Facing Failure and Rejection ⛔

Facing failure and rejection is a big part of a writer’s life, and they’re both hard to talk about. I’ve had my fair share. It sucks.

I’ve never been good at dealing with failure or rejection, so I do what I can to avoid it, including not finishing things, not sending out queries, or if I do, I stop after a handful of rejections or those cricket-silences.

They say you just need one ‘yes,’ but it’s hard to take 20, 200, or 2,000 rejections. It stymies motivation and reduces access to inspiration.

Over time, you’d think we’d all get used to it, grow thicker skins, but I don’t know anyone who takes rejection well. We just learn to take it and continue to imagine a yes around the corner. And on the days we can’t imagine that yes—by writing toward it, sending out queries, or applying to contests or residences—we spend a few days, weeks, months, possibly years feeling like a failure.

Have you noticed that we love talking about failure after someone has achieved success? But we hide it away shamefully until that success provides some relief and then we’re finally allowed to talk about how hard it was leading up to this moment of finally having our work seen and appreciated. There are plenty of 40-year “overnight” successes. What about the 39-year failures? Why aren’t we allowed to talk about those? And if we permit ourselves, how do we do it?

Recently, thanks to my friend and fellow writer, Shirley R. (@canadianshirley on IG), I came across a young artist, Eyvan Collins, trying a unique way of having this type of conversation by creating a Museum of Personal Failure.

Inspired by two relationship failures, Eyvan put out a call to artists for “artifacts of personal failure” and conceptualized “an experiment in unconcealment.”

Taking form as a pop-up museum in one of the empty stores at the far-from-successful Kingsgate Mall in East Vancouver, the exhibit is very home-grown and interactive. Viewers are invited to write on recipe cards or post-it notes in different places, adding their own notes about personal failures. People wrote about relationships, failed driving tests, not getting into schools, getting fired from jobs, not fulfilling dreams, including many about writing.

The “Wall of Rejection” was full of mostly anonymous confessions, and I was touched by some viewers’ choices to respond to another’s note with empathy and kindness, which show that the willingness to expose those tender places we try to keep hidden are, in fact, keys to connection and self-acceptance.

Eyvan’s mimeograph for the museum states: “If anything nearing a coherent distillation or thesis could be found, it might be this: by some strange force, people are constantly in pursuit of creating something that does not yet exist—be it an object, a consequence, a self in some form—and we sometimes simply cannot do it.”

Contributing artists submitted unfinished manuscripts, car parts from a failed repair, stabbed paintings, an old wedding dress, post-divorce, presented in a moving box to indicate a letting go of old fairy tales.

One unusual piece included a dead tarantula in a jar with a story about woman’s failed attempt to care for it adequately, a failure that haunted her for years (photo with her story below).

Apparently someone sent over an abandoned, barely alive aloe plant with an invitation for anyone interested to adopt it—and by the time I visited someone had left a note saying they’d taken it home, meaning that at least one “failure” may yet have its redemption.

I ended up having a thoughtful conversation with Eyvan, both curator and contributing artist. I asked him whether his ideas about failure had changed much throughout the process of putting the show together and what he thought about shame’s relationship to failure. One idea that has stayed with me has to do with shame being related to not having lived up to our own personal expectations. That we create a version of ourselves we’d like to be and when we don’t match up with it—in our own eyes and what we perceive as the eyes of the world—we feel a sense of failure and even shame. This sense of failure and shame lives on because of the bond between the missed vision, the ideal version of self we’re still attached to, and the self we are now. For some, a sea of disappointment lies in between, deep enough to drown in. Considering failure as a kind of glue that bonds us to perhaps outdated images of ourselves still cursing the future and casting regret on the past has stirred up some other thoughts I intend to explore over the next while.

We are each, of course, much more than any one of our failures, but we are also made up of those too. Our early visions for ourselves were full of hope and aspiration and faith that we’d succeed. But success is never guaranteed. And failures teach us many things. Failure is a kind of forge, and if we can take the heat and carry on our spirits are tempered and enlarged.

My own sense of failure comes from believing I haven’t become the writer I once imagined I would be. I realize now that I developed more habits of avoiding rejection rather than overcoming it, and that’s on me. Sadly, rejection paired with regret doubly sucks. But perhaps now it’s time to look at that outdated version of myself that was born in the past that still has such a hold on my present and future. It’s time to update with kindness and appreciation for having had any aspirations at all.

