Several years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts devoted a whole issue of its magazine to the topic of “The Art of Failure: The Importance of Risk and Experimentation.” Writers, artists, and musicians all shared their insights about their creative process, and how to handle the failures that happen along the way. One of them, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, encouraged writers to regard failure simply as data that can help them get better. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Writing Failure is Simply More Data on Your Way to Success”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. In 2014, the magazine NEA Arts, which is part of the National Endowment for the Arts, published an issue called The Art of Failure, The Importance of Risk and Experimentation.
And it’s a series of interviews with writers and artists and musicians, all sharing insights about the creative process and how they handle the failures that inevitably happen along the way.
And we’ll link to that issue on our website because it’s a really good one.
My favorite interview was with the incomparable Toni Morrison. She had some really reassuring thoughts about those times when writers can find themselves failing to achieve what they set out to do.
Morrison said, as a writer, failure is just information. It’s something that I’ve done wrong in writing or is inaccurate or unclear. I recognize failure, which is important. Some people don’t. And fix it because it is data. It is information. Knowledge of what does not work. That’s rewriting and editing.
You have to pay very close attention to it rather than get depressed or unnerved or feel ashamed. None of that is useful. And then she goes on to say, think of it like being a musician. It’s like hitting the wrong note. You have to do something else.
In a musical score, if you’re singing or you’re playing an instrument on stage in public and you hit a wrong note, you can’t say oops and leave the stage. You have to make something out of that error. Do a really powerfully creative thing. If it’s public, you have to have that ability, that gift to make a mistake look creative.
With writing, you can always scratch out the knowledge. You write and erase and do it over. And Grant, there was something so reassuring about that to me, that we writers do have the luxury of learning from our mistakes in private.
I thought it was really helpful and encouraging to hear not only that she’s confronted her own failures and had to work through them, but I think it’s really good advice for life as well.
Right. Yeah. Not just writing that that idea of not being flustered and unnerved or disappointed in yourself is so important. And treating as information instead of as aggravation is what lets you be persistent.
Because those emotions get in the way of you trying again and having that sense of, oh, I just need to repeat this so I get better results and try something different this time. And I’ve seen that in my son as he’s been growing up and learning what it means to be persistent.
And the persistence is not letting yourself get in the way of yourself when things don’t go well. I often think about Billie Jean King’s phrase, champions adjust. I think that that’s applicable here.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about writing and failure or failure in other situations that you’ve learned from. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.
