Last week, I wrote a fairly detailed newsletter on how intentional failure is a big part of learning how to do something. Trying, failing and integrating the failure into your process is how one learns to do anything as an adult.
Writing that essay got me thinking about things other than drawing, and I realised that while I’ve been able to fail purposefully in drawing, there was another creative venture that had stalled out because I was – it was becoming obvious as I thought about this – afraid to fail.
For many months, I’d been working on an outline for a comic-book series, and for some reason, around March, when I’d finished about 80% of it, I kind of … stopped writing.
It’s been three months since then, and I haven’t been able to write a word more of that outline. And it’s not like I’m blocked. I know exactly what happens in the rest of the story, I know how I want to show it, I just … don’t feel the urge to write it.
The unfinished outline niggles at the back of my mind, and since I’ve decided not to move on to any other project till I at least have a readable draft of that story, I’ve not been able to move on to the next big thing I want to do. And I couldn’t quite figure out why I hadn’t finished it.
Oh, I made my excuses – work’s increased a bit, real life has intruded, my back’s giving me some issues – but the fact was, I couldn’t even open the document and tinker with it.
Yesterday, I was listening to the latest Scriptnotes, and handily, they talk about how failure is important to the creative process. So far, so good.
Then one of them says that the problem with failing as a writer is that you fail in public rather than privately. You’re asking for people’s attention, and then the thing you put in front of them could easily be terrible.
That hit me square in the chest – that’s why I was so reluctant to finish my outline (and hence, my script).
Every time I narrated this story to someone, they loved it, but when you narrate something, there are automatically gaps, a bunch of things you handwave away, things which you intend to write better – “not this, but something like this”.
But when you’re done making it, that’s it. That’s the thing. And what if that thing is bad?
What if this comic I’ve wanted to make for years is bad?
What if I can’t find a good artist who also likes the story? What if I lose the money I put into this? What if this book is a sales disaster?
All of that translates to a primal instinct – What if they make fun of me? What if they don’t like a piece of my heart? What if this shames me?
And when I traced that line of reasoning, I had my response. It’s not a crime to make something that sucks. It’s okay. You’re allowed to suck. You’re allowed to be a bad artist. It doesn’t make you a bad person.
You see this so much on Twitter – people will casually make fun of something they don’t like. And worse, attribute ill intent to the creator. The fact is, apart from very rare exceptions, people care about what they make. That writer, that actor, that director, that showrunner Twitter says phoned in the final season – I can guarantee you they put in the same hours into making something you hated as in something you loved.
I find this a small way of thinking, and I’ve always bristled against that knee-jerk dismissal of effort. It’s very easy to watch/read/listen to something and rail against it, but making bad art is not a morally bad thing. It’s part of the process. You try your best and put something out, and you can’t always know if it’s going to be good or not, because art is so subjective, and it can be raw in ways that either repel people, or that people aren’t ready for.
Or, you know, you might just suck.
And that’s fine. The audience will live, and so will you.
It just gets hard to see that when it’s something you’re making.
One of the links in the podcast shownotes is an Austin Kleon post quoting critic David Sylvester. Here’s the relevant quote:
Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative.
I mean, that could easily be about the last section up there. There’s a lot of pressure to commercialise art and to turn it into a profession where you’re churning stuff out to audience demand, to parameters they want satisfied. But that’s not what art is for.
What art is for is a discussion for another day, but my takeaway from today was that as long as I try sincerely to do the best work I can, and I do that for this book, and the next one, and the next, failure is always a possibility.
I need to embrace that possibility if I want to tell stories that are dear to me. And of course, if I want to get better at doing what I want to do.
It’s also entirely possible that I won’t fail. But even if I do, there’s no net negative to the process. It’s all neutral-to-positive.
As an aside, it’s funny – I feel much more able to fail in drawing than in writing, because I’ve “only” been drawing for two years, while I’ve been writing for … let’s see now, twenty-five years. That’s why the potential of failure feels so heavy. Silly little thing.
Further on failing, the same podcast linked to this presentation by Derek Sivers, which systematises everything I wrote in my newsletter, and would’ve, let’s be honest, been very helpful to have around last week when I could’ve avoided writing a 1,000-word essay in my newsletter and just linked to this instead. It comes with a powerpoint and everything!
