Whenever I start a new writing project, I do it with the burning desire to “write something great.” Never mind what any of those words mean, or in what order – the feeling is all that really matters. Of course, that’s poetic nonsense. The logistics of editing and revising will eventually crush those colorful daydreams under reams of drafting paper. But it’s nice to indulge them, as fleeting as they might be, for as long as that writing “honeymoon” might last.
Sometimes you can ride that wave for a while.
Other times, the storyline collapses under your feet. The walls and structure of the plot cave in, leaving your protagonist in the midst of an existential crisis: laundering money for no apparent reason, hatching conspiracies that unravel long before they reach a target. You need direction in your writing, or at least the notion of a destination. Without it, the pen will stagger over the specific cobblestones of your story like the archetypal village drunkard trying to find his way home.
Like most things in life, writing boils down to control. Just how much control should a writer have over his subject? Hemingway will move mountains in a single sentence; Tolkien will do it in a chapter or two. Of course, moving mountains is like sitting through an hour of TLC: It’s impressive, however you manage to do it. The question is not concerned with style, but with what mindset best enables an author to develop that style and grow.
The answer to that question is far less transparent. It’s confused by the fact that mindset is not something we choose for ourselves, like a pair of shoes in a store window. It’s the sum of various life experiences, a conglomerate of competing attitudes and beliefs, and once these things have entered our heads they smooth and solidify like freshly poured concrete. It follows that attempting to change your mindset is more an act of construction than leisurely window-shopping. If mindset were something we could simply “pick out,” we could remedy life’s challenges like we do the common cold.
That’s not to suggest we’re hopeless to reconfigure our mental outlook. Carol Dweck is a preeminent figure in the field of education research, and is well known in academic circles for pioneering the concept of “growth mindset.” If you’ve ever participated in team sports, you’re probably familiar with this concept already. It’s the idea that an individual’s level of skill – from football, to writing, to tying one’s shoes – is flexible, and capable of being improved.
The caveat, of course, is that in order to make those improvements, we must first attempt whatever it is we’d like to be better at. An athlete must sweat through months of grueling practice; a writer must churn out pages of descriptive garbage (It’s true what they say – the road to a successful novel is paved with dead ones). Improvement isn’t something we can wish into existence. It’s a matter of construction, jackhammers and heavy lifting, breaking through that base of assumptions and prejudice that rests in our minds like an unused parking lot.
Above all else, it’s the willingness to fail. Centuries of conflict and struggle for survival haunt the human psyche to this day; we avoid taking risks we consider unnecessary. But failure is not a risk, and it’s certainly not unnecessary – it’s an integral part of personal growth. Without failure, we have no way to contextualize the effectiveness of our current approach. Moreover, we have no way of knowing when we’ve actually succeeded.
For the try-hards of the world, there is a stubborn sort of solidarity in the expression “Failure is not an option.” But I would contest that in whatever task or challenge we face – from writing a novel to literally jumping over hurdles – the phrase could use an addition:
Failure is not an option. It’s a requirement.
Metawhimsical 