Chapter 6 of THE BOMB IN THE SHED is out this Friday.
Previous chapters links - CHAPTER 1 - CHAPTER 2 - CHAPTER 3 - CHAPTER 4 - CHAPTER 5
Hi Everyone
And welcome to anyone who recently signed up.
The next chapter of THE BOMB IN THE SHED… is out on Friday and then every Friday after that. On Tuesday’s I send a post with some general thoughts or a short story. Today’s post is about failure, rejection and critical feedback.
Some of you may know this about me already, but a love to win, and I hate to lose.
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been hyper competitive and even I know its not a great trait, so I’ve tried my best to moderate it.
I thought this was helpful context as today I want to talk about rejection, failure and critical feedback. Sounds fun? Not really. But it’s the reality of just about every possible human endeavour, not just creative writing.
Here are some of my thoughts and experiences with this, and how the hyper competitive child in me copes with it…
Accepting Rejection
Stephen King is one of the most successful writers of all time. Here’s one of his better known quotes about rejection…
“By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”
- Stephen King
To me that sounds both depressing and encouraging. Depressing because it sets the stage for an emotional rollercoaster you know you want to take but will be far from pleasant. Encouraging because you know you’re not alone, even the best writers will go through the pain of rejection, it’s part of the journey.
Rejection emails are now more common than rejection slips, so you don’t get the same physical reminder of rejection on your wall, but you still feel it every time it happens and carry it with you afterwards. So I found it helpful to realise you should accept rejection as a normal part of the process, and as Stephen King suggests, just carry on.
Reframing Failure
And it’s not just writers. Here’s Scarlett Johansson, one of the most successful actors in the world, talking about missing out to Sandra Bullock on Gravity…
She described losing <Gravity> as “sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back”, stating: “I felt really frustrated and hopeless. Like, ‘Am I doing the right job?’
- The Independent
If rejection can make Scarlett Johansson feel this way then what hope is there for the rest of us? Maybe a lot of hope, if we learn to reframe rejection not as failure but as steps on our personal journey to success, whatever success looks like to us.
This next quote is from what I found to be a truly inspirational press interview by the basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo when he was asked if his season was a failure when his team lost their playoff game…
“Every year you work towards something, towards a goal … it’s not a failure, it’s steps to success … It’s the wrong question, there are no failures in sports.” - Giannis Antetokounmpo
Many commentators thought this showed the player’s unwillingness to accept the implications of his team’s defeat. Others saw it as a positive reframing of a lack of success as steps on a longer term journey to reach your goals. Personally I love this latter interpretation and will hang on to it for my own journey in creative writing.
If you haven’t read the book Bounce by Matthew Syed I’d recommend giving it a go. In it he popularises the often disputed claim that becoming an expert in anything takes 10,000 hours of stretchy practice. This may or may not be true, but I think there is a core truth within the book that failure is not just inevitable, but actually a requirement for success. “The gold medal winning ice skater is probably the one who has fallen over on the ice the most.”
Critical Feedback
This is deceptively hard, but as well as accepting rejection and reframing failure I think to find success you also need to be good at listening and acting on feedback . It’s not a personal attack, even though it can feel very personal sometimes. Feedback is a gift that we can use to get better.
When I began my writing journey my short stories were pulled to pieces by my writing coach. It felt like they were mauled to death. But that was how I learnt. His feedback as an editor is still valuable now, though thankfully each page isn’t as full of red pen as it was at the start.
Learning never ends and neither does the value of critical feedback. Even the most successful writers have ruthless editors and rely on them to create their best work. A genius like Paul McCartney needs a John Lennon. Paul wrote the lyric ‘She was just seventeen, and never a beauty queen’. John was the one who changed it to ‘…you know what I mean’.
I think its only natural for people to celebrate their success stories and look for inspiration in other people’s success. And to love winning all the time. I really do. But doing this can make the realities of rejection, failure and critical feedback even harder to deal with.
So maybe we should celebrate the downsides more as well.
That’s it, hope that was interesting. Any comments or questions let me know.
Jonathan
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All very interesting. One of my favourite podcasts is How to Fail with Elizabeth Day and it's all about how people learn from their mistakes.
Sorry I'm behind on reading Chapter 5 - will get on it soon......
Really like this. Thanks for sharing. I think people should be less afraid to talk about failure. We are forever bombarded with success stories and highlights on social media. Yet success, as you say, is pretty much part of any success story. I've definitely learned more from my failures than my successes. Maybe because they hurt more.