Showing posts with label failure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label failure. Show all posts

Friday, July 28, 2023

Write a Map for Failure

Have you ever counted up all the euphemistic, pseudo-inspirational bullshit this society generates around failure? The only failure is never trying. If you don't fail, you aren't trying. Fall down seven, get up eight. I mean. The list is onerous.

No matter all the empty, pithy sayings, I assert that failure gets a bad rap. I know because I'm in the middle of it. It's been four years since I've published a book. It's been four years since I finished a book. A writer not writing. Does that not define failure? It feels like it does. But just because I'm standing in the middle of this vast creative desert, it doesn't mean I've given up. I won't give up until I'm dead. Granted, some days that feels closer than others. But in the meantime, I clock what matters about failure.

1.Failure is inevitable.
2. Failure teaches.
3. Failure is temporary if you want it to be.

To handle failure, you need to know what it is. Define it. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it say? What does it smell like? Taste like? Is it a bad review? Those are guaranteed. Is it writing and never being traditionally published? In this market, that is a very real risk. What's your back up plan? Also, why are you writing in the first place? If it's to get published, you've put your power and happiness into something you cannot control. 

Recognize that failure of some kind visits us all. If you define that hell before you catch sight of it, you can develop plans to help dodge it before you get stuck in it.

If and when failure comes knocking, look for what that failure has to teach. No one ever learned anything useful and long-lasting from success. Our mistakes are our teachers when we don't get bogged down in emotion about them. Maybe I took on  a story that exceeded my skill, and I failed to stick the landing. The critics hate me, and the book isn't selling. Yet i gained incredible new skills for having dared to try this hard thing. So it's not perfect. The next book will be the better for it, and I now have a set of skills no one can ever take from me.

Failure doesn't have to be a destination. It can be a place you pass through. It feels like you'll die there, trust me. Occasionally, I guarantee you'll wish you could, just so you can stop trying and just rest. The path through failure includes a lot of flailing, a lot of crying for help, and a lot of looking outside yourself for answers to the 'what's wrong with me' question. The hard truth, though, is that the only route out of failure starts inside you. It starts with determination and the refusal to wander off into the sunset never to be heard from again. It means adapting. Developing new ways to work when the old ways either aren't available or no longer work.

I don't mean to imply that help isn't available and shouldn't be sought. I will be the very first advocate for addressing mental health issues immediately.  That is, in fact, a prerequisite. But barring the need for medical diagnosis, you aren't likely to find one class or one guru or one quick trick that's going to rocket you out of failure. Classes can be valuable tools. Writing groups, too. They're good supports to lean upon along the way while you're clawing word by word out of a failure state. But they cannot take the place of the work required of you for you.

No one wants to fail. No one thinks it will happen to them. No one wants to have to sit down with their already over-active imagination and mentally play through worst-case scenarios and then come up with plans A and B to address those worst case scenarios. Trust someone who didn't and ended up mired in failsville for too long. Your stay in failure will be much, much shorter if you come into it with a roadmap for getting back out.



Thursday, July 27, 2023

SOAR

Alexia standing beside a poster wall in the high school, black background with multi colored paper wings and the word SOAR above

Writing is hard. If you’ve tried it, are doing it, or have done it, you already know that. But we’re not talking directly about that this week. We’re talking about failure, which is also hard, and necessary, and what wise words do we have for our past selves.


I’m sure you’ve heard the saying failure means growth. That applies to writing as well. You write. You fail. You query. You fail. You publish on your own. You fail. You go on submission. You fail. You pay for marketing. You fail. 


The trick is to persist. 


Once upon a time I was a finalist in a national contest and found myself part of a group of talented, women writers. We called ourselves the Persisters. We celebrated, we toasted, and we had so many doors open. 


When you reach a high point—that first contract, that first sale, that first yellow badge—you think that’s it! I’ve made it. I’m a writer who belongs. And then, undoubtedly, something will unravel and you will fail. 


As a newbie writer you watch those overnight successes, which are never overnight successes, and you think that once you get there it’ll be smooth sailing. It looks like once you get there you’ll never hear a no, there will always be clamoring for your next books. 


Truth time. It’s not like that in real life. Even those best sellers have ideas that don’t get picked up or don’t sell. 


My wise words to my past self: Being at the top doesn’t mean the failures have ended, but persist. Because failure only means you’re growing and getting better. 

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Contemplating Failure


Know what this is?? It's a teaser for the cover of TWISTED MAGIC, Book #3 in Renegades of Magic!!

