Failure is Always An Option

On not letting excessive optimism get in your way (With a Writing Prompt)

I think I am a pretty optimistic person, for the most part. But if you catch me on a day when things haven’t gone my way, you wouldn’t think so. Today, for example. Things started out fine - a walk in the cold sunshine, some good stretchy yoga. But then I decided that today was the day I was going to make a successful photo transfer on my gelli plate. After all, I had watched multiple videos, I had a brand new plate that I had received as a holiday gift - what could go wrong?

Answer: everything. Not one technique shown in the videos worked for me. Not even a little bit. Cue being frustrated at wasting the printing of the photos, at wasting the paint, at wasting the time it took to try and pull five prints, all of which failed. So I decided to switch to a different photo transfer method where a cut photograph is set to a base paper with medium, dries and then the backing paper is re-wet and rubbed off, leaving behind the ink from the image. I had done this one a few times with varying degrees of success, so I thought it would give me a win for the afternoon.

Wrong. The first one started out okay and then I ripped through it and ruined the whole thing. Garbage bin fodder. Right now I have two others drying, and I swear that if those fail, I’m calling it a wash and giving up. What am I learning from this anyway? I wonder. That I suck at some things and will never get them right? That’s how I feel when things go like this. But, hear me out, that feeling can be a good thing.

I was taught from an early age that failure was an opportunity to improve, to practice more, to push harder. (Even when searching for a stock image for this post, I found mostly images that indicated that repeated failure is the road to success.) Over the years, I’ve learned that some things are NOT going to improve through hard work. I can’t ski, for example, and no one wants to see me dance. Even if I took classes, I doubt that those two things would ever move beyond failure. So I have given up completely on one (skiiing) and I only do the other at weddings where everyone is too drunk to notice me or at home when no one is watching. You don’t have to push yourself to be good at everything. Even when you are good at something, it doesn’t mean it will give you the results you want. (Cue transition to talking about writing…)

I have become used to failing as a writer - not getting the residency, the grant, the book prize, the reputed publication. These failures haven’t necessarily made me a better writer. Failure just comes with the territory if you are submitting work. These failures haven’t stopped from writing, however; they have instead been good for me in many ways. Mostly they have made me more realistic.

I don’t waste a lot of money applying for things that I have a slim chance of achieving. (I’d rather get an Air BnB with writing friends a couple of times a year than try to get into a residency that costs me $50 to apply with no guarantee of success, for example.) I am not a “big” or even recognizable name in poetry land, and no one is going to pay me money to speak at their college or run their prestigious workshop, especially since I do not hold an MFA. I am only the keynote speaker to the animals in my backyard. Poet Laureate of Pajamas.

I have learned to care less about those things and more about what matters to me: writing work that is true to me and not meant to please an algorithm or what is fashionable; building community; and promoting the work of others through my reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and now, the new journal I am co-editing with Rachel Bunting called Asterales: A Journal of Art & Letters. In this way, you could say that failure has made me happier and more well-rounded in my writing life.

Don’t get me wrong; it sure would be nice for my next book to sell well or to receive some sort of recognition for my writing. But it wouldn’t change my writing itself or make the “po biz” aspect of writing any easier or more fun.

For now? The second set of transfer images is almost dry. If they work out, I’ll have a couple of odd transferred images to play with, and I’ll feel a little better about the time spent this afternoon. If they fail, I’ll throw them in the trash and stick to the techniques that work for me. And maybe I’ll be happier for it. Who knows? And happiness is never a failure.

Prompt:

Make a list of things at which you consider yourself a failure. They can be silly things (like I can’t whistle), skill-based things (like my examples above) or more serious failures that gnaw at you.

Use two or three items from your list to write about a self that CAN do these things. How does that change occur? What happens as a result? How does that self feel now that it has these successes? In the middle of the piece, choose two other failures and bring them in as things that haven’t changed. Do these failures seem different in light of the successes the self had in the first part of the poem/story? Try to end the piece with some reconciliation with both parts of this self.