Failure is the only option

Deciding a few years ago to finally accomplish my lifelong dream of writing fiction was a massive turning point for me. Because for the first time in my life, I set out to fail.

Since childhood I’ve worked tirelessly to protect myself against failure. I strove for success on all fronts, in school and extracurriculars and in my personal life, and avoided any pursuits I knew I’d be bad at (ahem, sports). 

A recent article in The New Yorker perfectly sums up the reason behind this: like all perfectionists, the ingrained belief that imperfection would make me unloveable drove me to earn and keep love by “masking” to the world, trying to show no flaws. Failure wasn’t an option, because it came packaged with crippling shame and self-loathing.

Perfection is also why it took me so long to return to creative writing, which I’d loved as a child. Whenever I’d start a fiction project, I would quit fast. My work never measured up to what I was reading, or to the ideas in my head. I was stuck in the "talent-taste gap," as described by Ira Glass: "For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good…and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you."

Years of therapy convinced me to start writing again, if only just for myself. I discovered that I began to like my own work. Then, I began sharing it with others, and found that my writing was resonating with people. 

Just like that, the perfectionist “masking” came roaring back. I wanted acceptance and validation—and getting published was the pat on the head I felt like I needed. 

Enter inevitable failure

Yet publication is a whole new ballgame, and failure is the sport itself. 

On the first day of a college Theater 101 class, our professor told us the theater profession has a 99% unemployment rate. I have never, ever forgotten that statement. (It’s likely why I stopped taking theater classes!) Now, three years into my publishing journey, I’ve learned that publishing fiction has a similarly dismal success rate. It’s hard to break in and impossible to understand the rules. Like acting, it requires a lot of waiting, scrapping, and compromise, feeling grateful for any glimmer of hope along the way. 

My initial glimmer of hope came right out of the gate when I started querying. My dream agent requested the full manuscript of my novel—an extremely rare occurrence. My head spun with excitement. This wasn’t going to be as hard as I’d thought, after all! But ultimately, she passed—to book wasn’t a good fit for her. I vowed that the right agent would come along for this book, and the early interest by agents I respected kept me going, buoyed by industry stories of best-selling authors who failed a lot before hitting it big. 

For my first novel, I queried 187 agents over two years. Ten asked for my full manuscript then rejected it, 68 outright said no, and 101 ghosted me. Short story submissions have been just as hard: even though I’ve had two stories accepted by literary journals, that’s after 80+ submissions to journals and contests in the past year. 

Reframing rejection 

At first, I took every rejection hard. Each “thanks but no thanks” sent me into a shame spiral. I was embarrassing myself. I should just quit—this was never going to happen for me. What right did I have to think I could do this? 

Over time, though, the “nos” became expected. Sometimes, I was surprised and the “no” came with some words of encouragement—we loved the story but it wasn’t quite right for us, please keep submitting. I let more readers read my book and found it was resonating with them. Many agents loved the premise, but it wasn’t quite right for their list. I started reframing the nos as: “it’s a no from me,” not an outright “you should never write another word.” I kept rewriting my story, using the feedback to keep learning how to make the novel better, until I finally got it to the point where I was personally so happy with it, I no longer cared about the “nos.” 

And then: a tiny handful of times, the “nos” turned out to be “yeses.” When the “yeses” happen, they’ve so unexpected and thrilling that they make up for every “no” I’ve ever gotten. (When I opened a literary journal’s reply recently, standing in line while on vacation, I initially glazed over it expecting it to be a rejection, and had to read it three times before realizing they’d accepted my story. Then I jumped up and down in public!)

The 99% failure rate has continued to push me to learn, improve, experiment, and explore new angles—in my writing and in publishing. And also, to embrace that the real success is that I’m writing in the first place. I’ve also learned that you can’t write for everyone. There are audiences for every story; there will be people who don’t like mine, and a few who really get it. If I can write successfully for those readers, and have fun doing it while continuing to hone my craft, that’s winning for me.