Yes, I have the cover - and have had for a while - but I've been hanging onto it until I could set up a release date and preorder link. I'm a bit on tenterhooks at the moment, waiting on feedback from Agent Sarah on the book I wrote that fell on me from out of the sky and insisted on being written: ONEIRA. Once I know whether she wants to take it on submission to traditional publishing or if I'll self-publish it (in August!), then I'll be able to set a date for the TWISTED MAGIC release. Meanwhile, you can preorder the book via my website store!

This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking about failure. Ostensibly, the topic is reassuring ourselves that we are not failures and offering wise words to that effect. I say "ostensibly" because I don't think it's possible to say that we are not failures. We are all failures, at some point, in some way, on the large or small scale. Failing at something is a natural part of life. Everything, everywhere, fails to do something or another, usually multiple times, probably more often than they succeed.

I'm being persnickety about this because I think the concept of failure gets a bad rap. As if it's something we're supposed to avoid at all costs. I can't be honest and tell you you're not a failure. I can't be honest with myself and say that. I've failed at all kinds of things I've tried to do. I wrestle daily with facing that I've failed to reached certain goals. But the answer isn't some pep talk where I pat myself on the head and console myself with the comforting words that I haven't actually failed. That doesn't benefit me. Instead I have to look at why I haven't succeeded at what I set out to do. A lot of it may not be within my control. A great deal of publishing isn't. And it's good for me to look at that and cut away those things I can't control - and then focus on what I can control. What can I do better? How can I change my strategy? What can I learn from this failure?

Let me emphasize: failure is okay! We learn from failure.

I'm not going to tell you that you're not a failure because you are one, just like every other living creature. Life is about the attempt; failure and success are only metrics by which to measure the result. Learn, and live. 

 

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Failure & Reasonable Expectations

This Week's Topic: You're not a failure
Wise words to your past self and those who are struggling

The Key to Success is Great Reasonable Expectations

We're told from the cradle to aim high and dream big. Nothing is unattainable if we put our heart into it. That's charming advice for inspiration and aspiration. It's not so great for implementation. Our big dreams tend to ignore the necessary micro steps. Thus, before we even begin, we've set ourselves up for frustration, disappointment, and...failure. When things don't unfold as we imagined, we deem ourselves incompetent and spiral into surrendering our lofty aspirations. We limp away, defeated, relegating ourselves to the status of a dreamless cog. 

How heartbreaking.

The major flaw in our Grand Plan wasn't that we were stupid. We simply made a mistake. We kept the view at 5,000ft when we had to take the footpath. We didn't plant for the weather, enemy, and terrain. We disregarded our physical and emotional limitations. We didn't acquire the necessary foundational knowledge in advance, so we didn't know what we didn't know. When we don't know better, we don't do better. We sabotaged ourselves from the get-go by setting unrealistic expectations. 

Failing to achieve a goal does not equal being a failure.

We are allowed to make mistakes. Mistakes are a measure of progress, even when we have to take a few steps back to modify our path. Our mistake taught us to take a different fork in the road. Sure, we suffered a loss or two, but time spent learning isn't time wasted. As long as we are willing to reflect on where and how we went wrong, we can revise our plan to correct what we can control. This is how we learn to create reasonable expectations for ourselves and others.

This is when we revise and resume.

We succeed when we do our best. It's fine to compare ourselves to others, but it's not okay to punish ourselves for not achieving their success. It's human nature to gauge our place in family, community, and career through comparisons. We use the experiences of others to identify the milestones on our chosen path, and we strive to achieve similar goals in order to keep ourselves motivated; in order to reward ourselves for the small accomplishments along with the big ones. However, learning, truly learning, means we take in information, analyze it, process it against all our other knowledge and experience, and then customize it before applying it to our circumstances and our individual quirks.

Author, Know Thy Self

In a creative field like ours, it is critical to understand ourselves. Only through recognizing our strengths and foibles, our motivations and distractions, our procrastination triggers and our manic gateways can we set reasonable expectations for ourselves. We are not Nora Roberts nor are we James Patterson. Their methods and their paths are not ours. We are our own delightful oddities and our paths to success are as unique as we are. We are accountable to ourselves. We define what success is for us. The success we define is attainable when we have reasonable expectations of ourselves.

We are not failures.
We are Works in Progress. 

Friday, June 26, 2020

Fail Big

The most profound thing for me to say about failure comes from gaming. Big surprise, I know. It's from an old guild leader. He said: 

If you ain't dyin', you ain't tryin' 

 

Good advice in a situation where there are only pixels on the line, I suppose. But honestly, after the 12th wipe of a raid when you're trying to get everything just right, having the permission to relax into the ridiculousness of what you're attempting to accomplish changes EVERYTHING.

