually, when you try for something? Is that you don't get it. You fail to get it.
You already didn't have it. So you want something else, or you still want that thing, and you try again. It doesn't mean anything about you as a person other than that you are someone who wants things and who is willing to risk failure.
I believe this is part of what enables persistence, and persistence is one of the most important parts of success. It's what keeps you around.
This is all great coming from you, you may be saying. You published your first book in 2012 and now your sixth (oh my god how) comes out next month! But that did not happen overnight. I could also tell you about the books I wrote that didn't sell or didn't sell initially. It took my agent and I almost four years to make a sale, and that was *after* the years I spent learning to write books, getting an MFA and an agent. It took me 17 years of being a writer of various kinds to be able to leave my day job and do it full-time. Some of this was the time it took me to write good enough books to be published. Some of this was timing and the market. It's a tough, competitive business. But you know what I was always doing? I wanted to tell stories to people, and so I kept doing that. First book on submission, great, I'm going to go write another one. That book didn't sell, well, maybe I'll rewrite it and we'll do another round of submissions and then I'll go write another one. Rinse, repeat. I wanted something, and I failed to get it time and time again. Until I did. Was that hard? Yes. Was it worth it? Completely. Every bad day, every rejection, every time my hopes got knocked down was worth it. Because I wanted a thing and I still want that thing and I still get up and try every day so I can continue to have it.
Here is another danger, something I see sometimes in writers or others who are in a bad place in life or career or who aren't happy with how things are going.
There is a real danger in conflating disappointment with failure.
Disappointment is what we feel when, say, there was a nibble from Hollywood or maybe our book got optioned and then it didn't get made. Or maybe your publisher didn't put any marketing money in your book, and so its sales weren't that great. Or maybe its sales were great, but the publisher put in so much marketing money that you still feel they weren't great enough. Maybe your fans didn't love it as much as they loved something else you did.
What I see is that so often in this particular spiral people forget to recognize that all those other things, the things that didn't happen and so there was some disappointment? They were all even possible because of a success. Because you did a thing. You made something and put it into the world. That is not failure. Or you're disappointed that you aren't getting or didn't get a thing (awards, say)... but you didn't really try for that thing. That is also not failure.
And one last point. (God, I feel like I've gone full guru on you guys today and I'm sorry, it's the virus talking or something.) People cannot be failures. Careers cannot be failures. They can have or experience failures, but that is not ever a sum total. Thinking of yourself that way--unless you really are a failure of a human being like the zodiac killer or the Republican presidential candidate, who I'm pretty sure are not reading this--is so damaging. Don't do that to yourself. You're the kind of person who wants things. Being the kind of person who wants things and tries for them? Without putting so much pressure on the outcome? Well, I believe your story will unfold in a more interesting way. It works for me.
Or to sum all of this up much more succinctly Hercules Mulligan style: "When you knock me down I get the fuck back up again!"
Enough, I think, of this, though I have more thoughts. Always more thoughts! But that pesky deadline. So, news from this week:
Girl on a Wire is a Kindle monthly deal for just $1.99 all month!
There's a giant Girl in the Shadows giveaway for 100 Kindle copies over at Goodreads!
I'll be at the Hamburg Barnes and Noble in Lexington Sunday at 2 p.m. for a signing as part of B-Fest and I put up all FOUR gorge-mazing covers for the Girl Over Paris comic book miniseries in the post with the details too. Go see! (Seriously, you guys, GO SEE.)