I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.
The reality of the writer's world is that you set yourself up for disappointment with every success that you deliver because with every success you raise your readers' expectations.
I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.
In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.
I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer.
I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.
I assume as a writer that most of the time I'm going to fall down and fail.
For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.
I love failure. It's stuff that I'm thinking about all the time in my life, so it would make sense to me anyway to write about it.