Any failure that is nonfatal is a chance to learn and grow. According to Carol Dweck (check out her book Mindset) how we view failure has a profound impact on whether we do succeed or fail over the course of life, love, and business. Those of us with a Fixed mindset are afraid of failure because we're certain it shows up our short-comings. Those of us with a Growth mindset might not relish failure, but we embrace it as an opportunity to learn something new. Not surprisingly a Growth mindset sets us up with far greater odds for success over time. And the good news is that you can change your mindset. It's in the book. I'm not rewriting it here. 

So maybe don't go looking for failure in say, cave diving, or free climbing El Capitan just yet. Scale the fail. Where physical safety isn't on the line, dare to fail big. The risk should be just enough to give you a little anxiety but not quite enough to keep you up nights. Not many, anyway. You're learning stuff. You need your sleep.

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Epic fails, little fails...you've got to face them all.



I can’t count the number of things that I’ve failed at…and I’m a type A, will-do-everything-to-get-it-right kind of person! So it’s a little funny that I decided to become a writer because it’s upped my fails exponentially. 

Usually, when you do something over and over, you tend to get better at it. I guess you can say I’m getting better at failing, but it’s really one of those things that’s messy/ugly no matter how it happens. Life lessons are usually messy and ugly. 

My most recent read, I CAN’T MAKE THIS UP: LIFE LESSONS by Kevin Hart, ended up being pretty timely for this week. If you haven’t read it, it’s funny and inspirational, you should definitely check it out. Hart’s humor shines in this book, but it’s his outlook on life and the lessons he’s learned that really resonated with me. 

“One of the key factors for success—beyond work, talent, timing, relationships, and all the other qualities I’ve mentioned—is the glue that holds all of these together: commitment.” 
(page 160, I Can’t Make This Up)

Sticking with something isn’t a new idea, I wouldn’t be able to make such amazing pies if I’d given up after my first attempts. See the failed cake pic at the top! But it’s really nice to know that I’m not the only one struggling, failing over and over, and still tenaciously holding on, committing, to my dream. 

Because I agree with Kevin Hart, you have to commit if you want to succeed. You’ve got to be willing to put in the hours and energy all without the guarantee that you’ll get something in return. And you’ve got to be willing to do it again and again. 

So many try to write. Most don’t finish that first book. A good chuck that do, get some no’s and don’t do anything with it. Some will put out one book and then walk away. There’s a lot that goes into each individual decision, but I do know that if you give up on your dream there’s no way it’ll happen. 

Yes, you’ll hit times when you’re already down and get more rejections, more fails, and it seems like the entire universe is against you. There’s no easy fix. The best suggestion I have is to celebrate your friends successes. If you notice someone else is struggling, send them an emotional boost, or even a coffee! Lifting up someone else helps take the focus off your own problems, lightens your soul, and can give you energy to keep going. 

Stay committed. Don’t give up.

Sunday, June 21, 2020

Confronting Failure - and Learning from It!

Did you see the cover for THE LOST PRINCESS RETURNS yet? I'm so in love with it for so many reasons, but mainly because it so perfectly captures Jenna/Ivariel in my mind. Especially everything she's feeling about returning to Dasnaria after all this time.

I'm glad everyone nagged me to write this story! The novella turned out to be a short novel, and releases June 29. You can preorder at the links below at a special sale price or here. Yes, there will be a print version; it should be available for preorder later this week.

Our actual topic at the SFF Seven this week is confronting failure. Not just the occasional downturns of fortune which is the lot of every writer, but also being able to take an honest look at what is just not working.

I recently signed up to be mentored during SFWA's Nebula Conference. (Salient note: because the conference was online this year, we've been able to keep it going. For a reduced price, you can avail yourself of the recorded panels and workshops, along with ongoing chats and discussions!) I've always volunteered to mentor others, and I've always joked that I *want* a mentor. While I know I have an enviable level of success compared to many, I'm also invested in evaluating what's NOT working in my career (Spoiler: I am not a millionaire) and how I can do better. I ended up having a fantastic conversation with Laura Anne Gilman. She took my questions and ramblings very seriously and gave me some great ideas for how I could "level up," career-wise. (She did say she thought "leveling up" applied mainly to craft, and I could see her point.) Amusingly enough, by the end of the conversation, she said she needed to write down some of her wise insights for herself.

I think taking a hard look at what is not working for us career-wise is just as important as taking those hard looks at why a manuscript won't sell or isn't grabbing people.

That kind of work never ends!

