It's Failure Week!

One of poker players’ most damning conditions is known as “full tilt.” Either you’ve hit a massive winning streak and want to hold onto it so desperately that you make stupid decisions, or you’ve hit a massive losing streak that has the same effect. Your brain is spinning and anxiety has taken hold. Nothing can stop the feeling, but tilt demands you keep playing, so you do. This only makes your situation even worse. Cause becomes effect, and effect becomes cause. On and on it goes.

Writers experience full tilt as well, and for precisely the same reasons: Either you’ve hit a huge winning streak and everything you write is gold or you hit a losing streak and everything you write is terrible. Either way, you’ve grown desperate. Your anxiety has clogged your brain and your heart is beating like a kettle drum. Your writing voice vanishes, and suddenly you’ve been rendered incompetent as a writer.

In poker, the strategy for getting out of full tilt is to stand up and leave the table. Breathe. Stay away for at least a day. Find yourself again. Better yet, don’t allow yourself to go into full tilt in the first place. It’s easier to manage if you spot it early, so pay attention. If you can’t get out, at least use the situation as a learning opportunity. Pay close attention to your mistakes, and learn from them all.

There is no better solution for full tilt in writing. Put down your pen. Get away from the page for a day or two. Wait for your anxiety or over-confidence to leave you. Sometimes it goes faster than you expect. It depends on how effectively you can exist in the present. Yes, I’m suggesting mindfulness for the 500th time this year, and I intend to do it another 500 times next year.

Be aware of your surroundings. Immerse yourself in the present. Put your priorities in the right place. (Hint: Your peace of mind should be at the top of the list.)

The trouble with tilt is that it’s self-perpetuating. Your anxiety makes you play (or write) badly. The terrible work you produce tilts you out even more, so your anxiety grows. To quash it, you desperately type out another piece, but you’re in tilt, so of course it isn’t a work of genius. You can cycle through this a million times if you like.

Or you can leave the table entirely. I suggest the latter because tilt never achieved any damned thing. Just breathe.

This week we’re going to delve into the things that cause failure in a writer. That’s you. It’s nearly New Year’s Eve, so we might as well create some writing resolutions.

Let’s start with an easy exercise: Write five haikus. The catch? They must create one poem, so all five must be linked thematically.