Am I failing at writing?

"She's not that special, she's just wearing make-up."

When I was 19, I went to work in Sri Lanka. It was a gap year placement, and I was supposed to be there for three months, working as a journalist intern for one of the country’s national newspapers. It was a powerful experience in some ways, but I can’t say I exactly enjoyed it. I got bitten half to death by mosquitos, spent a lot of time feeling very unwell, and was profoundly lonely. In the end, I lasted a little more than three weeks.

I remember, vividly, on the plane journey home, writing in my journal about failure. I don’t still have that journal - all this took place more than 20 years ago - and I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I know that I was thinking a lot about what failure has to teach us and whether we can learn to embrace it.

I was trying to make myself feel better, I think. I felt utterly overwhelmed by the sense of failure, at not being able to live up to my expectations of myself, at not being capable of doing what everyone else seemed to be doing. I was only in Sri Lanka in the first place because of a deeply unhelpful conversation with a careers advisor. When, at the age of 16, it came to my turn to discuss my future with the bored-looking woman dispatched to our school by the local careers service, I told her that I wanted to be a writer. “That’s not a career,” she replied, with no emotion or apparent interest, “no one makes a living at writing. If you like writing, be a journalist. Next!” And that was that.

I may have added the “Next!” in my memory - surely that’s not how these things are done?! - but that was certainly the effect that she conveyed. And those words stuck with me for a very long time. I spent at least another 15 years believing that it was not possible to make a living from writing, and that no sensible person would even consider such a thing. So when I was looking for gap year placements, I decided that the journalism one was for me. It was not. I didn’t enjoy journalism. I had a couple more attempts back in this country that I also did not enjoy. I knew I wouldn’t enjoy it when the careers woman suggested it, so why did I insist on trying? Why did I trust her assessment of what was best for me - which she had based on having known me for approximately 20 seconds - more than my own? Surely that was only setting myself up for failure?

Photo by Stefano Zocca on Unsplash

It took me until I was in my 30s to start to lean back into the idea that writing might be worthwhile after all. But I didn’t fully recommit to my writing until after I had my first child. It cracked open something in me, and I simply had to write. I had no choice. Words spilled out of me, and I had to find somewhere for them all to go. So it was at this point that I started actually trying to make some money from my writing.

Which meant I also had to confront the idea of failing at writing.

She’s not that special, she’s just wearing make-up

I’ve had a project in mind for a while that I’ve desperately wanted to work on. I had a vision of a deck of cards that would be a cross between creative prompts and oracle cards. I wanted to be able to use images from nature and archetypes from mythology to act as jumping off points to explore deep thoughts and feelings through creativity. A couple of months ago, I decided to finally go for it, and I designed the Creative Oracle deck. But getting cards printed is expensive, so I had the idea to crowdfund the first print run. I figured that, if enough people wanted to buy it to cover those initial costs, then I’d know that I was onto something that could make money. And at first it looked like it was going quite well. But now, with just two days left to go on the campaign, and having already extended the deadline once, it looks like it’s not going to happen. I still don’t have enough orders to pay for that first printing.

It’s painful to be so close, and yet not make it. Hey, there’s still time - those elusive four last orders might just come in - you can order here if you want to be one of them. But the fact that they haven’t flown off the virtual shelves in the way I’d hoped they might makes me think it’s probably best not to go down that road. Maybe it’s for the best - it’s saved me from dedicating time and energy to something that isn’t really within the remit of what I consider to be my mission. Making physical products is a whole thing that I don’t know if I want to get into. And I have plenty of other projects to focus on right now, it’s probably not good to get sidetracked by something so left-field. But it still hurts to try and fail.

The trouble with ideas is that they always seem so beautiful and captivating in your imagination. You get excited about them, and you think other people will be as excited as you are. This idea came from within you, so it feels like a part of you. Then when people don’t feel the same, it can feel like a rejection of you as a person.

