Writing and the Creative Life: “Nothing succeeds like failure”

Re-thinking the role of failure in the creative life.

As writers, we have to learn how to handle losses and let-downs. Why? Because it is a constant dynamic in our lives.

Whenever I’ve had a project go south … lost out on a writing assignment … gone out with a pitch or spec script that didn’t sell … invariably I summon to mind my high school tennis coach: Mr. Crosswaithe.

I can only remember three things about him: his ruddy face, his buzzcut hair, and something he used to say quite often to us:

“Nothing succeeds like failure.”

I always thought that was the damnedest thing to say: What, so you want us to fail? In retrospect, I think he was trying to plant a seed in us for our lives down the road, knowing that we would face inevitable failures, and recast how we might experience that.

Looking at that statement in the context of sports, it makes sense.

After all, a baseball player who fails to get a hit 7 out of 10 times at the plate can make the Hall of Fame which means by default they deal with a lot of failure. Here are a few choice quotes:

Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.
– John Wooden

I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.
– Michael Jordan

About the only problem with success is that it does not teach you how to deal with failure.
– Tommy Lasorda

The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.
– Vince Lombardi

Finding the courage and commitment to write is not only the way to make things happen to further your career… it’s also where the real glory is, that act of embracing your creativity and against all odds making something out of nothing. At an existential level, that is the very definition of success.

This take re-frames the perception of failure. Instead of thinking about it as… you know… failure, we should instead look at it as an expected, even necessary part of the creative process.

If the more times we fail, the more times we succeed, then instead of looking at failure as a negative, we can benefit by embracing it as a positive.

And that doesn’t even pull into consideration what we can learn from our failures.

So this is for anyone out there who recently may have experienced what they consider to be a failure. See what you can glean from it. May it inspire you to dig in deeper and try harder.

May that failure be a springboard to success.

Writing and the Creative Life is a Go Into The Story series in which we explore creativity from the practical to the psychological, the latest in brain science to a spiritual take on the subject. Hopefully the more we understand about our creative self, the better we will become as writers. If you have any good reading material in this vein, please post in comments. If you have a particular observation you think readers will benefit from and you would like to explore in a guest post, email me.

For more Writing and the Creative Life articles, go here.