“I’m a novelist. Every day I fail. My drafts — when I complete them, which is not often —are inevitably shadows of what I had hoped they would be.” — Anthony Doerr
Sound familiar? Writers often experience failure. . . whether it’s receiving rejection notices or failing to complete writing projects. But . . . to not try, really, is to fail. So, if you have unfinished short stories, plays, poems, manuscripts. . . dig them out, blow off the dust and see if you can get back into this project. If not. . . move on to a new piece of writing.
Anthony Doerr was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And yet, he has doubts about his writing, just like the rest of us. “I can’t ever fully execute the glorious and inarticulable dreams in my head. Even on my best days, I just manage to cobble together the failures of many other days and assemble an imitation of the original vision. Only months later, once something is published, does it become plain to me how many failures I needed to accumulate to arrive at something that feels remotely complete.”
Marlene’s Musings: I know it’s hard to sit in chair sometimes and keep writing. But if you are a writer, or a want-to-be writer, that’s what you have to do. Get organized, get your water, settle yourself and . . . Just Write.
Quotes excerpted from “Costume Drama,” Real Simple Magazine, October 2014.
Anthony Doerr, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, believes “We need to live with the fear that we will stink, that no one will pay any attention, that we will fall like trees in an empty forest: the fear that we are going to take our glorious, flawless, nebulous ideas and butcher them on the altar of reality.”