We pour so much of ourselves into our creations, and we use so much of our energy and our light to bring something into the world that wasn’t there before. But, to be “a success”, we have to appeal to a load of humans who are entirely separate from, and different to, us. We have to attract the attention of people we do not know and can only have the vaguest conception of. Human beings are deeply complex and intricately varied, so understanding them in groups is challenging to say the least. Since art is highly personal and subjective, there’s no formula for knowing what any group of people will like. So we just have to keep trying. Using all that energy and light to keep creating. And we have to do that again, and again, and again to find the thing that will capture enough people’s imagination to make this into a career.

It’s hard.

I came to Substack excited by the possibility of being able to earn money directly from my writing. Not having to wait for a gatekeeper to deem me worthy of making money for them, and then allowing me to take a small percentage of their profits; simply publishing work directly to paying readers. It was a thrilling concept. And, like most ideas, in my head it was much more shiny and perfectly sculpted than it came to be in reality. One year and eight months into my Substack journey, I have a total of 12 paying subscribers. And I think about half of those are comped. I have just passed the milestone of 700 total subscribers, which feels amazing, but I know that plenty of people have started in those 20 months that I’ve been writing here and have amassed thousands of subscribers. I’m deeply grateful for every single person who chooses to subscribe to my work, and I’m humbled and stunned that some people choose to pay for that work, yet it’s easy to get caught up in wondering what all those people with thousands of subscribers are doing “right” that I’m getting “wrong”. It’s easy to spiral into thoughts that my writing just isn’t that good, that I’m just not interesting enough to enough people. But then the other day I had an epiphany.

My husband and I have developed a strong and inexplicable addiction to one of those gameshows where the contestants are “celebrities” - by which I mean three of the contestants are people you’ve never heard of, and one of them used to be properly famous in the 80s but hasn’t been seen in public since then. A couple of weeks ago, one of the people I’d never heard of was a writer. I think they were something else and a writer, probably a comedian, but I wasn’t really listening to the introduction until the word “writer” caught my attention. I’d been in a bit of a spiral that day about pitches that had been rejected and books that hadn’t sold as well as I’d hoped and one thing and another, so I found myself feeling weirdly envious of this person that I had never heard of (and whose name I can’t remember, even now).

Because they were on TV, I felt, they must be successful. They must not have any of these worries about the size of their savings account or whether they’d be able to go on a decet holiday any time soon. They must just release work that was widely enjoyed and celebrated, and then collect all the hefty royalty cheques. And then, as if someone was tapping me on the shoulder to remind me, I had a sudden flash of the time someone said to me, “Wow, you’re a BBC contributor, you must have really made it now.” Earlier this year, I wrote an article for The i about gentle parenting that made some waves (I then wrote a bit about it on Substack, too), and as a result I was invited onto the BBC Radio 5 Live breakfast show. I had a chat with Rick Edwards (who’s also appeared on that gameshow) about parenting styles, which was totally surreal, and so I had to be set up with a BBC contributor account, which means I can now be tapped by the BBC at any time for radio and TV interviews. I’ve not been asked back again yet, but you never know.

People assume that you make big money when you’re on the radio or TV, but it’s not as lucrative as you might think. I got paid £35 for that Radio 5 interview, which is a pretty decent rate for 15 minutes’ work, but it’s the kind of work that’s fairly sporadic. Even if you do become the kind of expert that gets asked to comment on news stories regularly, you’re still only getting little payments here and there. Yet, because I posted about my little foray into live radio across social media, a lot of people thought that meant I was doing pretty well. But it’s all about the spin you put on these things.

Photo by Vlad Deep on Unsplash

And then, watching that writer I did not know on TV, it hit me - she’s not that special, she’s just wearing make-up. We are, all of us, constantly performing this act of dressing up in big people clothes and creating a grown-up, professional face for the world that we hope will help us to be accepted as serious people who do important and worthy things, and that we hope will mask all our insecurities and imperfections and failures. The trouble is, we are very well aware of all our own flaws and how desperate we are to hide them, yet we never consider that other people might be doing the same thing. We readily assume that everyone else’s mask is their real face, and also assume that our own is a scruffily executed imitation of these other, better, ones.