None of us are immune to the heat of failure and the chill of rejection. Even Claude Monet once said, “My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that’s left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear.”

So let’s talk about rejection and failure more openly. We needn’t wallow in it, but we can admit it’s a big part of the creative path, and it’s not entirely our fault. Wanting to share one’s gifts with the world is a good thing, a brave thing. The world may only offer up crickets most of the time, and occasionally that will make sense, but most of the time it won’t, and there won’t be much you can do about it. Call up a friend, commiserate and comfort, and then check in about your habits of mind and action when it comes to sharing what you write. Persistent habits of avoiding rejection guarantee failure. But persistent creativity and courageously sending work out into the world keeps the door of hope ajar.

The Museum of Personal Failure reveals that you can sometimes make art out of failure, but if you reject the inevitability of creative failure, you won’t be able to make art.

By the way, the museum is temporary—open only from Jan 24th to Feb 3rd— and maybe that aspect of its form can remind us that failures can be temporary too, if we determine never to give up. As Ray Bradbury once said, “You fail only if you stop writing.”

The Luck of the Irish ☘️

Leprechauns, rainbows, and lucky shamrocks. Ireland possess a kind of mysterious magic in spite of its sometimes troubled and tragic past.

My paternal grandmother was Irish. She emigrated from the Galway region of Ireland to the United States in 1922 at the tender age of seventeen. When I first saw the 2015 film, Brooklyn, (based on Colm Tóibín’s novel of the same name) I thought of my grandmother’s story, which, of course, took place more than a generation before that of fictional character, Eilis Lacey.

Ireland in the late teens and twenties was rife with conflict and change. It was a revolutionary period, with the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the Irish Civil War, and the establishment of the Irish Free State all taking place between 1916 and 1923.

My great-grandfather was a farmer with too many mouths to feed, so poverty, along with national conflict, influenced my grandmother’s departure. The “new world” provided new hope and opportunity for her as it did for so many others.

Most of us have ancestors who hailed from somewhere else, whether it’s one generation back or five. And some of us are the immigrants. (In fact, I immigrated to Canada from the U.S. as a one-year-old baby.)

Issues related to travel, immigration, choosing where to live, or being forced out of zones known as home are as active now as they were a hundred years ago. We humans have been moving around this planet through choice and choicelessness for ages. Especially as it’s become logistically, technologically, and politically easier to do so.

A friend said recently: “Isn’t it amazing that within a matter of hours on a plane we can land in a completely different part of the world?” From desert to mountains, from one ocean to another, from the tropics to the arctics, we can move around more easily and affordably than ever before (carbon footprint and colonization arguments aside for the moment, it’s pretty mind blowing, isn’t it?). We don’t have to spend a week on a ship crossing the Atlantic to go from Europe to the U.S., unless we want to. And unlike our ancestors, we don’t have to be gone months, years, or a lifetime.

My grandmother only went home once after her first son was born (my father’s oldest brother). She made her home in a new country with others who had emigrated one or two generations earlier. She naturalized, put down roots, left progeny, lived and died in her chosen country. Her chosen home.

Her commitment to her new country meant we lost touch with any family remaining in Ireland, but when I visited there for the first time in 2015, I felt a vibration of home in my heart. I felt the magic of the place, too, which is available to anyone open to feeling it.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

~ WB Yeats ~

"Remember, remember always, that all of us, you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

~ President Franklin D. Roosevelt ~

Your Writing Vows 💍🖋️

My eldest daughter got married last weekend! 

In a moving ceremony I witnessed her and her fiancé, now husband, declare their vows to each other with heartfelt, life affirming words they intend to live by all their lives long. I teared up, felt my heart flutter, and breathed in the depth of their intentions.

Pledging your love and life to someone is potent, and it gives birth—figuratively and sometimes literally—to a third vital energy, something only those two joined forces can create.

The ceremony got me thinking of writing vows—not the act of writing vows but making vows to the writing itself. I’ve often suggested we think of our writing in terms of a friendly or romantic relationship, one we make time for, nurture, negotiate with, and trust thoroughly even when times get tough. A relationship we devote ourselves to. When a quality of devotion is present within artistic pursuits, the process is made more fulfilling than the product or outcome.

