Bringing Forward. FAILURE MUST BE AN OPTION

A Series of Posts to Get Ready for the New Year…

(I first did a version of this post in 2012, then brought it forward and updated it for 2014, and  updated again in 2017, and here it is as part of this year-end flurry of posts to help get ready for 2024.)

I’ll bet a few of you got very uneasy by me starting off a blog post with: “Failure Must Be An Option.”

This post is about how to move forward with your writing. And to do that, you must fail, over and over to become an artist in this business and to just survive.

And that’s normal and perfectly fine.

(I really should repeat that last sentence.)

Let me say this clearly. The reason I am starting right here, talking about failure, is that until you understand failure in publishing, you don’t have a lot of chances at success and setting goals for success in a new year.

Failure is very much an option and a way of life in publishing in all levels.

However, quitting is not.

You quit, you are done. You go into the “whatever happened to…?” authors and after that the “blank look” authors when your name is even mentioned.

So first let me talk about failure. It’s going to take a minute, so hang on. I need to try to see if I can get everyone on the same page here.

When setting goals for a New Year, everything about your goal must be in your control. Completely.

Let me give you a list of examples of “control.”

1a) Wanting your book to sell 200 copies a month indie…NO CONTROL

1b) Getting your book on Kindle and B&N and Kobo and all the other places, plus in paperback, with a great cover, good, active blurbs, and written well story… YOUR CONTROL.

You get the idea I hope.  When I talk about an objective in the future that is out of your control, I will call it a “dream.”

An objective in the future that is totally in your control I will call a “goal.”

Plan Point #1…

Check through all your goals for 2024 and make sure they ONLY concern your work level that is in your control. 

Nothing more. 

No action from another party can be involved, otherwise it is not realistic. 

So if you are an indie writer and thinking you want to sell a thousand copies of all your books per month next year, that’s a dream. Retreat back to how many new projects you can write and indie publish. Set up how many you want to finish and publish and list on your Shopify store. That’s a goal. Let the sales take care of themselves.

So do that now to save your sanity next year.

Now, back to failure. Smart failure.

To become a professional fiction writer, you must become a major risk-taker without fear of failure or a care in the world what anyone else thinks of you or your writing.

Now, saying that, all new writers have just turned away, convinced I am muttering stupidity. But alas, I am not.

Examples from writers of fear of failure:

Example One …

A manuscript must be perfect. The writer doesn’t dare let a “flawed” manuscript out for anyone to see. 

The writers who have this major fear are constant rewriters, are major workshop people, are writers who write for their critique group instead of what they want.

Writers with this fear will take five people’s feedback and try to get it all into their manuscript turning their story into boring garbage written by a committee.

Writers with this fear spend huge sums of money on book doctors and other scams.

Writers with this fear are replacing reality in publishing with their own fear.

Just to be clear here: There are no perfect books in publishing. Never has been, never will be.

Writers with this fear are often afraid of success, and certainly don’t trust their own art, because they willingly let many other people mess with it.

The problem with this fear is that so many modern myths play right into it.

A personal note about this:

Back when I was first getting serious, I was writing a story per week. I could not type much on my typewriter and certainly couldn’t spell anything. So I would write a new story, have my trusted first reader (Nina Kiriki Hoffman) read it and find the billion mistakes. I would fix the mistakes in spelling and typing. Then I made a copy to mail and copies to turn into the workshop.

I would mail the story to an editor on the way to the weekly workshop. (I turned in the story to the local workshop to get audience reaction and see if I could learn something for writing the next story, not to “fix” the story I already had in the mail.)  Stories the workshop beat up and said were worthless, I often sold. I never told them I hadn’t “fixed” the story. (If I had “fixed the story,” it never would have sold.)

Were those stories flawed and scarred?  Yup, they were. Zero doubt about that. But they were my stories, my voice, my mistakes, done at the best skill level I could manage at the time, and that’s what helped them sell. I trusted my own art, even flawed.

If I had been afraid of mailing out anything but a “perfect” manuscript, I would have never been a full time fiction writer.

Another personal example.

In 1973, in Palm Springs, CA, I finished up a pretty good professional golf tournament for me a few under par. Not at all happy with the round, but it made me a buck or two. One of my friends at the time, another young professional out chasing tour stops had just shot one of his best rounds ever. And won the tournament.

