This is what it’s like to be an artist.
You fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and fail,
and then you get it right.
You have to have a high tolerance for failure, or rather, for continuing after failure.
This is some kind of psychotic, masochistic trait that artists have.
Writers of history have often said things like, “Don’t be a writer. If you can possibly do anything else, do it! Only if you are compelled to this sick, tragic vocation by some inexorable drive should you consider it.”
So many people think, “Oh! I want to try some art!”
I always encourage them 110% to go for it!
And they do something and it’s not a perfect masterpiece, and they think “Ew, that’s bad. I’m not an artist. I could never be an artist.”
And I say,
Well, yeah! With that kind of attitude, you will never be an artist! Did you not count the cost??
Get used to failure!
I think one way to describe the process of growing as an artist is to say, “It is the increasing of one’s threshold of tolerance for failure.”
For a writer, you have to live with this paradigm: “Write a hundred words, and maybe you’ll keep twenty.”
Kill your darlings? Nay! Slaughter them in a holocaust, a bloodbath! Your precious darlings! Slog through swamps of blood, mortify yourself! That is the price of art. And if you don’t pay it, your art will suffer. There is no other way.
I have thrown away around 200 pages of finished text on my current novel, trying to find the right voice, the right vibe, a plot or storyline that is interesting or, dare I even hope, compelling.