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  Or Buy the ebook Direct from Jeffe

More than two decades have gone by since Imperial Princess Jenna, broken in heart and body, fled her brutal marriage—and the land of her birth. She’s since become Ivariel: warrior, priestess of Danu, trainer of elephants, wife and mother. Wiser, stronger, happier, Ivariel has been content to live in her new country, to rest her battered self, and to recover from the trauma of what happened to her when she was barely more than a girl.

But magic has returned to the world—abruptly and with frightening force—and Ivariel takes that profound change as a sign that it’s time to keep a promise she made to the sisters she left behind. Ivariel must leave the safety she’s found and return to face the horrors she fled.

As Ivariel emerges from hiding, she discovers that her vicious brother is now Emperor of Dasnaria, and her much-hated mother, the Dowager Empress Hulda, is aiding him in his reign of terror. Worse, it seems that Hulda’s resurrection of the tainted god Deyrr came about as a direct result of Jenna’s flight long ago.

It’s up to Ivariel—and the girl she stopped being long ago—to defeat the people who cruelly betrayed her, and to finally liberate her sisters. Determined to cleanse her homeland of the evil that nearly destroyed her, Ivariel at last returns to face the past.

But this time, she’ll do it on her own terms.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Chase your own dang goals, Writer-You

This week I can talk about anything I want to, so buckle up. This could get weird. Also personal. There might be swearing. You have been warned.

First, a confession: for the past, oh who knows how long, I've been in a slump. Not just one of those cute temporary "oh golly, I don't know what scene should go here" blocks but a solid half year of writing literally nothing. Of complete writer-brain paralysis. I'm coming out of it, with the help of a therapist, because as is so often the case with these things, a bunch of root causes grew up, choked the crap out of each other, and formed this constricting tangle.

One of those pesky roots was author goals. Or rather, other people's goals for me as an author.

My own goals starting out were pretty simple:

1. Have my partner read something I wrote and say it's good.

2. Have a stranger, someone I've never met and almost definitely am not related to, read my book and like it. 

3. Have enough success (that is, sales) that I don't have to assume a different pen name and start over, which I've heard authors anti-affectionately refer to as "re-branding." Note that I had no idea back then how to define "enough success."

So, my first book came out, and amazingly, #2 happened. Yay! My second book came out, and whoo-boy!  #1 happened as well. (Thank you, Conejo-my-love.)

My third book... er, so here's where things get sticky. Remember how I didn't have numbers for "enough success"? Remember how it was all vague and hand-wavy and trust-everything-will-turn-outish? That was a mistake. Huge. Because instead of defining my own goals--or my own identity, as a writer--I ended up chasing someone else's goal of sufficient numbers, sufficient success. I wanted to be successful enough that my publisher wanted to keep me on, right? 

But how much is that, numbers wise? How do you achieve it? What steps do you take to make that happen?

Problem was I let my success be defined by someone else's goals, without a clear understanding of what those goals were or what they entailed, and then I appropriated all of the guilt and horror when I failed to meet those goals. 

My identity had become dependent upon someone else's estimation of success.

This is a shit way to live, people. It's a worse way to work. However, I had a lovely eureka moment not to long ago where I was whining to the therapist about my failures and she asked me what specific goals I'd failed to achieved, and I told her and she asked me under what circumstances I'd set those goals and I was like... hold up. I didn't make them. They aren't mine. 

I never wanted to be a bestseller. I mean, it wouldn't have sucked, but I personally wasn't disappointed by a lesser splash on the scene. A writing career is a slow-burn love affair, right, not a hookup on page 1. Plus, I got goals number 1 and 2 right out of the gate, so I was good. 

Then therapist -- who is exceptionally wise, which is absolutely what I pay her for -- suggested I think up new ways of defining what Success as a Writer Means for Me. 

And it's this:

1. Success is that moment when I'm writing and my kid is reading over my shoulder and she laughs out loud at one of my jokes. (<--the BEST)

2. Success is writing "The End" on something, regardless of whether I have any intention of selling it ever.

3. Success is seeing hearts--or the odd "fucktacular!"--in the margins of my manuscripts after my critique partners have read a thing.

4. Success is making myself cry when I write a scene that's particularly difficult. Bonus if it ever makes someone else cry.

There will be other goals as I continue on this path through Writing Land. So far, I've gotten 1, 2, and 3 to happen and hope to replicate them. Number 4 eludes me, but it's something that is entirely within my control as a craftsperson and wordflinger.

And that's the trick, I think, to forming an identity as Yeah, I Really Am a Writer, Legit: making my own goals. Defining them clearly. Developing only goals that I have one hundred percent control over--i.e., not sales or reviews or awards. 

Sticking to it, focusing...

...and letting myself, sometimes, when no one else is looking, win.