In defense of "failure"

When things we love end, and maybe that's okay

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

There’s something they just love to say in publishing. “The book didn’t work.” Publishing is far too faux-nice and sanitized to call anything a failure, outright, so this is the euphemism that seems to have been universally agreed upon instead. I’ve heard it. My friends have heard it. It’s painful and always heartbreaking. This thing you poured your heart and soul and free time and working time and *gestures wildly* ALL THIS into just … *shrugs* “didn’t work.” Whoops. Better luck next time!

I was just chatting about this with a colleague, who has a book that has performed less well than they’d like. And how the first thing everyone will try to do to you is to convince you that IT’S OKAY, REALLY, IT’S NO BIG DEAL. Books have a long tail! I trust it will find its audience! But it’s such a good story! I loved it! We live in a world that fears grief, sadness, disappointment, discomfort, despair. We discourage expressions of it. We shy away from them. We create euphemisms. We lock these ugly feelings and broken dreams away, in tidy little boxes. We demand positivity, about everything from cancelled plans to cancer. Rain check! Look on the bright side! Get right back on that horse! You can beat this if you’re just happy and optimistic enough! It’s not *that* bad, really, is it; it could be worse!

Failures aren’t ever allowed to be failures. One door closes and another MUST open. A smile must remain on your face. We must keep on living our lives, people say, as if sadness, and grief, and heartache and pain and struggle aren’t all a part of living as well.

My dog recently died (no in a post about sanitized euphemisms, I won’t say passed, although he did go peacefully), and so I’m thinking a lot about grief, about pain, and about things ending, and about how and why endings scare us so much. Divorces, abandoned career paths, “wasted potential,” and the ultimate ending to end all endings—death. We fear the temporal. I think that’s one of the reasons why loving a dog is such a great and intimate leap of faith. You love them as deeply as any family member, you build your lives around them, and you know, that, at a max, you have 15, maybe 18, years with them. And so you go in, knowing, you will have to say goodbye. We are conditioned to seek forever, to find “happily ever after,” and with a pet we know there is no such thing. At least not a happily ever after that has them here with us physically. We know this, and we know that there will be great, immense, impossible pain, and still, we jump. We love. We open our hearts. After Farley died, we got a puppy within the week. A stray from Texas who was living in a warehouse and needed a home. We call him Wally, after the Pixar robot who was also living in a warehouse on a dilapidated earth. We love him. We do this, knowing, that pain will come around for us again. We do this, while the grief of losing Farley still feels impossible. Dogs bring out the best in humans, you will never convince me otherwise. Below is Wally. Please admire him.

But back to books. I had an editing client recently ask me to tell them if a book wasn’t working when I started reading it so they could know whether they should put it aside and do something else. I had to tell them that I couldn’t make that call, because I couldn’t know, in the reading, whether a book would land an agent or an editor. It depends on too much. The market and luck, and the work that someone does after receiving my notes, and so so much that is out of our control. But, I assured them, the work we would do would have value, whether or not that particular manuscript “worked.”

It can be hard to hear this. We put our hopes and dreams in a job, a move, a marriage, a manuscript. We define success by longevity, by outcome. And yet, whether a first manuscript “succeeds” or not, a writer, a storyteller, cannot do any of their future work without having learned what they learned by writing that one. There was value in the late nights, the early mornings, the writing process. There was, and is, value, in exploring your own thoughts and ideas, in learning to put them onto paper, whether or not an arbitrary, capitalist market deems it valuable.

Writers are in the business of attempting to monetize art. A horrible business! And yet, we chose it, and we do it. But the money, the outcome, the number of copies sold; it isn’t the whole picture. It maybe isn’t even a very big part of it.

What we said, what we learned, what we unlocked within ourselves; it matters. Just as the ten years I spent with Farley mattered. Just as relationships matter, even if they don’t last a lifetime.

It is okay to grieve when something doesn’t work. It is okay to not want to dress it up in positivity and hope and “maybe one day”s. It’s okay to let what you love go and be really, really sad about it.

And at the same time, what you did still was beautiful. It still was and is a thing. And it’s wonderful to, over time, be able to appreciate that.

Happy reading, writing, and letting go-

Leah