Writers: Give up Hope!
A conversation with Stephen Marche
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Stephen Marche is a failure. A self admitted one.
If you don’t know Stephen’s work, he’s a novelist and essayist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire and The New Yorker. He’s just written a new book, “On Writing And Failure” where he’s managed to do the impossible. He’s written a bleak, dour, and brutal assessment of the life of a writer, defining it by repetitive failure and defeat at every turn, and yet has also managed to make the book itself funny, entertaining, and oddly… optimistic?
So many contradictions! And SO well suited for all the conversations we have been writing about here in The Creativity Guild. The fear associated with creativity. That your work will not be good enough. That others will mock you and ruin your reputation. The inner Resistance voice that fills you with shame. And here is Marche, seemingly confirming that it is all true!
Stephen was gracious enough to hop on a call with us to talk about writing and failure. We started off by clarifying that this is not a hopeful “Fail Fast” feel good book about how failure is actually a good thing and should be welcomed with open arms.
“There’s the tech lord version of failure that goes, “I lost my first startup, but it prepared me for my world conquest.” I think for writers it's a little different because failure is an integral part of the process of writing, like not just the career aspects of it, which demand a lot of failure, but the actual practice of writing, which involves mostly throwing things out and mostly having things die on you.
You have to learn to fail better. To me that means to fail with more grace and to fail with more understanding and more self-compassion because that's really what it all boils down to. It never goes away.”
This feels particularly true for anyone trying to make a living as a writer. The book is filled with stories of the greatest writers of all time suffering through critical and financial failure. James Joyce, for example, was rejected for a position teaching literature AFTER he had already written The Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man!
However, once you accept failure as a necessary and permanent part of the writing process, there is a self-affirming side to knowing that you’re the one choosing this path. It helps get you to the “acceptance” phase of failure.
“I think one of the things about being a writer is that there's so much failure. I stopped counting my rejection letters at 2000, and that was sometime in my late twenties. I don't even notice anymore. I consider it the price of doing the work.”
Everyone, everyone has to eat shit at some point. I think it's better to eat the shit you serve yourself than the shit that the world gives out to you. The fear of failure is real but you can't do anything with that.”
There is something really powerful in the phrase “the price of doing the work.” You KNOW you’re going to have to fail over and over again, and yet the work is so vital that you choose to accept that the work and failure are inextricably bound together. Marche’s passion for - or perhaps obsession with - writing is palpable.
“I write compulsively. I write the way that gamblers gamble. It's this little secret that I hold over everybody, and that I don't tell the people that I love about, and I kind of like it. It's my little dirty little private world of meaning that I keep entirely to myself.
My strength is I just get so fascinated with shit that I just cannot not be fascinated by it. I don't ask myself the question anymore. If I'm fascinated I should just go as hard as I can until I'm done. I don't know if that's the right plan, but that's my plan at the moment.”
Here is where the optimism comes in, and the real reward for creating just about anything. Can you get to the point where you write or create for its own sake and not for some magical desired outcome?
It’s right there in our manifesto - exploring creativity for its own sake! (It’s also reminiscent of our chat with A.J. Jacobs about the magic of puzzles being in the process, not the outcome.)
“That's one of the advantages of being middle-aged - you realize if you want to do this, you better be prepared to fail. There's no point you're getting to where there's not gonna be failure.”
So WHY then? Why do writers like Stephen still write when they know the amount of failure involved? It’s simple. There is magic in the process of making great work.
“That satisfaction of making things very well - I think that is a key feeling with writing in particular, which is not just a craft, but an art.
What are we out doing here if we're not trying to make creative stuff, if we're not trying to make excellent stuff? The people who make crap, they don't survive.”
Whatever your creative outlet might be, do it for yourself and make something you’re proud of. That’s it.
“You never know what the consequences of any texts that you write are. No one knows, right? No one knows the outcome.The Baghavad Gita says, you're entitled to action, but not the fruit of action.
So concentrate on the action. Make sure that the action is good and that the writing is good, and the book that you write is the book that you want to write, and it is the book that you want to see in the world. That's what ultimately matters and that's also what you can control and you actually can't control almost anything else.”
Yes.
The Creativity Lessons
These are our main takeaways from talking to Stephen and reading the book:
You better not write with an outcome in mind.
You better not write in hopes of being successful.
You better not romanticize what it’s like to make a living as a full-time writer.
You better not try to discover yourself through the magic of writing.
You should write because you love writing. Because you want to write. Because you need to write. Because you want to make great things you are proud of.
“I only work on things I believe in. I think that's really my achievement. If I were to say that I'm proud of anything, it is that”
Creative Prompts
Are you creating with the hope of being successful?
If so, what does successful mean to you and why is that important?
Why have you chosen creative output as an activity or important facet of your life? If there are other, better ways to find success, what do YOU get out of creativity?
What are the creative projects you NEED to make? What do you feel COMPELLED to do, regardless of any potential outcome?
The Kicker
We wrapped by asking Stephen to send a lovely closing message to the members of The Creativity Guild, who might be using fear as a way to avoid exploring creativity. Brace yourselves….
“I mean, get over yourself, man. Honestly, no one cares… You're never gonna be recognized, period. No one, not your kids, not your wife, not maybe you, yourself, The idea that you're suddenly gonna make art and feel recognized? Allow me to disabuse you of that notion right now.
People come to me and say, if I could only write this, I'd be happy. I'm like, have you ever met any writers? That's just not how this works…”
Stephen Marche’s book On Writing and Failure is out now.
