Writer Wednesday – Fail

It’s okay. I give you permission. Fail freely, fail often and fail fantastically. Give it every thing you have and fall flat on your face. Here’s the thing though, you have to dust yourself off and do it all again. Do it over and over again.

This goes well beyond the common advice to get used to rejection. What I am telling you is open yourself up to the idea that you won’t even get something good enough to send out for a rejection. Take your terribly overdone idea and write it out. It is garbage at the end? So what I say! Move on and write something else. Figure out where you went wrong and move on.

If I am honest about it, the reason it took me so long in life to really get moving with my writing, it is because I wasn’t willing to fail. I refused to write things that were less than perfect aside from a few stories here and there. Because I was always waiting to write something worth it, I never wrote anything.

When a good idea did come along, I was woefully underpracticed. I did alright, but nowhere near as good as I would have done had I been willing to fail. In waiting only for the ideas and stories that were ‘good enough’, I wasn’t.

Write every day. I don’t care if what you write isn’t good enough to serve as the pattern on a disposable napkin. Write it anyway. Write it and figure out why it isn’t good enough. When you write again, remember what made all those previous failures so bad and try to overcome the things that hold you back. Eventually you will fail so often that many of your worst habits and most jarring mistakes will have been overcome.

Don’t ever think that you are done failing, but do understand that the more you fail, the better you become. Eventually you are going to write some things that are absolutely great. They may not find an audience, but they will be good all the same. So go for it. Fail and fail well.

What are your thoughts?

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