#22 The victory of failure, Interview with Pulitzer-winning narrative writer Lane DeGregory, Kobe Bryant coverage
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Peruvian feathered panel, 600-900 A.D.
"I have longed decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow."
- Margaret Atwood
When I was working full-time as a reporter, I would tell myself that I needed a perfect time to write. It had to be the weekends or an upcoming vacation because I was convinced I needed large tracts of time to get anything accomplished. But Sunday night or packing up after the holiday came and I hadn't done any writing. Atwood's comment resonates because I've learned that the best time to write is any time you have free time. It can be at lunchtime if you eat at your desk instead of going out with colleagues. Or after the kids are in bed. Or an hour in the morning after you've set your alarm early. Telling yourself that you'll do it over the weekend or on vacation is too open-ended. It's sort of like that old saying, "A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real money." For writers, it's a half-hour here, a couple of hours there, and pretty soon you'll have a manuscript on your hands. Writing is all about momentum. At first, the going is slow as you struggle to find a voice or the right opening, but then after a while, you're so invested in your story that any free time is the perfect one to propel yourself to the end.
CRAFT LESSON: The victory of failure
We celebrate the winners of elections. Cheer Super Bowl victors and the rising stock market. 4.0 grades and 800 SAT scores get our attention and praise. So do bestseller lists, the National Book Awards and the Pulitzers.
In our success-driven culture, it’s hard to accept that failure, not triumph, is a routine part of the writing craft, a constant in a writer’s life.
Sometimes we get lucky and the first draft is the final one. Sometimes the fates shine upon us and the first lead we write sings. Sometimes the agent or the editor says yes.
But on the journey to make meaning with words, we often stumble. The draft is a jumble, the language sinks rather than soars. Rejection follows submission, sometimes so frequently, it’s easy to lose heart, to give up rather than try and lose. Failing is never fun, but it’s essential for those who practice the craft of writing, indeed any art form.
I’ve been giving failure a lot of thought recently after discovering “The Fail Safe,” a new podcast devoted to writing and failure. Its creators aim to explore “how today’s most successful writers grapple with and learn from failure.” If you’re feeling like one, its guests offer a bracing dose of reality, as well as a modicum of comfort.
"Being an artist depends necessarily on a great tolerance for failure. It’s impossible to make art unless you give yourself permission to fail every day." That’s Garth Greenwell, author of the best-selling, critically-acclaimed novel, ”What Belongs to You,” speaking in the inaugural episode.
In the second, novelist and short story writer Chris Boucher spoke about the decade it took to write his first novel, “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.” “If there wasn’t daily failure there was almost-daily failure for a long time,” he said. Boucher didn’t have a plotline for two years. A recent short story went through more than 30 drafts before it was published. “There are so many dead ends, so many false starts,” he said, “that I consider it part of the practice.”
Samuel Beckett “came to believe failure was an essential part of any artist’s work, even as it remained their responsibility to try to succeed,” Chris Power wrote in, "The Maestro of Failure," a Guardian essay about the revered modernist novelist and playwright. Beckett couldn’t find a publisher for his first novel. Sales for the short story collection he plundered from the book tanked.
But Beckett refused to surrender to the despair that accompanies failures.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter,” he famously wrote in his short story “Worstward Ho.” “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Failing better eventually brought him success, including a Nobel Prize for literature.
When I consider my own failures — the rejected stories, the elusive prizes, the novel abandoned and the play that I never sent out because I was afraid of rejection — it tends to make me more anxious than depressed. Will the writing well run dry? Will I ever achieve all my dreams? What I took away from the first two episodes of “The Fail Safe” is that failure and anxiety are strands in the DNA of the artistic life. But there is a way to combat them.
“The only strategy for making that anxiety bearable,” said Greenwell, “is showing up every day to do the work. Whether the work shows up or not is out of your hands, but you can show up for the work to happen.” After that, he said, the rest is all luck.
These writers have helped me redefine the nature of failure. It is not losing out on prizes or even publication.
“What failure means for a writer is to stop writing,” Greenwell said. “The only thing we have control over is showing up to do the work.”
“And that,” he added, “means giving ourselves as many possible chances as we can to be lucky.”
So I’ll give myself more chances to be lucky and hope you’ll do the same by doing what successful writers do. no matter how many failures they face. They show up and do the work. They court failure every day, hoping for victory.
