How to Fail and Keep on Writing
By DeAnna Knippling
Copyright © 2011 by DeAnna Knippling
Published by Wonderland Press at Smashwords
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Table of Contents:
Chapter 2: The Writing Lottery
Chapter 3: Talent vs. Hard Work
Chapter 7: Where to Send Your Story
Chapter 8: Mailing Submissions
Chapter 10: Self-publishing/Ebooks
Chapter 11: Final Encouragement
Appendix A: Submission Checklist
Appendix B: How to Write Faster
Appendix C: Writing Tips to Get the Editor Past Page One
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Warning: This book will help you combat feelings of failure, humiliation, ennui, depression, and writer’s block. It contains math, including facts and figures you can use to shut up people who want to know when you’re going to get a real job. This book will take away your excuses to whine about how well (or poorly) you write, how much time you have to write (and lack thereof), how slowly you write, and how much more editing you have to do before you can possibly think about submitting.
If you intend to keep sabotaging yourself as a writer—read no further.
Introduction
I have given up a number of times, as a writer. I won’t go into the gory details; listening to someone talk about giving up is really frustrating.
Instead, let me just say that giving up hasn’t stopped me from being a writer.
There’s something in my head that makes me keep coming back to being a writer. My goals have changed, my attitude has changed, times have changed...I’m still a writer.
It’s not like I can be cured. I just have to deal with it.
So do you.
If you’re a writer, things are not going to go according to any sane definition of “plan.” You know how when you’re in the middle of a movie or a TV show, and one of the character says, “Okay, the plan is...” and then they say the plan out loud?
That means things will not go according to plan.
(If they cut the scene or whisper or something, then things will go according to plan, but that’s another story.)
Things will not go according to plan, and you will fail in some regard. Your work will not sell. If it does sell, it won’t sell as well as you want it to. You’ll get paid in used sweat socks. You won’t be able to finish the first draft, no matter how long you stare at the computer. You’ll take it to a critique group and it’ll be hacked to pieces. You’ll get a bad review. You’ll stand in front of the mailbox with a hardcopy in hand, stamped and ready to mail, and you won’t be able to do it. You’ll click send and realize you’ve spelled the editor’s name wrong.
You’ll fail.
At that point, you have two choices:
One, give up.
Two, keep going.
Now, the problem with choice number one is that it isn’t a choice at all; you’ll give up on giving up and find yourself writing again. You’ll be back.
It’s really better to keep going; you’ll thank yourself later.
Credentials:
I have been a freelance writer for five years.
I am a published writer, with one book and several short stories available from other publishers and multiple stories available from my small e-press, Wonderland Press; see Author Information for more info.
I presented a shorter form of this book as a talk at the Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference in April 2011.
I have been a slush reader for Apex Magazine since July 2011; a number of stories that I slushed have been published in the magazine.
I had almost 150 short story rejections over the last year (and eight acceptances). I may not be the person with the most rejections you will ever meet (I know someone who has over 1200), but I know how to get kicked in the teeth and keep on smiling.
Caveats:
This books is tough love; it’s meant to be the book that I wish I’d read the first time I gave up, when I was sixteen. So if it sounds harsh, that harshness is for that teenage girl with her nose in the air, ready to conquer the world on the zero-words-a-day writing plan—not you.
I mainly address writing short fiction in this book, although you can adapt it to any type of writing.
You will still have to do all the work yourself.
An irrational fear of failure
What’s a normal response to failure? Upset, despair, grief, horror, shame…?
What’s an abnormal response to failure? Celebration! Amazement! Breaking out the champagne!
We try to avoid failure and gravitate toward success, because failure feels bad, and success feels good.
But you can’t succeed without failing.
Rationally, we all know that 1) nobody’s perfect and 2) if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. You are practically guaranteed not to succeed at your first try or, if you do, have no idea how to succeed on your second.
Writers tend to have a huge problem with this. I had a huge problem with this, so I decided to fix that. I looked at my reactions to failure and said, “My hatred of getting rejection letters goes beyond the rational.” I’ve gotten over it, mostly. I still have days where I’ve had one too rejection too many, or I’m stuck on a story, and I just want to give up. But I’m not frozen for weeks. My fear of failure doesn’t stop me from sending out another submission or getting up the next morning and trying to write again.
I do see writers frozen by that fear. You know how I can tell? They have all kinds of excuses for why they’re not writing and submitting:
They’re too busy.
They’re not good enough.
They just have a little bit more editing to do…it’s only been seven years since their first draft after all, and everyone knows that you shouldn’t rush your writing.
I’ve used all those excuses and more.
Failing is hard. It feels bad, and we don’t like it.
We like to win, we like to succeed, we like to be admired, and we like to be right.
We can’t usually tell that we’re wrong until after the fact. And when we do find out that we’re wrong, the horrible reality of failure comes crashing down on us, and we’re paralyzed.
The story of failure
But when you’re inside that situation, you can’t see that you’re the source of your own failure. (It’s just human nature.) So you blame everyone else.
You don’t succeed because:
Nobody appreciates you.
The market is bad.
The economy is bad.
People like to read stupid books.
Stupid TV stars are getting all the book contracts.
There are mysterious forces acting against you.
