(And other Shakespearean cliches…)

I hope you’ve enjoyed the slew of (hopefully not too pretentious) writing posts I’ve made so far. I’ve been thinking about writing for a long time, so I have a lot of thoughts about it… and it’s easier to think about it than to do it. So I’ve been posting about writing like I’m totally confident and professional and days away from publishing when actually I haven’t written a thing. And I’m going to start posting more personal entries about my writing, alongside more (no doubt annoying) writing posts.

I wrote a while ago about the “Mirage of Perfection,” and about how we have to fail to succeed. But when you are in the trenches, it really doesn’t feel like that. It feels like you are always failing, and so you just have to wait and think a little longer in order to succeed. But, as I said in that post, the only way to succeed is to just start failing.

To that end, my amazing friend (who has an awesome webcomic, http://cityunderthehill.com/) suggested that we try a “Fail of the Week” project to get ourselves (mostly me–okay, just me, but she kindly has agreed to join in) motivated to at least try something. So, every Wednesday, I’ll post here and on Tumblr a summary of this week’s attempts and failures on the road to actually writing something. I think the idea of calling it “Fail of the Week” is brilliant (and entirely her idea, of course), because it emphasizes that this exercise is about failing and failing and failing again–failing your way to success. And it will force me, internet accountability and all, to at least write something every week.

You see, the question above is a trick question. The only way to fail is not to try at all. Everything else, all the disasters along the way, they are not failures–they are simply the pains of pre-success.

If anyone’s interested, I’ll be cross-posting and adding more on Tumblr here: http://jsevick.tumblr.com/