Does any writer not feel, at some level, like a failure? What better question to ask on the most miserable day of the year? But I’m serious: if baseball is the sport where you can feel like a hero while failing 70% of the time, then writing demands of us a similarly “philosophical” shading of the facts. As students of literature, we’re taught to worship the great, honor the good, and ignore the rest. As writers, we’re painfully aware how hard one has to work (and how lucky one has to get) even to make it into that third category. Every writer starts from nothing, every day, pushing the boulder wearily up the slopes toward that distant summit, but as students we take the lift right to the top to admire the view. It’s rare that any literature professor asks his students to look down at those sad figures toiling away in the valleys. Teaching literature is like an episode of Masterpiece Theater: all bonnets, no horseshit.
But there’s a dirty trick hidden in the way we teach. Should you, as a student, find yourself inspired to emulate those masterpieces, or even to say something serious about them, then suddenly you’re whisked away to join those pathetic souls slogging through the mud at the base of the mountain. It’s like something from a particularly nasty Disney movie, with the English professor as the creepy hurdy-gurdy man, calling all the happy children to the fair. Come and see! It’s so much fun! And beyond lies the work camp, where they all turn to donkeys. (We call it a creative writing workshop.)
I should know. Speaking for the donkeys, let me say, it ain’t all Hay-on-Wye. We spend our mornings spreading around the nouns and verbs, and our afternoons weeding them out. It’s a bit like farm work, only without the fresh air. And we do it in the knowledge that nothing of value may result. Mostly, we fall short of our ambitions. Put more bluntly, we fail.
We can take consolation in the fact that revision might still work a miracle, or that we’ve learned something from the process, or that a poem or story ??? however mediocre — exists where there was nothing before. If we’re young, we call it juvenilia. If we’re not so young, we call it avant-garde. Even successful writers write badly, or write well, but not as well as they’d hoped. There comes a moment when even the tenured six-book professor who struts through AWP has to admit he’s no Flaubert.
Still, is that such a bad thing? We live in a culture that worships success. And even in the literary world, we tend to define that success through money, prizes, or fame. There’s something about failure that’s good for the soul. Writing is a great humility lesson. (Although you might not know it by talking to most writers.) We should all aspire to more than we can achieve. Isn’t that what makes us writers? Isn’t that what makes us human?
I’m not arguing that we should accept failure. In fact, I’m saying exactly the opposite: we should refuse to accept our limitations, persist in our delusions, do our best through sheer effort of will to sprout stumpy wings and fly. And we should do all that in full knowledge that we’ll probably fail. If you’re a writer, you don’t really get a choice. There are easier ways to live. (You can teach. You can become a critic. Or, God help you, an editor.) But if you’re a writer, you keep pushing that boulder up the mountain every day because you have to do it, because you know that a few have made it to the top, and because you can still come upon that perfect poem or story that shows you how it feels at the summit. If we worship the great and praise the good, it’s because that’s how we keep ourselves going. And if we ignore the rest, it’s because the higher we climb, the more reluctant we are to look down. That could be us down there. In fact, that will be us down there. Tomorrow.