On the benefits of ‘failure’

I set myself a goal at the start of the month.

In fact I set several.

The most salient goal for this blog was the #NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words written in November. I did not achieve that goal. I didn’t even come close. It wasn’t a case of ‘just one more day’, or ‘just a little short.’ I failed to achieve 50,000. I failed to achieve half that.

sourced from this blog on how to embrace failure

And that’s ok.

Coincidentally, at the start of November, I also started a new job. It’s a similar role to the role I previously had, but the small and specific differences are significant. It’s at a different organisation, and a much larger organisation, than my previous employment. I’ve had to learn the new culture, the new hierarchies, the systems and protocols and all those elements of a workplace which go so often unstated. I’ve had to meet new people, learn names, determine the interconnections between each of them and me, between their roles and mine, how I can help them, how they can help me. It’s been a big transition, and in many ways one which is time-consuming and mentally demanding, coming into an existing project and quickly evaluating how the expertise and experience I bring will contribute. And I feel (one month in) that it has been a success.

I also set a personal health goal at the start of November, because I was feeling run-down and unhealthy, I was overweight (no shaming intended, but overweight for me. You be whatever weight you’re comfortable and happy with. I wasn’t comfortable and I wasn’t happy, so ‘overweight’), I wasn’t sleeping well, I wasn’t eating well, I was stressed… I was struggling. So I made some changes, on my own terms, and I set some health goals and behavioural/habit goals. And I’ve been successful there too, both in terms of the numerical targets I’m hitting and the general feeling of wellbeing.

And then there was the election of course, and all of the existential doubt and fear that flowed from it.

Graph of November (from here)

Life is about balancing things. That’s probably as true for you, reading this, as it is for me. It’s probably true for all of us. But sometimes we see people doing amazing things, devoting a lot of time and energy we don’t see to produce fantastic results we do. I had a friend posting astounding word-counts for the first week or so of #NaNoWriMo, an the temptation to compare myself unfavourably was strong. But I wasn’t competing with her, and her circumstances were not my own.

Recently Kameron Hurley spoke on Twitter about being a ‘binge writer’: writing tens-of-thousands of words a day, for several days on end, rather than writing every day (a nice antidote to the ‘write every day‘ mantra which can lead to feelings of guilt or failure when your life doesn’t allow you to write). But I’m not competing with her, and her circumstances are not my own.

I think there’s a lot to be said for the discipline of writing. One of the most striking changes I see in myself between my earliest dilettante days of ‘aspiring’ to be a writer (the advice to drop that qualifier was invaluable for self-perception) and the ongoing development in the midst of which I sit today, is my understanding of what writing is, what it is not, and what it requires.

Among other things, writing requires failure.

Initially in the sense that you need to accept failure merely to write anything at all, because it’s important to give yourself permission to suck, and to accept that your first draft of anything is shit.

But more than that I think writing (and really any creative/artistic endeavour) requires that we strive for something we know we may never achieve. And yet that we keep striving.

This is why we should not hate bad art. Peter Ball pointed this out for me, and it has changed the way I look at the Beibers of our world. We should critique, of course. We can express our dissatisfaction or distaste. We can call out problematic or offensive tropes and features. But bad art is important. It’s especially important if other people (for some unfathomable reason beyond your ken) like it, even love it. It’s the creative endeavour. It’s someone trying to make something and share it, and maybe you don’t like what they made, but then again maybe you’re not the intended audience, or maybe it doesn’t matter if no one else likes it because bad art matters to the artist. And bad art is so often a precursor to good art, or to better art, at least. If people stop making bad art, or are afraid to make bad art, how can they ever move through that phase to what comes next? As Alison Gerber points out, bad art benefits us all.

If you are serious about writing, you will create bad writing. You’ll fall into cliche, lean heavily on tired tropes, trot out stock phrases, overuse your pet words. You’ll make errors, break grammatical conventions accidentally or with ill-conceived intent, run-on your sentences, split your infinitives, dangle your participles, changed your tense mid-sentence. You’ll be incomprehensible, miss the mark, wander off on tangents, maybe be bland or boring. All of this is part of the process. If we castigate ourselves for these ‘failings’, or worse, if our fear of them paralyses us, we will never achieve the greatness which may lie just beyond them, just a little further along the path, just beyond the work-shopping and revision and re-writing which can only follow once a thing is written.

So what benefits are there in this failure, my #NaNoWriMo failure?

1. I have about 20,000 words about a weaponised infection, a dying city, and the reluctant poetry student who may hold the key to the cure.
2. I added another 5,000 words or so to a separate story about a retired government cyber-agent drawn into an international quest to learn the truth about her high-school sweetheart’s death.
3. I have a much clearer sense of where both of these stories are going, and more fully developed planning documents which will guide me there.

And I have perspective.

The month was not wasted because I fell (well) short of the arbitrary figure set for #NaNoWriMo. I have another month, and another after that, and at 25,000 or so words per month, I’m only a couple of months away from finishing another novel.

That’s an exciting feeling.