# Hav the guts to fail... or you aren't going to make it



## Linton Robinson (Jul 13, 2010)

Ninety nine point ninety nine percent of you people who want to be a  bigtime author at a major house are not going to ever see it happen.
That's not pessimism, that's just plain statistical fact.

And you are, to some degree, probably immersing yourself in an  industry/culture that pimps success the way churches pimp heaven.   Just  work harder, you're told.  Learn submission, study the waterhole, take  all advice.  Above all: buy, buy, buy the stuff that will make you  successful, the way women buying cosmetics and shoes make themselves  gorgeous and desirable.

Nobody talks about failure, which is almost inevitable as death.

A lot of people stay in holding patterns for years because they are  terrified of failure.   You have seen them.  Blogs about how to sell  your writing, when they've never sold anything.  And aren't even  submitting anything because they've gotten to into it to allow  themselves the luxury of failure.  Half the people who have been trying  to get an agent to request  a full for ten years are nervous about  self-publishing (or putting up an online serial or podcast or whatever)  not for the dim reaons they state but because taking a hot means you  could miss.

I preach a different gospel, myself.  One in which you can't really  fail, just start up a path that might lead to the golden heights, but if  not will always see you in a place of success and accompishment.  And  if you fail utterly--not one person wants to read your sucky story--you  do it soon.  Right away. You don't have to screw around for ten years  before deciding you should ditch your historical novel based on  Edwardian waistcoat design and try a zombie romance.... or take up  accordian lessons and maybe find your true self in another form of  expression.   

I want to lay on you, dear friends, colleagues, and wannabes, a  different view of things.  One that's starting to become a meme in  publishing, like "long tail" and "thousand true fans".   But it also has  a lot to say to writers  And if you're considering being a writer AND  publisher, it's are the more valid.

Learning by trail and error doesn't work if you can't face error.

So.
Here are links to two articles that I think are of interest to writers  as well as publishers.   They are from Digital Book World, a fascinating  site that is written by and for people who are actually out there  surfing--and modifying--the glorious future that writer sites and mags  just occasionally mention in some vague way.
Fail  Better, Cheaper, Faster 

And this recent one that quotes that and others  The  Need To Fail

By the way, anybody who wonders what I mean by my gospel of immediate,  incremental success in getting read,  there's  This


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## garza (Jul 15, 2010)

Lin - I see one flaw in electronic self-publishing as a way to start - lack of immediate, professional guidance that leads directly to being published.

I started by sending short local soft news stories to two local newspapers. Both had editors I could talk with personally who, in very different ways, taught me to write. One had a photographer who showed me how to get the most out of a camera, the other had a darkroom tech who talked me into buying an 85 line screen and then showed me how to make prints that looked great in the paper. They didn't tell me, they showed me. And the advice was immediately practical. It led directly to my byline in the next day's paper as I followed their examples and advice.

When I took my first stories to the local radio station they were immediately rejected. When this happened a second time I insisted on knowing why. The people at the station knew I was writing for the local papers, and finally the fellow who was the station's news reporter explained that the success I had with the newspapers was the problem. He said I was bringing stories to the radio station written the same way I had learned to write stories for newspaper. This was the first time anyone explained to me the different styles of writing. So I worked at it until I learned broadcast style, which is more difficult than newspaper style. 

Mine was a secure environment with that immediate feedback and practical effect. The old man at the weekly would take an hour to go over a story with me word for word, explaining what should be changed and why. Editors of weeklies don't have the daily deadline pressure. The old man at the daily told me once that I was a teen-ager (I was 15) trying to write like a college professor, that I should cut it out, go home, write naturally, and leave him alone he was busy. On a couple of other occasions he read through my copy without saying anything, crumpled it up, dropped it in the wastebasket, said that what I had written was a piece of excrement, pointed to an empty desk with a typewriter, and demanded that I write it again, and write it as many times as it took to get it right. When I handed him the rewritten copy he read it, nodded, spiked it for printing, and told me to get out of his office, he was busy. 

The point is those people taught me the craft. Until I started hanging around them I was just typing. They taught me to write.

Is it still possible for a youngster to start that way? The various forms of epublishing sound attractive for the writer who has a good bit of skill at the start. But there's not a live human being meeting you face to face and explaining how to make this piece good enough to earn a byline in tomorrow's newspaper. 

Is any of this making sense? You talk about beginners dreaming of being published by a major house. What about being published in the local Kiwanis Club newsletter as a start? 

I think I'm asking if a person can still start on the bottom rung of the ladder and climb, if not to the top, at least a good ways up. Or is there even a bottom rung anymore? 

Or a ladder?


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## Linton Robinson (Jul 15, 2010)

Who needs pro guidance to publish, when you can just publish?

My main purpose here is to show a new meme or logo or whatever that bears some thinking about.  Like "The Long Tail"  or "Thousand True Fans",  the concept of "Fail Better, Faster" is kind of a general philosophy that's hard to pin down or grasp all at once.   

I'd say it has to do with a lot more than publishing,  or even writing.

A saw it demonstrated in college by this guy who had the idea.  He'd just hit on every girl he ran into, no frills or foreplay.  And since he did it a hundred times more than us, it worked.  And he didn't waste a bunch of time screwing around.   Only works if you don't mind getting a lot of personal rejection.


