This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 18: Fail A Lot.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need, to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And I just had a really interesting conversation with my husband Tim. I asked him how his day was and he asked me how my day was. And inevitably we ended up talking about what we each want out of life. And by talking about what we each want out of life, I of course mean that I asked Tim, my husband, what he ultimately wanted out of life. What would make his life worth living? What would make it meaningful? And he said, “I don’t know. I don’t have just one thing.” And I realized that was probably good. And then he turned the question on me as people often do when they are asked difficult questions, that they are not necessarily prepared to answer.

And he said, “What about you, Sarah? What do you want out of life?” And of course I didn’t have an answer. So I told him, “I don’t know. I just want to make sure that I don’t die with any regrets.” And he kind of laughed when I said that. And he said, “Sarah that’s not possible. You’re going to live a long life. And life is not perfect. You’re going to die with some regret sweetie.” And in that moment Tim’s wise words made me realize something. I was okay having regrets. And in fact I have some with me right now. Things I’ve regretted doing or not doing. Things that it’s too late to go back and fix or repair. But I realized that what I actually had meant, was that I didn’t want to die with regret having defined my life. So I realize we’re kind of off to a bit of a heavy start to today’s podcast episode.

And I promise we won’t spend the entire time talking about death. We’ll keep that for another episode I guess. But that conversation inspired tonight’s podcast episode. Because I think that we think of regret in the same way that we think of failure. And that is as the opposite of something that we consider good. So I’m going to back up for just a second and talk a little bit about perfectionism, or the desire to be perfect or to create something perfect. That is to say with no flaws, with shining order or carefully crafted chaos, that is simultaneously true to life and vastly imaginative. That has the brain of Stephen Hawking and the looks of Cate Blanchett. And emulates as much as humanly possible, our own ideas of God. Raise your hand if you’re a perfectionist. Or if you’re listening to this podcast while gardening or driving a train or riding your bicycle, or carrying tiny children around, please refrain from raising your hand.

You can raise a metaphorical hand. That literal or figurative hand that you’re raising right now, I don’t think I know many, if any, people who are creative, people who are driven to create, who are not perfectionists in some way. Who are not driven to create something as close to perfect as possible. I think it’s fairly universally understood, within my very limited and confined worldview, that something that contains a flaw or failure cannot possibly be perfect. And we all want ourselves or our work to be perfect, and so logically they can contain zero flaws. Which in itself is a flawed line of reasoning. So if you think of something that’s considered perfect, if you can think of something that is considered perfect, say the Mona Lisa. If we look deep enough, if we become critical enough, we can find flaws within it. I’ve never seen it in person but I’ve had friends who have gone to the Louvre, and they’ve all come back saying the same thing. “Why is it so small? I was disappointed that it was so small.”

Or what about that girl that you knew in high school? The one that everyone including yourself considered to be perfect. She had a beautiful smile. She had amazing grades. She was the lead in the spring musical. You know what? I will bet you $1 that you can find a flaw within her. And maybe it was something that you didn’t know about. But I assure you on my dollar that it was there. Or maybe it’s developed since then. As Robert Frost said, “Nothing gold can stay.” Now that we have access to Facebook and essentially we can watch our high school friends age before our very eyes, and get fat and bald and have too many screaming children, or not enough children or et cetera, et cetera. I’m sure that there is a flaw that to this day keeps her from being fully perfect.

That keeps us from being fully perfect. That keeps your work from being fully perfect. We are imperfect creatures who create imperfect things. And I’m not saying this to be Debbie Downer. I’m saying this to encourage you to re-examine your expectations of yourself, and to the work that you create. I think that a lot of the time we expect perfection from ourselves. We sit down on a Saturday morning to write, and after a couple hours we close the laptop or crumble up the paper in frustration and say, “I’ll never be as good as Hemingway. What I just wrote is complete crap. Shakespeare would have written something a million times better than this.” What are you expecting from yourself? I think there’s going to be a lot of questions in today’s podcast episode. Because guess what? I have another question for you to think about. And any or all of the questions that I ask you today, would probably be great fodder for your journal or for meditation or contemplation.

But my next question for you is, when was the last time that you failed? And you don’t have to write this down if you’re not comfortable with the chance that somebody could find it or read it over your shoulder, but just think about that one. When was the last time that you failed? I think this is something that’s going to be either very easy or very difficult for you. So this morning I was 17 minutes late to work. I sat down at my computer at 8:17. I failed to show up to work on time. Now fortunately, I work for a very gracious marketing company and there aren’t really any consequences for showing up late. But still I failed to show up to work on time. Now there are big scale and small scale failures. And showing up to work 17 minutes late, which I later made up the time for if you’re questioning my morals and ethics, is a small scale failure.