We’re writers. We don’t just fail, we create a story that explains our failures in terms that we can understand. Like this:
The Tale of Cinderwriter
Once upon a time, there was a wonderful writer whose stepsisters made her work at a soul-killing office job all day, leaving the writer no time to write, and whenever the writer tried to get published, the evil stepsisters would steal all the writer’s submissions and send back cruel rejection notes! It was a terrible situation; however, the writer knew that someday, her True Audience would come and rescue her from poverty and despair…
As writers, I think we want to believe that our arc as writers starts out low and gets gradually higher and higher, until we meet our final foe and vanquish it utterly, after which we live happily ever after. You know, a regular plot arc. Isn’t that how real life works?
No.
It’s so very, very hard to fail because, on top of everything else, real life doesn’t fit the story. When you get rejected, your plot arc doesn’t go up, and it’s not like you can go out and stab the editor to defeat them.
You don’t start out as a beautiful, perfect writer that nobody appreciates but should. You don’t start out as being oppressed by your evil stepsisters, evil agents, or evil publishers. You start out as…sorry… not a success. That is, as a failure.
The secret of getting published
You need two things in order to find some measure of success as a writer:
You have to be built to be a writer. That is, you have to like words the same way a mathematician likes numbers or a teacher likes kids.
You don’t give up. (This includes not making excuses or refusing to change).
That’s it.
It’s not an impressive secret. The impressive part is getting yourself to believe it. But you should.
You may not succeed the way you want to. You may never meet your goals as a writer. But you certainly won’t look back on your life and be able to say, “I never got published.”
You might not get paid for it, but you can always get published.
Chapter 2: The Writing Lottery
So if the secret of getting published is not to give up, how could we possibly fail as writers?
Logically, we fail when we don’t fail, that is, when we don’t try. It’s like the lottery: you can’t win if you don’t play.
As of February 2011, the odds of winning the Powerball Grand Prize were 1 in 195,249,054.
The odds of winning the $3 ticket were 1 in 61.74. There are a number of other prizes, with more money going along with lower odds.
Okay, I’m going to give you a thought experiment.
Here are the wealthiest writers in the world, according to an October 2010 Forbes article. This is what they earned in one year:
James Patterson ($70 million)
Stephanie Meyer ($40 million)
Stephen King ($34 million)
Danielle Steele ($32 million)
Ken Follett (British) ($20 million)
Dean Koontz ($18 million)
Janet Evanovich ($16 million)
John Grisham ($15 million)
Nickolas Sparks ($14 million)
J.K. Rowling (British) ($10 million)
Sounds kind of like winning the lottery, doesn’t it? At least the amounts do.
Again, you can’t win if you don’t play.
Eight of those writers (if I’m figuring this right) are from the U.S., which has a population of about 308 million.
Your odds of being a top-ten fiction writer, as determined by earnings, are about 1 in 38,500,000. That’s right, you’re about 5 times as likely to get on that list than you are to win the grand prize in Powerball. And that’s not counting the lesser prizes, like being able to write for a living (whether you’re writing fiction or not), publishing a story in a professional market, getting paid for something you wrote, or just getting published.
(A thought: if the $3 prize on Powerball is about 1 in sixty, then maybe you shouldn’t be surprised if you have to get sixty rejections to get the equivalent publication credit, at least when you’re first starting out. It gets easier as you get more experience.)
That is not to say that these writers achieved what they did solely based on luck. Unlike playing the lottery, you can increase your odds of winning—from the $3 prizes to the multi-million jackpots—by becoming a better writer.
Now, you may be rolling your eyes at some of the writers on that list, because they’re such terrible writers.
Please don’t. Just because a writer doesn’t write what you want to read (and that includes their style), that doesn’t mean the book is undeservedly popular. People are reading that stuff for a reason, so suck it up, be a pro, and stop talking smack about them, at least in public.
Even if you don’t agree with the taste of the day that makes certain writers top earners, you have to admit they have at least these traits:
They write. They don’t make excuses. They put their butts in the chair and write.
They submit. They got their work out there, often after stacks of rejections and years of obscurity.
They do it all over again. They deal with criticism, bad reviews, mockery, days when they don’t get to write because they have to do paperwork, days when their private lives take over, days when they just want to have a meltdown. And they don’t give up.
Here is how you’re going to have more success as a writer:
You’re going to play the lottery, and you’re going to do what you can to increase your chances.
You’re not going to send out one short story, get one rejection, and quit. That is not how serious lottery players play.
You are going to play the lottery a lot.
What happens if you play the lottery and don’t win the multi-million lottery jackpot? Do you fail? Heck, no. Nobody picks up a lottery ticket and expects to win the Grand Prize. Especially if you’re only picking up one ticket.
No, what happens is that you buy a strip of tickets, expecting to toss most of them in the trash but hoping for something better. You certainly don’t have a mental breakdown if you don’t win on every freakin’ ticket.
Writing is like that. You write a bunch of stories and send them out to a bunch of markets and expect a bunch of rejections. You hope for something better; you don’t have a mental breakdown if you don’t get acceptances every time. You shouldn’t, anyway. When you get a rejection, it’s not failing, it’s playing the game.
And the great thing about writing is that it isn’t based on pure chance. You can do things that will improve your odds, and, unlike with Powerball, it isn’t considered cheating.