Apr 12 2009
Embracing my Identity as a Failed Writer
Failure in life is something I am well-acquainted with. Sometimes failure makes me cringe with embarrassment, sometimes I don’t much care.
But failure in writing is something I do care about, and I’ve noticed that I’m trying to hide it. I try not to mention the number of years I’ve been trying to write a completed novel. I even try to hide my age so people won’t know how many years I have been trying to finish a novel but in vain.
I’ve decided that now is the time that this must stop. I must embrace my identity as a failed writer: not only that, I must learn to take pride in how extensive and complete my failure has been. Only in that way can I rise above being a mere commonplace failure into the ranks of the truly glorious failures.
One could tell from an early age that I was destined to be a failed writer. I learned to read before I entered school, I made up stories in my head all the time, but I was clever enough to know that writing things down just invited fierce criticism from teachers and other kids. Since I couldn’t bear being laughed at— strange, because I experienced so much of it— I kept my stories in my head where they belonged.
During the dreary years of my imprisonment in high school, I slipped up. I took a creative writing course, and actually turned in an assignment in which we were to write the first paragraph of a story. The teacher singled me out for praise, reading it to the whole class.
It was as follows: “In the beginning, John created the heavens and the earth. At least, that was John’s opinion. It was for that conceit that I resolved he must die.”
This might have been fatal to my career as a failed writer, but luckily none of the other kids noticed that the teacher had singled me out and continued to hate me as usual, and after a few feeble attempts to complete the next assignment, which was to finish the story, I gave up.
I managed to get through college without much in the way of writing attempts. I was having enough trouble keeping up with my German verbs and minor prophets. But after graduation and my failure as a schoolteacher (great with kids, lousy with parents and authority figures) I ended up here, at my farm in upper Michigan, where I began my first failed novel.
It was called “The Captain’s Woman” and was a regency romance about a young woman swept off her feet by a dashing pirate— who happened also to be a woman.
This was not long after I came out of the closet, and also after I lost my faith in Christianity and after a rocky four days as an atheist, became a Neopagan.
“The Captain’s Woman” made it to about page 70 or so before it ran out of gas— a pretty impressive journey considering that my other written work tended not to need more than one sheet of paper. Although it was written many computers ago, in about 1990, I believe that I may still have a version of the manuscript around somewhere.
My other writings at the time were: ‘The Charm of Alien Suns’, which was either the first chapter of a novel or a finished short story, notable mostly for its Communist point of view and that group sex thing near the end.
Another was a Star Trek Voyager novel, inspired by the fact that I had a serious crush on the alien girl, Kes. I worked on this for a long time— right up until the producers of the Voyager series got rid of Kes and replaced her with the Borg with the boobs. I hate the Borg. I really, really hate them. They’re kind of like Daleks but less fun. And so this discouragement caused my Voyager novel to founder. It had reached about 70 pages at the time as well.
My career as a writing failure went on in a similar manner, until in about 2004-2005 I started work on a novel called ‘Viridian’ about an alien invasion. As usual, being a good Pagan girl, I started my work with a prayer. I cast around in my mind for which Pagan God to pray to: Freyja, Thor, Odin, Forseti? And it popped into my mind to do a little experimental theology and pray to good old Jehovah and give Him a chance to prove that Christianity was true by helping me with the novel.
Well— Viridian went to about page 130, breaking my old record of around 70 pages, and I was thus obliged to become a Christian. But Viridian ran out of gas all the same and my hopes for being a successful writer diminished.
Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that my life story IS that of a failed writer. Even if I finish a novel in the next month and it is published, there are all those years of failure to account for. If someday some scholars examine my body of work, no matter how much success I might have from this point on, there will always be those might-have-beens. If only she had finished this novel or that one years earlier, what might she have become???
And so I am embracing my identity, not just as any old wannabe writer, but as a failed writer, and as a glorious failure at that. Very few there are with the gifts to fail on the scale that I have done!
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On another topic: have you yet signed the Esperanto pledge, in which you promise to learn the international language Esperanto if 20 million others make the same promise? Let’s face it: if 20 million people make that pledge, you would be silly NOT to learn Esperanto. And it’s not as if learning Esperanto would take up much of your time.
Here are some Esperanto words to start with:
kato = cat
katoj = cats
hundo = dog
hundoj = dogs
mi amas katojn= I love cats
vi amas hundojn = You love dogs
lando = country
paco = peace (pronounced pat-so)
milito = war
To figure out on your own: Vi amas paco. Mi amas milito.
Not to worry. One of the world’s most unforgettable novels took thirty-two years to write. I forget its name but, it was good.
Don’t worry about being a failed writer, if you try hard enough things will come to you. Tthis blog is bringing you money, so that’s a start.