A couple of weeks ago, when we were all writing about our path to publication, the subject of rejection and failure had to come up. I shared the fact that I’d sent out one hundred and nine queries before landing an agent, so if you think about it, that’s one hundred and eight rejections. I had failed that many times. But I don’t think I really wrote a…
This week we’re talking about failure. Any writer will tell you that this career is filled with it. We all have hundreds of rejections- from publications that don’t want our short stories, from agents who don’t want to represent us, from editors who don’t want to buy our books, from readers who didn’t like our book. Each one feels like a sharp stick to the gut. That flash of adrenaline…
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating.—Elon Musk Let’s just stipulate that I’m highly innovative. And yes: I fail. A lot. If you want to be a writer, you must brace yourself for a series of truly ridiculous cosmic bitchslaps. Never has there been an endeavor more fraught with options for failure* than deciding to write a book: you can fail at writing…
Trigger warning: depression, anxiety. People who have experienced trauma may associate the excitement of success with the same physiological reactions as trauma. They avoid subjecting themselves to excitement-inducing circumstances, which causes them to be almost phobic about success. Psychology Today This week’s topic (navigating failure) isn’t hard or scary for me, because I’ve chosen failure for so much of my life. Navigating failure is historically pretty comfortable for me….
Content Warnings: suicide, self-harm It’s hard to write this post in a week where two high-profile, objectively massively-successful people have killed themselves. And I’m not really going to write about that. I don’t tend to comment on celebrity deaths, whatever the cause. It always feels… I don’t know. Performative, somehow, in a way I feel awkward about. So that’s not what this is about. But we are talking about dealing…