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## garza (Jul 15, 2010)

A man walking past the schoolyard gate happens to overhear a young boy asking every girl who came out if she wanted to. He said to the kid, 'Don't you get your face slapped a lot?' and the kid says, 'Yeah, but I get a lot of you-know-what too.'

I get the idea. But does this principle applied to everyone's ability these days to publish on the web without going through any kind of process like the one I went through as a teen-ager benefit the reader more, or the writer? There are bound to be some naturally talented people out there who can start writing good material with no guidance whatever. That's good. But what about a person with marginal talent to begin with, as was true in my case, who needs the kind of learning environment that surrounded me all through high school? Do they fall by the wayside, lacking those helping hands?

I'm continuing to work my way to a full understanding of this concept of publishing without a publisher. I'll get there, but the process may take a while. I'm like the cane farmer who got rich when there was a steady market for sugar, but now is upset when he reads something like an article I wrote two years ago that started out, 'The best way to solve the problems we see today in the sugar industry is to stop growing sugar cane.'


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## Linton Robinson (Jul 15, 2010)

You start looking at other people's requirements for what you "have to do" to "learn how" to write and there's just no end to it.  And as far as I'm concerned, people saying "the only way to do anything is the way I did it" should be completely ignored by any newbie.

And, in fact, some of the world's most successful writers just sat down and wrote a book and were on their way.  Writing is not rocket science.  It has almost no technique, has almost no catechism, doesn't require learning a bunch of terminology or rules or principles beyond one's own language.


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## Sam (Jul 15, 2010)

Interesting stuff, Lin. I agree with you wholeheartedly on the publishing thing. I've been doing research myself and what I've discovered is that there are a million-and-one different opinions out there. You start trying to read them all and you get bogged down really quick. The best way I've found to learn about _anything _new is to wade right in there and figure it out for yourself.


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## Foxee (Jul 15, 2010)

True but there would seem to be a happy medium between piling in with no knowledge, having to re-invent the wheel and over-saturating yourself with other people's opinions? New media is at a time much like when the car or the airplane was first invented...everyone took a shot at it in a different way, some more successful than others but some principles had to be adhered to. It's kinda fun to go to an old car museum and looking back to see just how people interpreted what a 'car' should be.


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## Linton Robinson (Jul 15, 2010)

That gets very directly at what this whole "failure thinking" is about.  And, by the way there are "failure seminars" going on: it's a hot topic and buzzword.

A lot of what you see in museums of phenotypes from generational periods could be seen as a catalog of failures.  Some are failures that advanced the overall technology.   Some (Stanley Steamer) could be seen as too successful as objects, but failures in marketing or just unlucky.  

The whole idea of embracing failure flips a lot of people out, especially when they're used to the THINK SUCCESS!!!!! type of yappa dappa.  Science and engineering incorporate the planing and use of failure.  "Failure testing" is a telling phrase--spending money to force something to fail in order to learn from it.
"Having a plan B" is another form of failure planning.   Sounds simple, but you troll around writers sites and you see a remarkable number of people essentially saying that even thinking of a Plan B is tantamount to seling yourself out.

To me, one of the main factors in this is "Fail faster".   Don't spend ten years deciding to look into smaller presses or self-publishing--or just tossing your crappy manuscripts and becoming a perormance artist or something--if you can figure out how to do it in six months.


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## garza (Jul 15, 2010)

But I'm still looking for an answer to my question. 

Regardless of how many other ways there are to get started writing, is the way I did it still open, or is that option closing fast with the decline of the local newspaper?


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## Linton Robinson (Jul 15, 2010)

Well, if you learned to write at a newspaper and there are no more newspapers, then future writers won't be able to do it like you did, no.


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## Foxee (Jul 15, 2010)

By the look of it a lot of news is getting scooped by bloggers. I know that's not a popular thing to say here with some of the hatred of blogs, but the fact is that electronic media is fast. I think that newspapers will be around for a while (hey, for some people they're a habit that's practically a religious thing) I think there are better opportunities out there. No reason why you can't keep writing for newspapers if that's what you're doing...but I'd branch out and keep looking. Things are changing.


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## garza (Jul 15, 2010)

I haven't personally had anything published in a newspaper for quite a while, except for some syndicated material that I wrote on my trip to the Gulf Coast. But that wasn't written specifically for any media.

It seems a shame, though. I've known several people of my generation and older who got their start the same way, and we all ended up doing okay. We learned from the ground up with hard-nosed editors who would shove Strunk's 'Elements of Style' in your face in a heartbeat. 

In a way, though, even for a certified codger like me, it will be fun to watch what falls out of the tree.


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## Kimberly Bird (Jul 17, 2010)

I have been writing for a number of years, and have learned that failure in this business is almost a must if you are going to succeed.  It gives us character, teaches us humbleness, teaches us strength and endurance if we are meant to follow this path.  Even if you never get that life story put into print there are other avenues to follow, other doors that can and will lead you to success.  Your writing Resume can be just as important as your novel; published short stories, volunteer works in the field of writing, ect...


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