The problems of failure are problems of discouragement, of hopelessness, of hunger. You want everything to happen and you want it now, and things go wrong. – Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art”
Failure is a prerequisite. No good work occurs in the absence of it. Failure is the instructor, the guide. It tells the writer to not go in one direction and to try another.
The new course may also result in failure and a chorus of emotions: discouragement, hopelessness, hunger. Those emotions are valid, but the writer mustn’t lose herself in them. She has to press onward and recognize that those feelings are a part of the “not yet.” She knows where she wants to go. She isn’t there yet.
That sense of “not yet” produces two options. The writer can become despondent, or she can work in the knowledge that the “not yet” eventually will be realized. The first produces impatience, frustration, and anger and the decision to walk away from the work.
The second breathes hope into her heart. It comes to mind during her struggle to overcome the discouragement and the lie that her work will never amount to anything. It provides a certainty, an anchor, that can’t be swept away by any storm.
It furnishes her with patience even as she taps her foot and feels the weight of beginning again come to rest upon her shoulders. The shoulders round beneath it, but they straighten. The hope comes to her again. Her foot stills in the presence of it. It urges her to go back to work, so she gets out her tools and settles into the “horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well.”
Concluding quote is from Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
Image: Dustin Gaffke (Creative Commons)