Words Unlimited

Failure? It’s just another writing opportunity

I picked this image up via a twitter link that led me to the Facebook page of a Lara Crippa.  I don’t know who you are, Lara, but if that is your artwork it speaks volumes to me as writer.

Amazing, isn’t it, how you can almost glimpse a whole novel in an instant of thought. There’s the vision you have in your head, soaring towards completion, then there's the reality of turning that vision in to 300 pages of prose that others might want to read. 

Interesting, then, that on the same day I found this image, I read this piece in The Guardian, 'Falling Short: seven writers reflect on failure.'

The seven - Diana Athill, Will Self, Anne Enright, Julian Barnes, Margaret Atwood, Howard Jacobson, Lionel Shriver - are pretty frank about failure in relation to their writing and the rest of their lives.

It might not be a bad idea to clip the article and keep this image somewhere you can see it on the those days when the writing just won't go in a straight line.

It never will!

As Anne Enright says:  "Failure is easy. I do it every day, I have been doing it for years. I have thrown out more sentences than I ever kept, I have dumped months of work ... Even when I am pointed the right way and productive and finally published, I am not satisfied by the results. This is not an affectation, failure is what writers do. It is built in."

But this is not to suggest all is doom and gloom. It's how you handle the paradox that counts, as Will Self says: "...this is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this – nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously 'creative.'  On the contrary, it often occurs to me that since what successes I do manage are both experienced and felt entirely in solitude, there must be many others who are the same as me: people for whom life is a process to be experienced, not an object to be coveted."

Margaret Atwood puts it succinctly: ‘Get back on the horse that threw you … you learn as much from failure as you learn from success.’

Easy, then. No such thing as failure, just more writing opportunities…

 

Paul Auster on Publishing

Apparently Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ – one of the stories in The New York Trilogy – was repeatedly rejected. The experience seems to have left Auster with a realist’s view of the publishing industry.  He says:

I don’t think they know what they’re doing -- they guess. And they guess wrong a lot of the time. So the book that was rejected 17 times is now published in 44 languages around the world. So what did they know?

This is from a much longer piece in which Auster talks about his writing process. It's on the NY1 website and worth reading in full.

The book has had so many editions and covers. My all time favourite, to date, is The Folio Society's 2008 edition, pictured here. Tom Burns's original artwork won the V&A Illustration award in 2009.

Are You A Perfectionist?

David Foster Wallace on the tragedy of perfectionism. You know the feeling - you can see the novel/story/poem in your head, but what comes out on the page seems to fall short... what to do?

 

Thanks to Cheryl Moskowitz for alerting me to this animation.

The Rules Of Writing - under your nose?

Form                                                        Style

              Structure

                                                                                                                                  dialogue

I'm at that stage with my current work-in-progress where I need to pull together fragments of a life into a story, from page one to The End. I ask myself: How would you tell this story if you were sitting in the pub, trying to entertain a friend?

Oh, too simple, another part of my brain says, and wants to get all analytical and tricksy.

Mulling on this dilemma I decided to clear the piles stacked on my desk. I was pleased to come across an article that I'd cut from The Guardian in January - Rachel Cusk on the teaching of creative writing.

My eye fell on a paragraph I’d marked: 

“The natural grasp of form, structure, style and dialogue can be witnessed everywhere … The smallest child can tell the story of what he did that day, can work out how to make people laugh or how to make them anxious: by repeating his tale he can start to refine it based on the reactions he gets, learn to emphasise some parts and leave out others. The rules of writing are mostly indistinguishable from the rules of living, but this tends to be the last place people look …”

It was like finding a message in a bottle. Anyone free for a drink?

 

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

Isn't Tweeting bad for writers? Just another way to procrastinate? Isn't it all simply inane, egotistical chatter?

Back in the early 1990s - that does sound a long time ago! - I was mainly writing about the visual arts, my novels, as yet, were unwritten. I attended a conference - something to do with critical writing in the arts - at which there was a session on this thing call The Internet. Someone said it had nothing to do with writing and, anyway, wasn't it just a purveyor of porn?

Less than ten years later, with my first novel about to come out and another on the way I found the Internet and email part of the writing life  - research, sending edits back and forth to publishers etc.Well, Twitter's been here a while now and I've been using it in a modest way for a couple of years. For me, I find it an incredibly useful way of picking up 'industry' information, chatting to other writers, finding out about books and events I might have missed. Of course you can waste a lot of time on it but, equally, you could spend all morning sharpening pencils.That's your choice.

I would urge every writer to at least consider Twitter and how it might work for them. The more working writers tweeting the stronger that community grows.

Scriptwriter Jason Arnopp has looked at Twitter from a writer's perspective and come up with his 10 Reasons Why Twitter is Great For Writers. It's an excellent list as he embeds tweeting into the writing life.

And where did I come across this article? Why, on Twitter, of course.

The Secret Of Writing

Anne Tyler on the secret of writing:

" ... pretend to yourself that no one will see it, ever."

The novel she feels proudest of is Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant. More on her writing life in a long interview from last Saturday's Guardian Review

Writer's Clock

Feel the need to keep track of how much time you're giving to that necessary frustration? You might want one of these...

If so, you can buy one here.

Don't be fooled ...

 ... by your frustration with your current work-in-progress. If you're sitting there thinking 'this novel will never work out' or 'why did I think this image would ever make a poem?' you should be happy. This is the creative process at work. Time to embrace your writer's block. Go and dig the garden, do the ironing and all, eventually, will be well. Don't believe me? Watch this video ...

 

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Catching up with reading back issues of the London Review of Books [why don’t I just read it when it arrives in the post?] I came across this quote in Christopher Tayler’s essay length review of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 Book 1 and Book 2, and 1Q84 Book 3,

“At his best, he [Murakami] ... has a compulsive storyteller’s ability to hustle the reader over the threshold of assent and create a feeling of being led into a coherent inner landscape.”

He's describing the literary equivalent of ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ Of course we’re all far too literary and worldly to respond to the nursery question. And yet isn’t that what a global bestseller such as Murakmi is tapping into? Our instatiable desire for a story?

So, as you re-draft your first chapter, that’s what you’re aiming for - to hustle the reader over the threshold and have them believe in your fictional world. You probably have less than a page in which to achieve it.

Simultaneous Submissions to Agents

These days, when silence seems to be the new 'no', first time authors, understandably, get impatient. It must be tempting to send your manuscript to every agent in town in one go. But beware. I've just picked up this on Twitter from Curtis Brown agent, Karolina Sutton:

It's fine to submit material to a few agents simultaneously. It's not fine to submit to more than one agent at the same agency.

Did that just apply to Curtis Brown or was it universal, I wondered, and Tweeted her back. Her answer was swift: Universal