Terror Week Day Five: Fail Because You Have the Courage to be Creative

Insane people tell me bungee jumping is fun. I do not know which planet those people come from, but they appear to exist. It gives you the sensation of falling without the bone-crushing crash. Fear can be fun, but only if you know the rope will prevent you from turning into Casper the Friendly Ghost afterwards.

Writing comes with no such rope. You might fail. In fact, if you’re like me, you’ll fail 90% of the time. Only one in 10 of my poems ever makes it to publication. I have to trash most of them. I’ve maintained the same success rate for almost 30 years.

So you don’t want to write because you might fail?

Well… that’s not going to work out well for you. Writers must fail. We must embrace failure because it’s a certainty. Choosing not to write in case you’ll produce abject crap is like not driving to a party in case you land up in an accident.

You can’t predict accidents, and you can’t predict abject failure.

What will happen if you produce a terrible poem? I can answer this question as someone who has produced terrible poems in the past. Nothing will happen. The sky will continue to be blue. Nutella will continue to be fabulous. Dogs will keep letting you give scritches, so write terribly, but do it with ambition.

There are two kinds of failure in writing:

• Failing because you were too scared to be creative.

• Failing because you had the courage to be creative.

Always, always choose the latter. Reach for greatness. Dare to imagine you’ll be a genius one day. Reach for that Booker Prize. Try difficult things. Don’t try to be perfect. Perfectionists don’t take enough risks.

One of my favourite coping tools is called “playing the movie through to the end.” When you’re facing something terrifying, define the worst that can happen. Let’s say you’re terrified of the fact that you can’t pay the rent this month. Playing the movie through to the end entails defining the worst that could happen: You’ll be evicted, and then you’ll have to live with your mum, and she’ll force you to eat vegetables, and then you’ll have to find another apartment.

When you play the movie through to the end, you learn that a lot of bad things might happen, but when you define them all, they’re a lot less scary than uncertainty. The thing you’re fearing won’t usually kill you. You will move onto new challenges, and then you will face them.

If you think you might write a terrible piece, play the movie through to the end. What’s the worst that could happen? I promise it won’t include dying, so jump.