Failure Happens

Have you ever burned dinner? It's something that happens to me with some frequency, because my husband claims that I only know how to turn the knob on the stove to "high" (oh, and once I turn it on, I tend to walk away and start something else...) If you burn enough chicken, you realize how easy it is to recover: you make pasta, you order pizza, you announce that you're having cereal for dinner, and the next night, you're back at the stove, cooking chicken again. Creativity happens in the same way. You try to make something, you mess it up, you try again the next day. Failure, in other words, happens. It's just part of the process. Writers go through a lot of pencils, artists go through a lot of paint, potters go through a lot of clay.

There's a fantastic blog that captures the horror and the hope of writers' failure, in particular. It's called The Rejecter. It's written by the assistant to a literary agent who talks very specifically about how writers are failing each and every day. The tagline of the blog: I don't hate you. I just hate your query letter. What hope is there in that? It's a lot like me and my burned chicken; there's something really useful about someone who's telling it like it is, and in hearing about all the people who are pressing on, regardless of their previous and current failures, to tell a good story.