You can fail on a sentence, paragraph, page, scene, and story level. You can fail a million ways in writing, and most likely, you’ll fail in 999,999 of them of the course of your attempts. So it is with many things in which we seek improvement. We fail, fail, fail, and get incrementally better with time and effort.
I struggle with accepting the failure. I have worked in corporate environments where failure was not an option. You could easily be fired for failure. Once, I was threatened with immediate firing for allowing a typo to appear on a web page. (Later I was laid off).
In my small business, I cannot afford to fail right now, and nor can my clients afford to have me fail. I was just listening to the radio about how a major software upgrade for the state went millions over budget and was delayed an entire year. I might never work again if that happened on one of my projects. No room for that. One bad project, and I’m destitute. This year more than last, I’m in a tight spot. This means I tend to turn down projects that I am not 100% certain about (not sure about technical requirements, the budget, etc). Sometimes, this means turning down thousands of dollars. But what’s worse, to turn down the money and tighten belts, or to take the money and utterly fail the client by missing deadlines, or delivering completely buggy software? I’d rather keep the pain of that limited to myself, and not ruin someone else’s dream in the process.
It’s this issue of failure in my jobs that pay and have paid that bills that makes me so hard on myself when I fail at writing. Because I sacrifice business time to do the writing, and the fact that I cannot produce professional, salable material with anything resembling consistency or regularity makes that time essentially a waste from an income standpoint. I love doing it, but writing is very costly to me. It costs time and lost income. So it’s doubly hard to realize that I’ve produced a failed story, or novel. Efficiency is key when time is money. And I’m trying to be efficient enough to justify the time.
It’s all vaguely ridiculous, to attempt to manage your creative writing work the same way you try to manage your web development work. But for now, I just don’t have any other option. Hence backing off of writing again, at least until I know where I will be living in August. Hopefully not in a parent’s basement.
If you can afford it, give yourself the gift of failure. You’re going to do it anyway, so you might as well learn to forgive it. I’m trying to do that myself.
Tags: business, failure, money, My Writing
I know what you’re saying when it comes to putting food on the table and the roof overhead, but I wanted to share this, which has been on my writing desk since day one: “Always try. The defeat from failure is never as disheartening as the failure to attempt.” You’ll go back to the writing when you can because it’s what makes you happy, even if you feel you “fail” occasionally. And if you’re writing, even a little, you’re probably doing everything else better, too. Good luck. :)