There’s an excellent essay in Booklife called “Permission to Fail”, and in it, Jeff Vandermeer says,
To be great, we must attempt so much that we not only are in danger of forever failing, but that we do fail, and in the failure create something greater than if we had set our sights lower.
Whenever I’m working on a novel, I get a sinking feeling at some point, sometimes at multiple points. “This is too weird,” I think. “No one will like this character. This setting is too alien to me. This novel is way over my head.” The feeling of biting off way more than I can chew is familiar to me, and I usually end up putting the novel away. It’s a coward’s way out: “I’ll just work on something else for a while.”
Here, Vandermeer is giving me a different perspective on that feeling. Maybe that feeling of being in over my head is a good sign, a sign that my ideas are exactly the right ones to inspire me to write something dearer to my heart, which I believe is the real way to reach for literary greatness: write something that matters to you. He continues with a quote from J.T. Glover on Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell:
‘Both were big, ambitious books, and from a fearful-of-failure standpoint horribly risky. What happens if you spend ten years on a novel, only to find it doesn’t work?’
All I could think of is how much Kostova and Clarke learned while writing those novels — how at times, for whole years, their lives must have revolved around work on their respective novels, and much of everything they did had some relationship to those novels. The risk factor is incredible, and yet even if those two books had never been published, I find it unlikely that either novelist would have said they’d failed. the failure would have come from never attempting what had appeared in their imaginations. The failure would have come from thinking what if I had tried?
Surely if I write something that’s frightening in its peculiarity, but that speaks to me on a deep level, it will speak to someone else, too. Even if it doesn’t, does it matter? By writing from my heart, I will have written the thing I needed to write, the thing that made me get up in the morning and throw myself into the work with abandon, and isn’t that better than writing a sure bestseller? How could I regret something like that?
The downside to this is that there’s every possibility that when you devote that much of yourself to a project, give everything you’ve got to it, there’s no way of knowing you’ll write more than one. When Vandermeer says, “You might be of a more cautious temperament than other writers so it might take you longer,” I feel a twinge of apprehension. On the other hand, is there a cost to planning a ten book series, in that you may rob Book One to pay Book Two, and so on down the line, never really reaching your full potential in any of them? Is perfection really the enemy of the good, or do you have to shoot for perfection to ever hit greatness?
I don’t know. While this advice gives me inspiration for those beloved projects that once seemed too big for me, the part of me that dreams of being a prolific working writer is skeptical. I don’t know what the results will be if I aim for a middle ground; my personal conviction is that everything in life has a cost, and the greatest rewards have the greatest cost.
I’m also reminded of a favorite quote of mine, by Annie Dillard:
One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.
This is definitely an important thing to remember, for anyone, really. Don’t get worried that X is a waste of time and wonder if it will ever yield fruit. Just keep going.