Have you ever made vows to your writing? Vows are different from promises, which depend on future fulfillment. Promises always come later. Vows take place in the here and now, they are expected to be embodied, to be lived out, “from this day forward.” A future is implied here as well, but the devotional action starts now.

Having one foot in and one foot out—whether in a human relationship or a writing one— seems to limit the depths of possibilities that arise from the gifts of commitment. What would it take for you to fully commit to your writing? Right here. Right now. Even by phrasing the question with what would it take or what will it take we’re naturally deferring to the future. Isn’t that interesting? But what if we didn’t defer or delay until some condition is met? What if the vow was now? Which vows can you offer your writing in this moment?

• I vow to cherish my urge to write.

• I vow to honor that urge by providing time and space, internally and externally, to write.

• I vow to honor and appreciate whatever I write, have written, or will write.

• I vow to write from a place of love and wisdom rather than fear and insecurity.

Many years ago, in the late 90s, Jan Phillips’ “Artist’s Creed,” which is included in her book, Marry Your Muse: Making a Lasting Commitment to Your Creativity, helped me to deepen my commitment to writing. Her list of beliefs moved me closer to taking up writing vows. The Creed begins with: “I believe I am worth the time it takes to create whatever I feel called to create.” The rest of it can be found and downloaded here.

Now, as I feel inspired to renew my writing vows, I’m also asking myself what my deepest writing urges are in the context of what I feel is most significant for me to have written before this life as “April" is done. These thoughts have led to a collaboration with fellow writer and “story nurse,” Sabrina Görlitz, on a free series of webinars we’re calling Stories to Live & Die For: Writing, Living, and Dying with Your Whole Heart .

I know that those of you reading this blog take your writing seriously enough, but today I ask you to strengthen your relationship with your writing by making a deeper commitment by creating your own writing vows. Allow yourself to express that unique vital energy that only you, joined with your writing process, can create.

“A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.” 

~ Junot Diaz~

“Commitment is an act, not a word.”

~ Jean Paul Sartre ~

Gushing Fountain or Steady Stream? ⛲🖋️💦

We all create differently. At times, the muse inflames us and we rush to our laptops or notebooks and let the inspiration pour forth. Other times, we show up regularly, routinely, and work methodically. 

I know one writer who only writes while traveling, and since she knows this about herself, when she she has a project in mind she plans several trips and works intensely in spurts of several days of long hours. Her work gushes forth like a fountain turned on for a few days and then she returns to the business of her life. Meanwhile, the project keeps percolating in the background until her energy builds for her next trip dedicated to focusing on the writing project.

Another writer I know writes a little every day. He’s up early and tends to his writing projects first, before getting into his other business. His steady routine allows him to complete several writing projects every year.

What’s your proclivity? Do you like to work intensely for shorter stretches of time? Or do you prefer to have a regular daily routine? Are you a gushing fountain or a steady stream?

Our individual characters and ways of living makes us lean one way or the other, but particular projects may demand a certain way of working too. Some ideas gush out almost fully formed and demand an intensity of attention, while others need longer to gestate and steadily take shape; they may require less time daily but more time annually for the process of drafting, rewriting, and revising. Your personal character plus the particular project will affect your approach to getting the writing done.

Even so, I’ve found that most writers struggle in some way with the nature of the project and/or themselves. That old saying, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” plagues everyone sometimes and writers quite often. A gushing fountain writer longs to experience the steady stream’s regular, disciplined routine. A steady stream writer wants a taste of the fountain’s intensity and wild productivity.

It seems to be in writers’ natures to feel unsatisfied to some degree while working (and only somewhat satisfied after having worked--full satisfaction seems elusive and probably shouldn’t be sought).

While most of us can achieve a degree of satisfaction working as either fountains or streams, we are all capable of both ways of writing. So experiment with your flow sometimes. Mix things up. Give yourself opportunities to get away to write intensely a couple of times each year. Practice a regular writing habit for a few weeks or months at a time.

Figure out which way of working feels more energizing and satisfying for you. Sometimes it just takes changing things up temporarily to revitalize creative flow.

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the tap is turned on.”

~ Louis L'Amour ~

“No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

~ Martha Graham~