Fail Fantastically

Mo’ Poems Week 3

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The second last blog before Christmas, Christ lads, this year absolutely zipped by. I know we say that every yearn but this one in particularly quick. Blink and it’s gone type of energy. It’s strange how years get shorter the older you get. But here we are.

Here’s a story. I spent 2 years writing this admittedly weird book, poured myself into it. I got help from Mercier Press to polish it up. Man, I did everything I could to make it alluring for publishes and agents. Then I sent it out for months. Jesus, that book must have been rejected more than 20 times. ‘The writing is good but it’ll be hard to sell’. The book was obscure. It didn’t fit into a genre really. I still love it, but I shelved it for now. Maybe later in my career it’ll emerge as a book about a man looking back at the mistakes he made in his youth.

Anyway, that failure almost killed my career. I almost sacked it all in. Writing as a career path can be devastating. It can really mess with your mental health. It can cause anxiety and stress and inferiority complexes to blossom. Self-esteem is constantly in flux. And so after writing a book for 2 years and trying to sell it for the bones of 1 more, I felt lost. I took a break from writing specific projects, floating stand alone poems and essays out, unsure of what I was going to do.

And then in September the muse rocketed an idea into my brain. It was a Friday and on that first night I wrote six thousand words in three hours. It just poured out of me. And it’s not as obscure, but it is a story I need and want to tell, a story that should be told. And I love it so dearly.

The point of me telling you all of this is that I probably couldn’t have received that idea if I didn’t fail gloriously for three years. If I didn’t get knocked back, humbled, I may not have ever needed to write it. And I’ve always thought novels were the hardest thing to write – and they are. My writing ability wouldn’t have been near the level required if I didn’t spend months trying to figure out why that other book wouldn’t work. I got better at writing because of this failure.

Sometimes you need to fail to move forward. You need to fuck up. There’s no way around it. We look at other people and think things are always going smoothly, without resistance. But behind every person posting about how good things are going, there are a litany of failures. You can’t have one without the other. So, I suppose what I’m saying is, keep the chin up and fail fantastically.