On a somewhat larger scale, there is the time that I backed my beautiful new car out of the garage, and completely took both the driver’s side mirror and the front bumper completely off. Now my point in asking all of this, is not to get you whirling down the drain of despair and self doubt and hatred and all of those terrible feelings. I don’t intend for you to go back and recount every single one of your failures. In fact I want you to stop when you think of one. Whether it’s large or small. Or if you had trouble thinking of the last time you failed, especially if you had trouble thinking of the last time you failed, my next question to you is, Do you allow yourself to fail? I think we’ve all had one of those friends or at least an acquaintance who doesn’t want to date, or to chance any romantic entanglement because they’re afraid of getting hurt.

“Love isn’t worth the risk,” they say. Are you like that with failure? Do you protect yourself? And by asking if you protect yourself from failure, what I’m really asking is, do you prevent yourself from trying. Whether it’s moving forward in your novel, whether it’s starting a novel, whether it’s gathering the courage to jot down a poem, or submit a piece to a magazine or a journal or a publisher, do you protect yourself from failure by not trying to succeed in the first place? And by no means am I judging by asking that. Because actually right here next to me in my office where I podcast, there is a drawer. And within this drawer is a stack of stories that I wrote in college and after college and over the years. Stories that I intended to submit for publication at some point in the future. In a future that never arrived and might never arrive. Because of course, if I were to send any of these stories out, I might get a rejection letter back. I might fail.

And so I think that a lot of us ask, myself included, “Why even try?” We are afraid of failure. And we’ve been trained to be afraid of failure. So being afraid of failure is not necessarily a failing on our own part. I like how circular you can get with this. And maybe I should even be asking before I ask why we’re afraid of failure, what exactly is failure? I could be all like, “Well, Webster’s defines failure as blah blah blah.” But you’re a writer, and you have access to a dictionary and or the internet. Now since failure is largely viewed as a negative thing, I think I would like to try defining failure in negatives. And what I mean by that is, failure is not. Because I think that’s a little bit easier than trying to talk about or wrap our minds around what failure is and what it constitutes.

But it’s a little easier to say, failure is not rejection. I have to tell you, I was so proud of my sister Rebecca. Rebecca if you’re listening to this, I am always proud of you. But I was extremely and especially proud of you when you told me that you had submitted a story to a literary magazine. And I know that you got a rejection letter back. But a rejection letter is not a failure. A rejection letter is feedback from one subjective person’s point of view. In this situation the failure would have occurred had you not sent in your story. The failure that I do every day by not sending in my pile of stories, because I’m so afraid of those rejection letters, that once again are not failure. But rather subjective feedback. When Stephen King wrote his first novel Carrie, you know about the teenage girl and the blood and all that stuff, it was rejected 30 times.

I’m going to repeat that. He received 30 rejection letters when he first tried to [inaudible 00:12:52] Carrie. And yes this is the same Carrie that you are familiar with. The one that has been published and republished and turned into successful movies, and serves as a basis of pop culture reference in so many television shows and books. Those rejection letters that Stephen King received, that my sister Rebecca received, those are not failures. Because when the novel Carrie was accepted to be published, nothing had changed from the other 30 times that it had been sent in. Stephen King had no control over any of those situations. Do you see what I’m saying? Another way that we think about failure is as the opposite of success. Let me tell you, failure is not the opposite of success. I know that we think about it that way. In life you’re either a success or a failure, right? Wrong.

I think if you ask anyone who’s been successful at anything, whether it’s writing a book or painting a mural or learning to walk, if they’ve done any of these things successfully, it’s only because they failed a lot on their way there. So the example of a baby learning to walk, the first time it tries if a baby falls down, is the baby a failure? No, it’s just learning. Failure is part of a learning process. Failure is a step towards success. Without sounding like a motivational poster, it’s true. Often you don’t get something right off and you don’t succeed until you’ve practiced a hundred times or a thousand times or 10,000 times. And while you’re practicing you’re failing a lot. If you’ve played a musical instrument, how many times have you hit a wrong note before getting it to sound like music? How much practicing goes into that?

How many little failures do you have to sweep away and accept, before you can overcome them and produce something really beautiful. Failure is not the opposite of success. Now success is in our faces all the time. I spoke earlier about Facebook. And Facebook is this weird self planted garden of success. It’s this place where you post pictures of your happy smiling children. It’s where you talk about your promotion or a recent sports win. Facebook is a carefully curated space where we tend to post our most ideal or perfect or successful selves. Because we get to be very selective with the self that we portray. And of course, I’m going to post a picture of me holding up an award or a trophy that I won, where I am much less likely to showcase a tweet that ruined a friendship, or a divorce certificate, or a blow by blow account of how I got totally chewed out by this person or that person at work.

