The act of risking and enduring failure is celebrated at length these days. I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon, perhaps arising out of Silicon Valley startup culture, or if it’s an old philosophy that’s become newly relevant. Certainly humans have had to face their fears again and again, and fear of failure is one of the most significant.
Author Melissa Yancy (@melyancy), in her essay The Upside of Failure, shines a new light on what failure brings to the writing life. Her exploration isn’t the usual reflection on rejection, but rather a contemplation of what it means to keep writing when you don’t or can’t launch into it full-time, and it’s a day job that pays the bills. She writes:
… over the last decade, I’d seen many of my friends stop writing fiction, or stop writing altogether. It wasn’t from lack of talent, and more surprisingly, it wasn’t about discipline, either. The writers I knew who had taken their writing most seriously—working part-time, freelancing, and making significant financial sacrifice to spend more time on their work—were the ones who most easily gave it up when a stable career opportunity came around.
For years, when all else failed, I would think of something I’d heard Ron Carlson say: the writer goes to the stubborn. If I didn’t feel disciplined, or inspired, or talented, I knew I could be that: I could be stubborn. But when I talked to friends who had been able to give it up, I realized it was no longer stubbornness that kept me coming back.
Read Yancy’s entire essay in the latest Glimmer Train bulletin.
Also this month at Glimmer Train:
- Every Bit as Hard as It Sounds by Robert Schirmer
- On Writing as Theft by E.A. Durden
- Laziness in Molecular Transformation by Vi Khi Nao
- Expository Dialogue and Student Fiction by Gabriel Brownstein
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
Hi Jane. Thanks for sharing this passage from Yancy’s essay–it’s beautiful and terrifying. I’m about to step out of university and I’m both excited and afraid to see how my friends and I travel, if we’ll find some sort of magical balance between a day-job and writing, or if we’ll give it up for something more stable. So this was very relevant to me.
[…] view post at https://janefriedman.com/talent-discipline-stubborn/ […]
Well, I feel better. I had to get a fulltime job at 19, meaning college and writing took last place. It took me 18 years to get my bachelor’s degree–but I did it. And it was another 22 years before I could retire from my HR career and write in earnest. But my career earned me a pension, and my writing earned me an award for my debut novel at age 58. Life doesn’t always go the way we imagine it should, but that isn’t necessarily bad!
Years ago, I worked on the Hem-Onc unit of a top children’s hospital caring for kids with leukemia, an experience I describe in My Nights with Leukemia. One of my patients was a baby girl diagnosed at six-months with a form of leukemia so rare, the medical literature only described 32 cases. Complications quickly sent her to our ICU, where she was given only a two percent chance of leaving alive.
After she came back to Hem-Onc, so weak at ten months she couldn’t even hold a bottle, I talked to one of her ICU nurses. They would have given up on her but for the fact that she was so stubbornly fighting to live. They could not quit because she refused to quit. She licked that leukemia and today runs a chain of small businesses.
Stubbornness is often portrayed as an irritating vice. Someone should write a book pointing out that people who simply refuse to quit, defying the odds, repeated failures and vocal opposition, often accomplish a lot of good.
I’ve been told that Navy SEALs are taught that, when you reach the point where you feel you can’t go one step further, you’d exhausted about 40% of what you can do, that 60% still remains. That’s equally true with writing.
I’ll add one additional remark. Back in the 1950s, a new writer was typing, editing, and retyping her manuscript, trying to please her editor. At one point she became so frustrated, she hurled the latest manuscript out the window of her apartment. Realizing she might have made a mistake, she called her editor. He calmly told her to go down, collect up the pages, and get back to work.
When finished, Harper Lee’s frustrations were transformed into To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the best-loved novels of all time.
[…] When the Writing Life Isn’t About Talent, Discipline, or Stubbornness (Jane Friedman) The act of risking and enduring failure is celebrated at length these days. I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon, perhaps arising out of Silicon Valley startup culture, or if it’s an old philosophy that’s become newly relevant. Certainly humans have had to face their fears again and again, and fear of failure is one of the most significant. […]
[…] Source: Melissa Yancy’s “The Upside of Failure”, in Glimmer Train‘s Bulletin (via Jane Friedman) […]
[…] https://janefriedman.com/talent-discipline-stubborn/ Does stubbornness keep you writing? […]