You Are a Failure

My friend Seth W just posted on his blog on failing at an endeavor out of our league. There’s some good advice for novice fiction writers, like me. It’s axiomatically unavoidable: you’re going to start out writing complete garbage, but that’s the only way you’re going to learn how to really write a good story.

Writing fiction, I’ve been told and I’m now experiencing, is something you catch onto, not something that can be completely taught. There are some guidelines to writing good fiction but I don’t think it’s essentially codifiable; one knows it when one sees it but it can’t be dissected very easily into its component parts. It “works” but we don’t know how, and the only way to start its engine is continually tinker with and keep turning the key until the pistons fire and the wheels don’t fall off.

In a week or so I will post a review of Tobias Buckell‘s Nascence self-released ebook. It’s an unusual card for an established sci-fi writer to deal out: it’s a compilation of his short stories that “failed” (didn’t get published), complete with the stories’ background and explanations. The most successful have to start out somewhere, and it’s not going be at the top and the climb is not going to be easy.

While you’re at the laptop, read about 25 Visionaries Who Created Empires from Virtually Nothing. There’s a few on the list with which I would take small issue but the bulk of it is noteworthy.

The failure of a new project should be used to whittle away at your process to set yourself up for success. If you’re not failing, you’re doing something wrong.

EDIT : Speaking of the evasive nature of good fiction, read Rebecca’s post on C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. The book breaks some cardinal “rules” of fiction yet it’s one of the finest speculative fiction/space stories ever written, as well as his entire trilogy.