I’ve had a recent run of small failures.
I had a goal for my dog Ruby and I to qualify at the Ontario Regional Agility competition this May. I trained with her for the past year with this goal in my mind, taking courses and practicing runs with clear and focused handling. Despite these efforts, we failed to met our goal in the competition early this month. I blame my foot which had developed severe planter fasciitis in the weeks leading up to the competition making it difficult for me to walk, much less run. It’s still a disappointment.
My beloved vision for an orchard is failing. I had planned, researched and worked on developing my orchard for the last two years. I spent hours of labour trying to improve the soil by working compost into the hard clay soil. Last fall, in the first light snowfall of the year, I bravely planted the first seventeen fruit trees. With cramp fingers I protected these fledgling sticks with tree tubes and checked on them as best I could throughout the winter. I have learned from previous tree planting failures that the rabbits and mice are hard on my tree planting efforts. This spring: 6 dead trees. My orchard looks more like an experimental display of soil and mud. It doesn’t seem fair.
I don’t know what I did with dinner the other night but we couldn’t eat it. Usually I consider myself a good cook but this was a complete failure. Ended up eating popcorn instead.
I try to comfort myself with insightful quotes on the benefits of failures, especially those that come with inspirational pictures:
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” – C.S. Lewis
“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.” – J.K. Rowling
There’s a time for inspiration sayings and they can sometimes pull you up from the funk. But we can be truthful for a moment? Do you not sometimes feel like taking these inspirational messages and throwing them against the tile floor like a porcelain plate and shattering them into a million little pieces? Do you not want to scream: “Easy for you to say when you have already succeeded!”
I’m an analytical person and I can’t help but to dig down into my failures and to find out why. This is not wallowing like pig in mud but more like an archaeological excavation, pushing back the turf of the initial response and getting my hands dirty in the muck and worms below and looking for a fragment of information.
Can I learn anything about these failures and how it might provide insight to help my writing?
For my failed dog agility dreams, I blamed my foot and bad luck. Sometimes it’s easier to blames these outside forces. Maybe that was part of it but was there more? I think on my runs at the competition and I wasn’t running with confidence. Instead I was timid, afraid to take risks despite my training. I fell back into weak and timid handling. My foot messed with my brain (how dare it!) and told myself a lie: that I couldn’t do the type of bold handling I had worked hard at all year. The failure was not just my foot but with my confidence.
In writing, lack of confidence is also fatal. Writing that lacks confidence can turn a potentially great story into something as limp as a boneless cat. One symptoms of timid writing is over using the passive voice instead of the active voice. When I am feeling tried or unsure, I find myself falling back into the comfortable passive voice. Another example is when a writer backs off from emotional depth – maybe because of the writer’s own insecurities. But instead of digging into that emotional hole, the writer only rakes across the soil. A third example is when a writer is not willing to take risks and instead retreats into common tropes or what feels like “safe” writing. But taking bold risks in your plot, or your characters or your writing is what gives your story its own voice. It’s what will make it stand out. Be confident in your writing. Be bold. Take risks.
For my beloved orchard vision, I may have to accept that some death is inevitable. In writing, some stories you write may not survive. Perhaps knowing when to accept a dead idea and focus on what is flourishing. Writing, like tree planting, means to continue to write stories even though you know not all will survive. Some will and it might surprise you what does catch hold: my plum-cherry cross that I planted on a whim and a prayer survived the winter and is putting out tiny green leaves!
Do more research. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. My farmer neighbour checked out the orchard and declared that what I really need to do is tile between my tree rows; my efforts at improving the horrid soil was not enough to deal with the problems of the orchard location. I may have heavy clay soil but I also have too much water, drowning the tree roots. Have friends read over your story, even though you may feel that is not “finished enough” to have someone else read. This might be the time to ask before more trees drown! A new perspective can give you great ideas for moving forward.
For my inedible dinner: sometimes you just have failures and eating popcorn on occasion isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes you need a change. Your story isn’t coming together? Maybe try to change up the writing and write something completely different. Write a short story romance or a fantasy or horror. Something whimsical. Tomorrow you can return and start again. There’s always another dinner, another story waiting for you to write.