When asked about his round, he was proud of it, but mentioned to the reporter a few places he had left shots on the course. And a wedge he had missed on #14.

That night, instead of drinking, we were both hitting golf balls and practicing under the lights at the driving range at my course. And he was working on hitting wedges.

Luckily, he didn’t need a perfect golf game to put himself on the line. He just needed to keep working and trust the skill and art he had at that moment in time. And even though the next summer I quit golf and went back to college, he went on to do just fine in the world of golf. And trust me, you would recognize his last name.

Plan for 2024… If you have this fear that everything needs to be perfect, take drastic action to fix the fear, otherwise 2024 just won’t matter much. 

Example Two… 

Afraid to mail a story because of the rejection or afraid to put a story up indie published for fear of not having many sales. 

I have never understood this fear, but I know it is real. For me, this fear is beyond silly. It’s like walking up to the front gate of a golf course and then deciding not to play because your score might not be perfect.

This fear is one of the “quitters’ fears” as I call them. It is safer to not try than try and fail.

Nothing I can say or do to help you past this fear because, honestly, I just find it too silly. And sad. What do you think an editor will do to you???? Come to your house and shoot you for not sending in a perfect story? Never once heard of that happening in the history of publishing.

And if you put up a book out indie on all the different stores and no one buys it, WHO IS GOING TO NOTICE??  No one. Because no one bought it. Duh.

But interestingly, by not trying, you guarantee failure. Quitters never really understand that logic. You hear the word, “But…but…but…” (Echoing off into the distance from quitters.)

Example Three…

Afraid to write or finish a story you have been talking about for a while.

People respect others, especially artists of all stripes, who work hard in their art.

There is no respect (zero, zip, zilch) for those who claim they want to do something then never “get around to it” or as the laughing-stock phrase of all writers who are quitters, “I just can’t find the time.”

Maybe for a month or six months or a year you won’t find the time as life beats on you with something special. But if you don’t really have this fear, you will come back to writing when life gets off your back and you will finish your work.

This fear is just an excuse to quit by never starting, never putting your skill and art on the line for anyone to read. It’s a ton easier to just remember how much praise your high school English teacher gave you for your writing than actually put your writing out there with real readers.

Remember, quitting is not an option. Failing is fine and you will do that a lot, but the moment you find a reason to quit and stay away, you and your art are finished.

And if you can’t find the time, just keep telling yourself that, but please don’t write me with your excuses because I won’t care because you have quit by never starting. I want to help people who are not afraid of fighting for their art.

If you suffer from this fear and can’t just use logic to snap out of it, get professional help if you really want to be a writer at some point. Not kidding.

I think that’s enough examples of fear for now. We can talk about more if you want in the comments section. I’ve seen them all, actually.

Some other fear examples for your files…

… “It’s too hard” fear.

… “It’s going to take too long” fear. (Kids under thirty and adults over fifty worry about this one the most.)

… “The system is rigged against me” fear.

… “I don’t have enough talent” fear. (Talent is a measure of your craft at a given moment in time, nothing more. Take a craft class. You’ll get more talented.)

… “Fear of success” fear. (This fear is deep and subtle and needs professional help to get past. If you grew up lower income, you might have this one.)

… “I am so good, I don’t have to practice or keep learning” fear. (Yes, this is a fear of admitting a need to keep learning. It is ego-based fear. Deadly after a few years.)

… “Fear of public failure” fear.

And so on…

Summary of Fear and Quitting

You must be fearless in writing and at the publishing business. If a fear slows you down or causes you to quit, then you have lost your art and your fight. Stay aware of the fears as you set goals for next year.

The very, very best way of getting rid of fears is just not worry about failure.

Failure is normal in publishing and writing and all art.

Kill the fear of failure and all those fears I listed will just vanish. (Except for fear of success, which more than likely will take professional help to deal with as I said.)

Failure Must Be An Option. 

Attitude is Everything

It says that on my iced tea mug. And it is true.

I am not afraid of failure. For heaven’s sake, I have been doing my own magazine now for 67 issues.  And my attitude is to look at what did get done from a goal or challenge and see the success.

When you are setting new goals for 2024, you must expect failure at all levels in your plans.

And you must not allow the worry about failure, or a bad attitude about failure, to bury the success you are having.

Sometimes you can fail to complete success. But you have to be willing to fail to reach the success.