Okay, gather ’round, my dudes. It’s time we had a Serious Chat about your game plan. We need to talk about your approach to:

FAILURE.

Looks like a big sodding scary word, doesn’t it? End of your world? Game over, man!

That’s a lie.

Failure is the normal mode. It’s a standard part of the learning curve.

You know this. If you win the game the very first time you try, you lose interest fast, because it’s too easy, it doesn’t feel worth it; you didn’t have to work for it. What’s working for it? Failing and trying again until you succeed.

We’ve all read that fanfic, where the character is perfect and everyone loves them, and they don’t have any setbacks – you know, try-FAIL cycles – and we hated it.

We’ve all watched that movie and read that story, where the character tried, failed, tried harder, and things got worse. tried again, and everything went seriously sideways, and they’re scrambling, and taking everything they learned and throwing themselves at the near-impossible odds, and…

We have a Stand Up and Cheer moment when they win. Because they earned that win.

Apply that not just to your fiction, but to your LIFE.

Everybody’s gonna fail. You know how many times you faceplanted on the floor before you learned to walk? Nope, and neither does anyone else, because nobody ever said “Oh, the baby failed on their fifth try, they’re never going to learn to walk.” They expected you to fail and fall down on your diapered rump over and over, until the day you finally made that first shaky, wobbly step (which usually ended in splatting into the floor again if you weren’t caught.)

The only difference between then and now is that now you fear failure. You expect that if you’re not successful every single time, that you’re going to be shamed, and made fun of, and rejected, and locked out of ever trying again. You get to thinking that if you fail once, you’ll never win. You fear that failure will permanently doom you to be branded a loser, and can only watch as your projects go down in splinters and flames always and forevermore.

You know why that fear exists? It’s your brain trying to protect you. Because by this point, you’ve learned that failing can hurt. Falling down gets you rug burn. Having the business going bankrupt gets lot more pain, for longer than it takes for rugburn to heal. If you don’t try, you can’t lose, you can’t get hurt, you won’t get rejected. If you force yourself into trying, letting everyone know that you’re going to fail ahead of time means that they can’t be surprised or upset at you, because you warned them! If you wallow in it, then you don’t have to worry about it, and you’ll never be ambushed by having to cope with success, or happiness, or getting out of your familiar rut!

Of course, if you never give it an honest try without self-sabotaging, well, you’re going to end up killing your dreams, your soul, and your mental health… and your physical health will follow. So that’s not a healthy road to go down, and even though it protects you in the short term, in the long term, it’s a miserable existence that ends ugly.

So it is, indeed, far better to fail your way into learning to fly. And if you you never achieve your goals, you’ll still be better off, because you’ll take all those lessons learned and apply them to something else that you can achieve.

So, you WILL fail.

But it’s not just enough to fail. You have to learn to fail BETTER.

What does failing better mean? It means learning to stop focusing on the negative and stop beating yourself up. It means disengage your emotions from failure, and do an after-action report on what went right as well as what went wrong, what factors you correctly anticipated, what factors you anticipated that didn’t happen, what factors you did not anticipate, and what you’re going to change on your next attempt.

Because the only difference between a kid picking up a music instrument and failing horribly at the assigned exercise and directed practice is how they failed better each time.

If you hand a kid a little plastic recorder and tell them to play the theme from some movie soundtrack they know, they will suck and fail the first time. If you don’t show them how to get better, they’ll just make a lot of discordant noise and give up.

If you walk ’em through “Good! Now do this instead.” “Good, you got that down, now try this!”, they will slowly go from horrid discordant shrieking wind instrument noises to something fairly pleasant.

The difference between being kids with a music teacher and being an adult is that, unless we find and pay for a mentor (if one is even available), we’ve got to be our own cheerleader and teacher.

So, how do you do this?

1.) Acknowledge your failure.
2.) Own it.
3.) Fix it.
4.) Implement the fix on all future runs.

This is brought to you by aviation, which regularly kills the lucky and the skilled, much less the unlucky and the unskilled. As I tell student pilots:

Yes, we all hate messing up. If this industry had an accident rate of 1%, we’d have over a thousand deaths a day, and so we all drive ourselves to be perfect every time.

But you know what? You stay in this business long enough, you WILL bust a checkride.

NOBODY CARES.

It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even the end of *your* world. What everybody wants to know is:

What are you going to do about it?

Are you going to own it, fix it, and make sure it’s staying fixed and you’re a better pilot?

Or are you going to deny it, or fail to fix it, or keep doing it?

One of these is on the path to becoming a wise senior pilot; the other gets kicked out of the cockpit before they kill somebody… starting with themselves.

…

Now, we are here on this blog because we’re in the business of writing and submitting or  publishing stories. Unlike aviation, if you have a failure, you’ll be embarrassed, upset, maybe out some money, definitely out some time and effort, but you won’t be burning to death or leaving bodies of those who trusted you spread across five acres of farmland.

Relax. It’s a good day. No one’s shooting at you.

If your story doesn’t get accepted, if no one buys your book, if your first and only review is a one-star…

You are still alive, and you can first throw a fit about it, privately, (do NOT do so on social media, or you’ll have just set yourself up to learn a different lesson about what not to do), and then once you’ve gotten the big upset out, disengage your emotions and do an after-action review on

1.) what went right,
2.) what went wrong,
3.) what factors you accounted for,
4.) what you did not,
5.) what you’re going to improve next time.

And then let it go and try again with something new.

No, I don’t mean take your rejected story, slap pirate on it, and try to submit it to a pirate anthology. I don’t mean unpublish your novel, do one more edit pass, and publish again. I mean put it down and write something new.

Start over. Make *new* mistakes. Make *better* mistakes. Learn. Grow.

And finally, you’ll get to your stand up and cheer moment where you succeed.

…
…
but you know what? That’s not the end of the journey.

You’re going to fail after your first success.

This is NORMAL.

It’s normal because two things happen simultaneously:

1. ) You raise your standards.
2.) You’re trying new and different things.

Hey, after years of effort and at least 8 attempts, your story was accepted! W00t!

But oh, no, the second one was rejected! Does this mean you’re a total failure?

Or does it mean you moved the goalposts from “One story in 8 was accepted” to “every story must be accepted!”

Yeah, that. Don’t worry, dude, that was a perfectly normal human mistake to make.

But the rejected story isn’t the same as the accepted story. You were writing something new. You tried new things. The conditions for acceptance changed, too. Theme changed, editor changed, the other stories (both in number and quantity) that it was competing with changed…. If you’re self-pubbing, while you were writing the sequel, everybody else was out there writing and publishing, too. The market changes, the economy changes, the discoverability changes, the readership changes, which tropes age from fun to tired changes…

You’re not turning out the exact same widget every single time, nor are you selling to the exact same market every time… nor are you being read by the exact same audience every time.

It is normal for a sophmore effort to suck, whether it’s a movie sequel or a second book. Why? Usually because the creators mis-diagnose why it was liked, and double down on the wrong thing, while trying something new that doesn’t quite work as well as the first thing did.

But for the love of our little green earth, don’t fixate on your failure. Because failure is normal, and it’s boring. If you fixate on your failure, you’re telling people you haven’t learned and grown… because you prefer a terrible normal to the possibility of growth.

Fly the airplane you got, not five miles back.

Keep going. Do your after-action report, and decide how you’re going to apply that next, whether to another book in the series, or to another short story going out. But move on. You’re getting better, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Fail. Fall. Cuss. Get up. Fly.