Don’t Be Discouraged
Roary Naps Next to Part of the Manuscript of SK4
Last week, after I wandered on about adapting my garden to the heat, I received a very humorous e-mail from a local friend who, like many people this year, decided to dive into gardening for the first time.
For weeks she had posted about buying “grow kits,” germinating seeds, sprouting plants, cutting herbs. Then she started posting about how things were going wrong. She’d misread the instructions as to how much room her plants would need. The heat hit. Everything wilted, and most of what she planted died.
She called herself a failure. I call her a success. Why? Because she learned a whole bunch of things that, if she decides to try gardening again next year, will serve her well.
Learning to accept that failure is a form of success, if you choose to learn from it, applies to writing—or to any creative endeavor. Success isn’t something that should be measured in word count or finished projects or sales or sales figures or awards.
If you measure success that way, the one thing you’re always going to be is a failure. Why? Because there’s always a higher bar to jump. One day you’re going to find the bar you can’t jump—or maybe you will jump it, but only after a lot of falls.
As with gardening, success in a creative endeavor should be measured by what you learned and whether you want to try again. Even deciding you don’t want to try again doesn’t make you a failure. You’ve learned something about yourself, where you want to put your energies, and what excites you enough to be willing to fail again.
This week I’m immersed in proofing the rough draft of SK4, the still-untitled new Star Kingdom novel I’m writing in collaboration with David Weber. Some people would see the many, many little red marks scattered on every single page as marks of failure, because these are all things I didn’t get right the first time.
I see them as marks of success, because they show how much I’ve learned over the years about all the aspects of telling a story, as well as that I love telling stories enough to keep learning about my chosen craft.