Once in a while people will post things like, “Ah, I feel sick,” or, “This bad thing happened to me,” or, “The weather is terrible.” But those are all posted to garner pity or sympathy. They’re not posted to say, “Boy, I really screwed up. And I want to publicly acknowledge that.” I mean unless it’s like a corporation or a public figure and they are being forced by their PR companies to admit that they made a big mistake or that they failed in some way, normal people don’t do that. Or at least not a lot of them do. We see success around us all the time. In other people’s happy marriages, in their beautiful shiny new cars, in their gorgeous houses. We even see other writers’ success. Have you ever walked into a bookstore and just gotten a little depressed or full of despair when you look around at all those people who have been published, it’s a little daunting sometimes.

I mean I love bookstores. I could probably live in one. But yeah, sometimes when I go into a bookstore I’m like, “Jeez! Everybody else slow down so I can catch up.” Other writers’ success is all around us. And sometimes it’s hard not to compare. But with that in mind, I want to point out something that’s not talked about very often. At least in… I live in the United States. So at least not in the culture of the USA. And maybe this is true of your culture as well. But success is not happiness. I feel like that could be a whole episode or a book or what have you in and of itself. But that’s a lesson that I learned a while ago, and I was very surprised at that lesson. Because I think we tend to equate the two. Without being boastful, I think like a lot of people I’m really uncomfortable talking about any success that I’ve had.

And so I did something and I saw a moderate amount of success from it. It was praised by some people I didn’t even know. I was receiving very kind emails from very kind people. And yes there were parts of that success that I did enjoy and treasure. But the success did not make me happy. And that was because it wasn’t necessarily tangible. And I don’t think there’s really a bar that’s high enough where we can ever say that we’ve made it, or that we’ve completely succeeded, because there’s always something else. You can never rest on your laurels or hang your hat or whatever phrase you want to use. I think it’s very similar to the realization, if you’ve ever had this realization, that money is not happiness and cannot buy happiness. It’s important and if you don’t have it, I think you feel the absence of it.

But by itself, money is not going to make you happy. Success is not going to make you happy. And so with that in mind, I want to ask you my next question, since success is not happiness, why are we so afraid of failure? I think that sometimes when it comes to failure, we can let our imaginations run away with us. At least I know that’s true for me. When I was in high school and college I took tests very seriously. I took all of my classes and all of my studies very seriously. And I was so afraid of not getting an A. I was so afraid of getting a B or a C, that I was paralyzed with fear. Because I wasn’t thinking rationally. I wasn’t thinking, “Okay Sarah, what will actually physically truly happen if you get a B in a class, if you get a C in a class?” I was so wrapped up in this fear of failure, that I didn’t even stop to think what failure meant in that case.

I think a lot of the times when we think about failure, we just immediately associate consequence with it. In this case I was so terrified of failure, I didn’t even think about the consequences that I was sort of subconsciously tying to that failure. And if I would have chased down the consequences for that failure, for that less than perfect grade, would what I’ve found truly have been so terrifying? Of course not. I sometimes think that getting good grades in high school and college was kind of a mistake. I worked so hard and I was so stressed out and so anxious all the time as I chased down what I thought of as some kind of idyllic perfection, that I didn’t let myself have a lot of fun. And I maybe sacrificed some truly meaningful relationships for the chance to study. I think that we’re afraid of failure because we’re afraid of consequences, negative consequences. Because there are good consequences too.

And for me and I think for a lot of us it’s a slippery slope. So, “Oh, if I get a B the next step illogically is getting kicked out of school, and then I’ll never find a job and I’ll die in a gutter somewhere.” All of my fears related to failure of any kind. Whether it was missing a note in a jazz solo or not getting an A in a class. All of these failures were somehow tied to this image of me living in a gutter. Like in the middle of the city, dressed in rags, climbing over piles of wet napkins and big gulp cups. And that’s I think because we are obsessed with defining ourselves. And I think at the end of the day, we expect that we will either define ourselves as a success or a failure. And nobody wants to be a failure.

I think you have to make a lot of mistakes. And I think you have to fail a lot, more than a lot. I think you have to fail nonstop to end up in that gutter. So what is it we’re afraid of? Negative consequences, being hurt, being vulnerable, even though these things have value. When you’re a little kid and you touch a burner on the stove, that is an action. It has a negative consequence, you get burned. But also you learn not to touch the stove. Consequences can have value. And yes they might hurt. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have value, and they’re not important for a full human experience. And the same thing goes with vulnerability. Are you afraid of exposing the fact that you are vulnerable? We are learning more and more as a society, that vulnerability is a type of power.

