Failure is Underrated
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Rebecca Brown on failure. The Dogs and The Terrible Girls will melt your face off with their amazing, so GO READ THEM. So creepy, so beautiful, so good. Thanks to Author-friend/certified genius Carol Guess for the link.
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Now I totally have to find a copy of The Dogs.
And totally agree. It's funny, I'm always blathering on about that Moby Dick story. I think there's lessons there. And I've always felt that the people who succeed the most are the ones who aren't afraid to fail.
I think our culture is all whacked, and always so overconcerned with winning, to the point that we make competitions out of things where there should be no competition. And with that comes "success" and "winning" as good, and "failure" as bad. Failures, though, are merely stepping stones to success. What's that old line? Writing is rewriting. That is, learning from failures.
So true.
Off to go see if I can melt my face off.
Great essay. One of my favorite quotes about the benefits of failure vs. what others see as success, comes from Dylan: "There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
And on a side note, here's a bit on the benefits of writing without outward success:
Interviewer: What was the effect of the National Book Award on your career?
Mary Lee Settle: It made me sick. It also made my advances seven times what they had ever been before. It should have been wonderful, after all the necessary years of obscurity, but it was one of the most unpleasant experiences I have ever had. The envy, the viciousness were appalling. My husband said afterwards that he would rather be invited to a train-wreck than a New York literary cocktail party.
Awesome essay. How can you recognize success if you've never experienced failure?
That story of Young Sook Park smashing the pots is screaming awesome. I'm printing the whole thing out, but out of the whole failure post, that's what stuck into me like pins (having a voodoo doll kind of day, sorry. I have a two year old, what can I say?).
If success was easy, we'd all have it. And none of us would value it.
VIVA FAILURE. Thank God it's en vogue, because I am getting damn good at it ;)
I am breaking lots and lots of pots. Thanks for reminding me that it is necessary.
Great link - thanks so much for sharing.
I agree with Kimberly and Heather, the story of Young Sook Park and the line, "That you might need to break a lot of pots, and write a lot of drafts, and that not everyone is going to like what you do." especially moved me.
Thank you so much for sharing this.
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