What is it to succeed in writing?

Maybe I’m better asking myself what is it fail in writing – or fail as someone who wants to write?

I reckon it’s a cop out to link those questions to publication. Must get published – must get published. But is not being published any measure of failure? How much is one kind of being published (big five high-budget marketing household name published) the success that we’re framing and believing in and dreaming of – rather than the quiet publics that come with digital publishing, independent publishing, self-publishing and niche publishing – or the even quieter obscurity that comes with most of them in the end.

And when you ask people who are published it’s never quite what they imagined and never quite good enough…  If publication of any kind’s not the winning line then what? Global readership, critical acclaim, the test of time and the homage of history… it everything short of that is failure then we’ve all failed. In which case, failure is no-longer a precious commodity and failure needs to be understood and cherished if we’re to be true to ourselves as learners.

Where might that precious commodity failure come from?

There’s plenty of worthy writing that hasn’t succeeded in commercial publication. Plenty more that briefly flapped its wings and died, unremembered. Surely publication and readership has too many external factors to make it a sign of a brutal divide between success and failure.

These are the successes and failures of business and of marketing. These failures are at the mercy of a demanding audience, over-hyped on quick-to-get entertainment industries and addicted to same-but-different ploys. They are failures of cafe society recommendations or literary club quirks.

However useful a market quality control this may be, however true that literature is a dialogue between text and society, there are other ways we should judge ourselves when working.

There are failures that are far more common, far more damning and far more readily fixed: not finishing, not pushing to get the very best from an idea, not being humble to an exacting and difficult craft.

But failure can be the stuff of learning, levelling-up.

So let’s think again about which aspects of a practice we can fail better.

Fail better

A defiant part of me, a cryptic crypto-literary part of me, would want to call a writing blog “throw up and go.”  Great line. I’d tap my nose when I told people the name, wait for the flicker of recognition or smirk condescendingly when it didn’t come.

I’ve got this blog of how I’m trying to learn to write better. It’s called “Throw up and go” – yes? – yes? get it?

Then I explain in an accent that’s Dublin-literary-cum-Open-University that the line is taken – as of course you’ll know – from everyone’s favourite piece of easy-entry comic prose, Worstward Ho!.

As a title “Throw up and go” is one of those fabulously memorable little snippets that sticks in the memory and makes you want to cuddle into a black polo-neck sweater and cardie-combo next to a full-cream Guinness. You know the one. “Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go.”

Know it. No? Maybe that’s not the well-loved and memorable snippet I should use…

Yet it is a sickening thing, the old writing. Very occasionally rewarding, very often essential, always interfrastic. Sometimes the only recourse and the only sanity. But sickening in many ways.

In an ocean of swift utterances of all kinds there’s something about pace and process that draws us to writing.

It also makes us feel we’re doing something more than just prattle into a void. Writing has pseudo permanence. Pseudo transference. It has a presumed audience a believed audience an absent audience. Readership of none, but a readership potentially of digitally-networked millions. Crusoe casting bottles into the sea in hope.

There’s something else about writing other than just putting pen to paper or its digital equivalent. There’s something in the need to write that is to do with improvement. It’s how many of us learn. It slows and orders thoughts. It provides for reflection both instant recap and long-term review.

Some writings are read and some are not. Some are lauded and some are not. Some are lasting and most are not. But we must hold true to a belief that some writings are self-evidently better than others otherwise what are we improving towards and what are we failing away from?

“Sick of the either” would be an even more cryptic two-per-center as a blogger’s title, perhaps. Another popular gem from Worsward Ho! and inadvertently a reminder that most of “the best writing” is utterly unreadable. What we are most comfortable to call “good” – especially in covertly combative social groups – needs to have been rubber stamped by authorities in publishing houses or universities or schools, or by strict parents and sneering students. Then there’s the other “good” that has no critical acknowledgement of its worth but has a short-term world-praise by a few hundred thousand eyes and hearts. Writing that makes us scurry anxiously to cling to or condemn the notion of  literature, of high art and of taste. At that point we’re surely lost.

And that’s the point at which you wonder how Beckett’s later work would fare without the aged polo-neck Beckett behind them. How good is good – and is it the writer’s whole-life good or just some freak singular good – or is it the readers’ good? Or society’s good?

And once we know good, do we know failure?

The best known quote – if we’re honest, the only known quote from Beckett’s Worstward Ho! unless you’ve had it as a set text in a class – isn’t the two above. Chances are it’s this one:

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

It’s the one that everyone rallies to if they have forced themselves into a diet of rejection and a hankering for some nebulous hope of improvement under the terms that unknown people might bring under the cover of night.  It’s also a useful if perplexing example of what lasts, what doesn’t, what outlandish contexts bring what texts out and what meme-ification has done for the world.

Why try to write fiction?

We write because we have to. It will help us through and keep all those hopeless and very human feelings of pointlessness at bay. If failure is the ultimate goal of art then no better way to try failing than as an amateur writer – amateur in both its current English sense and the more wholesome original, French, and differently pronounced version.

Writing as an amateur is to spend time alone doing something that is unlikely ever to get an audience.  Unlike cookery, gardening, landscape painting, silversmithing, drama, interior design or cricket, there are no obvious opportunities to deliver work to an appreciative local circle. Instead writers cluster together, trading read for read in a curious session of I’ll let you show me yours if you let me show you mine.  Test it. Friends rally round anyone who’s half decent at baking, they’ll stick an amateur watercolour on a wall or even buy one. They’re happy to admire a companion’s begonias or sit in the sun and watch the village pub team trundle a medium paced over or two. But ask someone to read your poems and they run a f**king mile. As for prose it’s unlikely any offers to read don’t come from someone in the same game.

So that’s your lot. Writing is meant to be for someone to read but most writing is a lonely business. No-one to be a trouble to. No opportunity for dismissal or appreciation. For many it’s a lottery-ticket hobby, fuelling the slush piles of unwelcoming commercial entities who themselves are struggling to see what glow fiction can provide for a naughty world. So it’s a lonely game – the only game in town and one for metaphors that Neil Sedaka and Phil Cody should be left alone with – and that can easily feel like failure if you let it.

Leap in. Get better. Not by failing, necessarily, although if not getting readers is failing then expect that in spades. Get better by tangible notions of what works – for you, for an unknown audience, no matter.

There’s bags of advice out there, of course. Storygrid.com is my own current hope and salvation along with McKee, Iglesias, David Lodge, John Gardner and many many more.

Hopefully whatever you’ve found so far has been fabulously helpful and you’re ready to get going. As someone who’s started more novels than they’ve finished and finished more novels than they’ve published and is still rewriting those nearly-but-not-quites almost to death, there are a few things that I wish someone had given me all those years ago when I first started and which I’m still mulling over now – some of those thoughts I’ve stuck online, hoping it helps me fail gracefully and maybe better.