Peruvian feathered crown
Following the Side Trips: Four Questions with Lane DeGregory
As a young reporter, Lane DeGregory "was so focused on gathering all the information I needed that I didn't pay much attention to things I thought didn't matter, or take down details like the color or the timbre of the coach's voice." "Shutting up is hard for me," she said in this week's interview, "Four Questions with Lane DeGregory." "Listen and look around," DeGregory said, is the most important lesson she's learned as a writer. "I had to train myself to really savor the quiet, note the unanswered questions, and follow the meandering side trips that subjects take you on. I realized that sometimes the seemingly meaningless details open windows into a person's head or heart." DeGregory is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Tampa Bay Times who prefers telling stories about people in the shadows. She went to work with a 99-year-old man who still swept out a seafood warehouse, hung out with a boy trying to buy his first Valentine and followed a photographer taking portraits of dying children. In 2009, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for "The Girl in the Window," about a feral child who was found in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, and was adopted by a new family committed to her nurturing. "I'm like a praying atheist," DeGregory said about the metaphor that describes her as a writer. "I'm too jaded and cynical to truly believe in the goodness of humanity, or some benevolent god, and I'm surrounded by ugly, often evil people in the news. But I'm still holding onto the hope that there is such a thing as universal truth and light, so I'm constantly searching for it, especially in the shadows." DeGregory is not in the shadows when it comes to discussing her craft. With her editor, Maria Carrillo, she launched an innovative podcast, "Write Lane," which features writers and editors talking about stories and the stories behind them. As someone who's appeared on the show to talk about nut graphs, I can attest that they foster lively conversations and care deeply about good writing and the writers who produce it. A friend once told DeGregory that her stories reminded her of Lucinda Williams' songs." I don't know if I'm really anywhere near that realm, but it's the best compliment I've ever gotten: To be able to write gritty, lyrical, earthy ballads that give voice to every day people -- stories of folks struggling, surviving, and saving each other."
DeGregory says, "The best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave me was from Ronald L. Speer, who was my editor at the Virginian-Pilot when I was a young cub on the Outer Banks. He, and this piece of advice, turned me from a reporter into a writer: Put away your notes. The story isn't in your notebook. It's in your head. And heart.
I still stash my notes in my car or kitchen before I sit down to write."
TIP OF THE WEEK
If you can't write the lead first, just write some of the story by starting anywhere. Usually, you get a better opening that way.
h/t Kat Merill
Writers I admire say they can't move on until they have their lead. I respect them. I've never been one. I've wasted too many hours trying to craft the perfect one only to look at the clock and realize I have less than a half-hour to make deadline. At that point, I start throwing anything I can find in my notes on the screen. It's bait-and-switch writing. The reader thinks, "Hey, this is a fantastic story. I am so intrigued," only to read on and wonder what the hell this story is about. Consider the alternative: Don't waste much time on that ideal opening. Write the end first so you know what to foreshadow. Draft scenes or nut graphs that sum up the story and tell the reader why they should read on. You may not yet have your lead, but you've got a good chunk. And any of this material, I've found, helps point the way to a good lead.
BOOKBAG
The death of basketball superstar Kobe Bryant summoned an outpouring of grief from fans, and sorrow about the death of his young daughter and the others who died in a helicopter crash on January 26. For journalists, the news meant the challenge of grace on deadline. Trevor Pyle, a Washington state sportswriter, produced a roundup of the coverage, which tracked Bryant's achievements yet didn't fail to acknowledge a rape accusation against the Los Angeles Lakers standout player.
"The stories produced in the first 24 hours after the accident," Pyle wrote for Nieman Storyboard, have been dizzying in variety. The Los Angeles Times published, as of this writing, 51 stories, with surely more to come; one, by assistant metro editor Erika D. Smith, astutely drew parallels between Los Angeles’ love for Bryant and its similar stance toward recently slain music star Nipsey Hussle. The Ringer used a list format to drive home the range of Bryant’s accomplishments. And Slate hosted a thoughtful discussion of how Bryant’s rape case fits within the larger discussion." Pyle focused on four stories "that chose different paths to cover Sunday's story, each offering its own moments of elegance on elegance."
Peruvian feathered panel, 600-900, A.D.
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
"Every day is Sunday"/The Slackers
MISCELLANY: This week's art
Christine Giuntini, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided the background for the Peruvian feather panel featured here.
"The discovery of an ancient burial or ceremonial site in the upriver region of the Churunga Valley, in far south Peru, received little attention in the turbulent world of 1943. Decades later, it would take two generations of Andean scholars to painstakingly piece together the puzzling story of this discovery, which included the largest and most spectacular find of Precolumbian Peruvian feather work to date.
"Protected from decay by being rolled, placed into large ceramic jars, and buried in the arid soil, the cache included an estimated ninety-six panels, each densely covered with tens of thousands of small glossy macaw body feathers, primarily from the blue and yellow macaw (Ara ararauna). Although these panels were found in the dry western foothills of the Andes, the birds’ home is the Amazonian rainforest, far to the east. The effort required to secure such a mind-bogglingly large supply of either feathers or live birds suggests that colorful feathers were highly valued.
The panels are of roughly similar dimensions, and the majority feature alternating rectangles of blue and yellow feathers, which came from the macaw’s dorsal and ventral sides, respectively. The panels have a woven heading tape, and most also include braided cords that hang from the narrow sides. Although the cords suggest that these works were meant to be secured to some kind of structure, their actual function remains frustratingly illusive [sic]."
The feathered crown was created sometime in the 14th-15th centuries.
A Fourth Question
When I launched this blog and newsletter four months ago, I created a recurring feature: a series of mini-email interviews with writers and editors I greatly admire. I posed three questions: 1. What's the most important lesson you've learned? 2. What's been the biggest surprise of your writing (or editing) life? 3. If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer (or editor), what would it be? Last week, I realized that I'd missed an opportunity to gather an additional dose of inspiration. So I've added a fourth question: What's the best piece of writing/editing advice anyone ever gave you?
Lane DeGregory, the subject of this week's interview, kicks off the change. Her answer, about the need to put away your notes before you write so that you can write from your head and heart, convinced me an additional question will pay off. I hope you agree.
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May the writing go well.
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