Give Yourself Permission to Fail

Writing is a messy business. You might imagine that as you progress along your artistic and professional path things get cleaner and simpler—that you’re able to bang out clean, powerful prose at any moment without all the mess of false starts and revision, but you’d be what Literary Scientists call ?wrong.’

Yes, you get better at certain things. Organizing your thoughts, jump-starting beginnings, crafting thesis statements and arguments. Research, process—there are plenty of things you get better at, including recognizing when the words you’ve just put down on the page or screen are absolute hot trash (note to self: Absolute Hot Trash is a great band name). But you’ll probably never hit a point where you can bang out a draft of a novel or story quickly and nail it every time. Maybe sometimes. Maybe when motivation or inspiration really smacks you. But in general you have to give yourself permission to fail.

Nothin’ but a Number

This can be difficult to accept when you’ve attained a certain amount of experience and success. After all, if you’ve written and sold novels, been anthologized, won awards you must know what you’re doing! And yet you’ll still write stuff that is the aforementioned Absolute Hot Trash. You’ll still get a novel 66% of the way and then watch it fall apart. You’ll still review yesterday’s work and be dismayed that your sentences have all the flow of a high school kid rapping for the first time after drinking an entire bottle of Jägermeister by themselves.

The best thing—the only thing—you can is to give yourself permission to fail. Permission to write Absolute Hot Trash. Permission to delete 10,000 words and start over.

The important thing to remember here is that failing in a creative endeavor is not only not unusual even for veterans, it’s healthy. It’s necessary. It’s like a controlled burn that clears out the dead underbrush and old growth so new saplings can emerge. It should be embraced.

Most importantly, recognizing that you’ve screwed the pooch on a piece of writing means you’re still able to tell the fucking difference between good work and bad. If you ever feel like you’re in some amazing Zone where everything breaks your way and you haven’t done shitty work in a long time, get suspicious.

Of course, don’t make my mistake: Remember to also give yourself permission to succeed. Whew, the wasted years!