I could probably do a whole nother talk on vulnerability. And if you haven’t seen them, I encourage you to watch Brené Brown. Has some really cool TED Talks about vulnerability and shame that are just life changing. So watch those. But what I’m getting at here, is that we need to start embracing failure and stop living in fear of it. We need to fail to grow. And I know it’s scary and I know it hurts. But you need to do it. Now I’m not talking about intentional failure. So you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to just intentionally go make a huge mistake right now. I’m going to set my house on fire.” That’s not a good idea. That’s kind of the opposite of what I’m talking about. Don’t be irresponsible. But be okay with trying something and establish the expectation that you might fail at it. Chase down the consequences. What happens if you fail? You get back up, you start again, right?

You burn the pie. You have to bake a new one. Sometimes there are painful consequences. Wasted time, wasted money. But it’s so worth it. Embrace failure because it can help you try in the first place. Embracing and expecting failure can give you the courage that you need to try something, that you would otherwise be too afraid to try. Because the only way that you can succeed is to try. Once again, not to sound all motivational poster [inaudible 00:24:18] , but you’re never going to finish a race that you don’t even start. Embrace failure because it helps you grow and it makes you stronger. I talked earlier about failure being the stepping stone for success and not the opposite of success. So think about when you exercise, if you like to exercise. You tear your muscles and the muscles repair themselves, and that’s how muscles grow. Sports analogy. Realize that failure is okay.

I really can’t say that enough today. And in fact I have a really lovely quote from J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, about being okay with failure. She says, “Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve. I was determined to try. And I was determined to try because frankly my life was such a mess at this point. What was the worst thing that could happen? Everyone turn me down? Big deal.” Wise words from my wise lady. So get comfortable with failure. Because I truly believe that the more you fail, the more you’ll succeed. This week’s book of the week is Dark Currents by Jacqueline Carey. Jacquelyn Carey is a writer that I really admire a lot. She’s very good at turning phrases. And she has an enormous vocabulary that she’s very comfortable using. And yet she’s very skilled at both crafting natural dialogue and really likable characters.

The first novel of hers that I read was Kushiel’s Dart. Which is this sweeping epic fantasy novel series that while awesome, is not particularly family friendly. So when I saw that Jacqueline Carey had written a paranormal romance series, of which Dark Currents is the first installation, I was like, “Oh man! This is going to be a wild ride.” And when I say paranormal romance, I’m kind of talking about the Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood, Anita Blake, My boyfriend is a vampire/werewolf/I’m a vampire/werewolf/there are ghosts, and other paranormal things. And there’s some kind of romance entanglement therein. So while following the traditional story structure of a romance novel, they also have a little bit of violence and often a mystery to solve. And so I was really hoping to see this genre which I’ve read a lot of, turned on its head. But Oh my gosh! It was so standard. Not to make a pun but it was very much by the book.

It had a love triangle and mythical beasts, a sociopath or two. It had a murder mystery. But there wasn’t anything in here I hadn’t seen before. And that was kind of disappointing. You know me, you know how much I love to be surprised by books. So maybe I simply had expectations that were not met. Which does not mean that this book is a failure. Now you see how I tie that in. I just expected something different from what it delivered. And it’s very competently written. It’s compelling. It has all the right paranormal romance notes. It was just kind of normal. And for me in paranormal romance, that is the kiss of death.

I received a really really lovely note on my website from a listener named Sharon who said, “I just found your podcast last night and listened to four of them back to back. A breath of fresh air. I love your insight and your style. Keep going, we’re here.” Sharon thank you so much for your feedback. I really appreciate that. It kind of made my day.

Also if you subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, or if you have an iTunes account, or I guess if you listen to another podcatcher such as Stitcher or TuneIn Radio, I would truly appreciate if you would leave a review of the Write Now podcast in iTunes or whatever other podcatcher you use. Positive reviews go an enormously long way in getting the word out there about this podcast, and in helping to grow my listener base. Podcast listener and iTunes reviewer Madlikealyce said, “Inspired. Five stars. Sarah has a refreshingly honest perspective on the struggle to balance work and life, while keeping the writing spark ignited. Beautiful and inspiring. Highly recommended.” Thank you Madlikealyce for your very kind words. Podcast listener and iTunes reviewer Dvgallery Says, “Calm approachable wisdom. Five stars. Wise and calming. Sarah’s podcasts have much to offer. I look forward to each episode.” Thank you so much, Dvgallery.

Thank you all for your kind reviews and comments and emails. Thank you also to my Patreon supporters. Notably official rad dude Sean Locke, and podcast caffienator Rebecca Werner. And all of my other wonderful and lovely Patreon supporters. I’d also like to thank my husband Tim, for the conversation about regrets and successes and how we define ourselves, which sparked this podcast episode. So thank you Tim for your wisdom. Finally, thank you so much for listening.

This has been the 18th episode of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need, to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner. Now go forth and fail a lot.