It is the age-old problem: we believe that everyone else is doing far better than we are, whilst massively over-estimating how well everyone else is doing. Simultaneously, everyone else is massively over-estimating how well we are doing. I could get dressed up and go on the BBC and act confident and well put together too - in fact, I have - but I’m still just a regular sometime successful, sometimes failing, always insecure human being. And so is everyone else.

The reality is, no one else is as secure, confident and successful as you think they are, and you are doing far better than you recognise. You just need to lean in to your own hype a little more - put on the metaphorical power outfit, and allow yourself to believe you really are that cool. One day you might be getting the call from the BBC - or whatever other big call-up the universe has in stall for you - and the next day you’ll be letting go of a project that died. And that’s just the way it goes.

The mundanity of failure

There is no such thing as objective “success”, not really. However expansive your wealth and fame may become, your insecurities and concerns simply swell to fill the space around them. There is always more pressure and expectation to be discovered, more lifestyle to be maintained. And the more public your successes, the more visible are your failures.

Because we all fail. All the time. Life is failure. We learn to walk by falling and getting up, over and over. We babble and mispronounce words until we get the hang of talking. Early in our lives, we accept failure as part of the process, and we never let it demotivate us. We don’t question ourselves or our capabilities. Then we get older and we start to believe that failure is a sign of weakness, rather than an inevitable stage of growth.

You can’t achieve anything without failing. I know that really. I had to send out so many pitches to newspapers and magazines before I even got that first reply from an editor. I pitched a business book that got rejected before I was asked, along with my business partner, to write The Inclusion Journey. Some days I can write posts that I’m excited about, that I think will resonate with others, and they’re published to the sound of crickets. Then, other days, a post that I worried wouldn’t land at all can bring in numbers of new subscribers that I hadn’t thought was possible.

All of life, and art, is trying and failing and learning and trying again. And art rarely has the steady growth trajectory of other endeavours. In business, for example, you test something and you learn enough from it to make your next project more successful. In art, you might find something that works quite well, but then, if you try to replicate elements of it in the future, it could fall entirely flat, and you will never know why. Art is too personal, too ephemeral, too of-the-moment to be replicatable. Your audience don’t want more of the same, they don’t want predictable - they want to be surprised and moved, and you have little way of knowing what will achieve that effect on any given day.

All you can do is create the work that feels most important to you. The work that nourishes your soul, that expresses who you are and shares your authentic self with the world. If you feel good about what you’ve made, and it’s been a positive and worthwhile experience for you, then it doesn’t matter so much whether it sets the world on fire. You’ll keep trying, and maybe the next project will be the one that does.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

When I think about writers I admire, the ones that have the kind of “success” that would make me feel that I had truly made it, I think of Margaret Atwood. I adore her. I would read the phone book if she wrote it. The Handmaid’s Tale has been my favourite book since I was 15. When I heard a sequel was coming, part of me knew that I wouldn’t like it. What were the chances, really, of me being happy with a follow-up to a book that I already thought was perfect as it was? I mean, obviously I bought it immediately; how could I not? But it fell completely flat for me. I put it quietly back on the shelf, and tried to pretend the whole thing had never happened. Yet I still think Margaret Atwood is the greatest writer alive today. I will still buy and devour anything she writes in future. One “failure” (from my point of view, anyway, which is highly subjective) doesn’t change anything about her abilities and possibilities. It just goes to prove that no one can hit the mark for everyone every time.

So yes, I am failing, sometimes. So are you. So are the fancy people on TV. It’s part of being human. But we succeed sometimes, too, and we need to celebrate those moments, and remember them when the failures come along. We need to learn from both our successes and failures, and not take either of them too seriously. Life isn’t a static experience of “success” or “failure”, we’re in a constant process of unfolding and becoming - never completely having “made it” and never having “lost it”. We are experimenting and playing. Winning some, not winning some others, but hopefully having fun along the way.

I’m going to try to worry less about “failing”, and allow myself to just enjoy the process. To just do what feels good and right to me. And to keep doing that until some of them make me some money!

On Thursday 28th November, you can join me online for a live hour of creative wellbeing. This month, we’re going to be focusing on using creativity to process difficult emotions. Sign up here: