Just Past Splat

Success is that way ºjust a little past SPLAT.

 

What if you knew you’d sell your first book April 16, 2014? I’ll bet there would be no problem keeping up with your writing until that day, would there? But…you don’t know, you can’t know. But the discouragement of today that makes you want to quit, that sinking-shoulder feeling you get in the middle of a tough to write scene, the doubt that whispers, what the hell are you wasting your time for? that makes you long to stop putting yourself through rejections, might only be a rock you’ve stumbled over on the road toward publication.

Think about how many unsuccessful writers just needed to keep writing one more day, take one more rejection, try for the brass ring once more. We’ll never know, never read their book. Wouldn’t that be the saddest thing? Wonder if your favorite writer, LaVyrle Spencer, Kaki Warner or Elizabeth Lowell quit the day before they put the finishing touches on the books you love so much. If anyone of them had said, “That’s enough rejection!” after the first rejection letter. We never would have heard of any of them. We would be missing those wonderful books left inside them and what a loss.

I get so frustrated with the media’s attitude toward failure. Take NASA and their mistakes and failures. The media questions suggest that these setbacks are a waste of time and money. That failure is completely unacceptable.  Is failure a reason to scrape the whole mission? To stop trying? Where would NASA be if they had quit with their first failure? It certainly wouldn’t be to the moon, mars or even the sky.

The thing is, we really don’t learn much from success. We see how damaging success too soon can be. If we have to struggle, work harder than we ever thought we could, we learn how much we want something and it’s that much more valuable. We tend to use the success better, too. And if we always met with success, we’d learn to be careful; we wouldn’t dare change what we were doing. Think of the daring, wonderful books that would never have been written, let alone read. No polio vaccine, no Post-it™ notes. Think of the avenues we as a nation, as a people would never have taken.

We learn best from our failures. We improve because of them.

If you can’t risk the rejection, you can’t risk beginning. If you won’t allow yourself to fail, you won’t even start. Tell yourself every day, at the point where success seems hopeless, even impossible you might only be inches or days away from your goal. Hang on. Don’t quit. I won’t.