The Path of Failure (The Short History of a Writer)

I recently saw a Twitter thread started by a writer that posed the question ‘who was the first person who encouraged you to write, who said, hey you are good at this you should pursue it?’ and it was a fascinating read. I did not have a quick answer to that question.

I remember wanting to write almost as soon as I learned to read. I wrote little stories and illustrated them and lived very happily among the Wild Things. I must have showed those stories to people but I don’t remember much about their reactions. Probably something along the lines of the ‘I love those colors!’ kinds of comments you say to five year-olds when they bring home yet another finger painting from preschool.

I wonder, did I never actually say it out loud? Never say I was thinking of being a writer for a career? But surely my actions, writing and reading and writing, surely that signaled the desire. 

I went off to college, a premed major. LOTS of people praised that choice, lots of encouragement when you say you want to be a doctor. At college discovered I could pretty easily double major in Biology and English. I couldn’t believe I got college credit to read books and write papers about them, it was so easy it seemed like a scam. I got all A’s in my English classes and not all A’s in the rest of my classes.

And sophomore year I won a writing award. I didn’t even know there was one, just got a letter in the mail after I returned home that I had won the Bucknell Prize for Women for excellence in English composition and literature.

I had gotten lots of good specific feedback on papers but that is the first time I felt encouraged in any significant way to write beyond class assignments, and I don’t even know how I got picked. There is no face to attach to that encouragement. I’m going to pretend it was Professor Michael Payne who singled me out, I took every class he taught. If he had offered a class called Old White Male Authors Pontificate on Their Prostates, I would have taken it, he was that magnificent of a teacher.

The award was presented at convocation when school started again. My boyfriend did not come me watch me receive it. He was majoring in mechanical engineering and fraternity hijinks. No encouragement for artsy-fartsy types in that group.

I’m pretty sure I heard a lot of ‘what job do you get with an English major’ type comments from my family and my friends at college (it’s a fair question), and when I decided I didn’t want to go to med school I switched to psychology. I ended up in graduate school for that, and it turned out to be a worthy career, full of interest and challenge.

 Flannery O’Connor said about writing, ‘I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,” and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there—showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.”

Psychology gave me a deeper understanding of how (and why) some folks will do in spite of everything. And it made me even more curious, and that is never a bad thing for a writer.

There is a lot of failure in writing, it can be a lonely process where you are faced, time after time, with falling short, no one to blame but yourself. It occurs to me that I lucked out, that I would not have handled a writing career well as a young woman, as someone in my twenties with too few failures under my belt. Or maybe more accurately, too few triumphs over failure. A soft and privileged person, I was then.

I’m not sure I handle failure well even now, but psychology and age brought me some gifts. I have way more fortitude, more resilience tricks up my sleeve, a thicker skin, and enough failures to know there rarely is such thing as an end. There is the beginning of things and the middle. The end is just the beginning of something else. A rejected manuscript is not an end, it has many more lives to live. It can be submitted to someone else. It can be revised. It can serve as the footstool that lifts you up enough to write the next story, better. It can show you that the rejected story was the thing you needed to create in order to get to the thing that you wanted to create.

The past few years I’ve had people encouraging me to write and I deeply appreciate them, but I have realized that the person who encouraged me the most, from the beginning up until this very minute, was the wild little girl in love with words.

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website: https://lynnrankin-esquer.com/