I am covering for SensibleShoes tonight while she is away to "confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob" with her fellow writers at a conference. I hope she has fun and I look forward to her return next week. She usually brings back nice gooey confections of thoughtfulness to share on Thursday nights.
I am not a published writer, least not the way this series is interested in supporting. So, I am not really qualified to say much here. At this stage of my development I am still trying to figure out how to take all the "book learning" and make it "real word" learning. That's my apprenticeship and it will go on for as long as it needs to go on. (Perhaps forever.)
What I really have are questions. Boy, do I ever have questions. Most of mine have to do, in one form or another, with failure. I am looking for advice on how to fail and was wondering if anyone here can offer insight into that? I can't seem to find that in books on writing. They are too focused on what to do, not on what not to do. Let me briefly elaborate.
One of my favorite pondering websites on the 'net is You are not so smart from David McRaney. The site is filled with great insights into human nature based on the work of behavioral scientists. One of the essays specifically addresses why it is a mistake to look just to the top achievers for tips on how to be successful. You also have to look and look deeply at failures. This is from the essay on Survivorship Bias:
If you spend your life only learning from survivors, buying books about successful people and poring over the history of companies that shook the planet, your knowledge of the world will be strongly biased and enormously incomplete. As best I can tell, here is the trick: When looking for advice, you should look for what not to do, for what is missing ...
Last week I wrote something on WO that failed. It was kind of awesome because the scene I wrote really did, well, suck badly. (I felt like Wile E. Coyote after one of his Acme-produced products failed. Crap, I'm going over the cliff again. This is going to hurt.) But if I didn't fail I never would have gotten some nice help from SenShoe. She showed me how I could have saved the scene. She also asked me if I really wanted to continue with what was clearly not an especially well-thought out idea. (No, I really did not.) I think I learned a little bit about how not to fail.
A lot more of life is based on random chance than we care to admit. The most talented don't always get the accolades and rewards. Learning how to "not fail" teaches how to see when something isn't working or when it's time to rethink a project. It teaches how to let go. This insight from that same essay says it well:
What you can’t see, and what they [the successful] can’t see, is that the successful tend to make it more probable that unlikely events will happen to them while trying to steer themselves into the positive side of randomness. They stick with it, remaining open to better opportunities that may require abandoning their current paths, and that’s something you can start doing right now without reading a single self-help proverb, maxim, or aphorism. Also, keep in mind that those who fail rarely get paid for advice on how not to fail, which is too bad because despite how it may seem, success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.
And that's about all I have to say on that in this filler edition. Apprentices really want to listen, not lecture. Got any good stories about "how to not fail"?
Tonight's Challenge:
Shit happens. The Jewel of Togwogmagog falls out of a pocket and tumbles down a ravine. Belinda trips on a table leg and falls head-first into the avacado dip, right in front of Lord Postlethwaite-Praxleigh (pronounced Puppy). James Buns accidentally ignites a bomb with his turbo-laser pen and blows up a super secret base.
Write a brief scene that shows these characters, or ones from any other scenario you favor, learning from a failure. What do your characters do to recover when shit happens? Do they eat comfort food and drink heavily; re-order new devices from Acme Products to try again or buy giant vats of Rocky Road Ice Cream and stay indoors and pout for a while? I would say try to keep it under 150 words, but I never manage to do that. I aim for it, but rarely get there.