The Emily Project

It might be easier

To fail with land in sight,

Than gain my blue peninsula

To perish of delight. ~Emily Dickinson

Brenna here–this one’s going to be more of a personal reaction, because I have failure and blue peninsulas on the brain.

As a writer who’s been querying various novels for a decade now, I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to success. I’ve gone from rejections that critique my plotting to rejections that essentially say, “It’s not you, it’s me”–my craft is solid, but a particular agent just isn’t in love with my book enough to take it on, or that agent already has something similar, or the YA market is flooded. I feel like I’m getting closer–but you can infinitely halve the distance between two points and never truly have them meet. So I don’t know if I’m close enough.

Failure terrifies me. I am afraid of pouring myself into stories that no one will ever read, afraid that the time I’m writing (and thus not doing anything else) will not pay off in the writing career I dream of. I hit a low point this past November after a three-rejection week–a novel rejection, a short story rejection, and a grant rejection. The dark night of the soul got so dark that it ceased to be a night and was more like a fortnight. It took me a while to dig my way out of the pit.

It was such a rotten time, in fact, that it prompted me to allow myself one day of despair per month. That way I can keep the angst contained. So far, so good. When I get a rejection, I tell myself that I can get bent out of shape about it and rail against fate as soon as despair-day comes, and not a moment sooner. I have tricked myself pretty effectively, I think.

But every once in a great while, I imagine the seemingly impossible happening. What if I don’t fail? What if I (gasp) succeed?

This possibility can be just as terrifying. After all, success is counted sweetest, as the poet says, by those who never attain it. To succeed means to have made it, to have attained the rarefied stratosphere of the great and successful and brilliant and amazing–but the thing we get may not be quite as sweet as we imagined it to be, and at least half the fun of anything is in the anticipation.

But Dickinson here isn’t talking about sweetness–she’s talking about  ease. It’s easier to fail.

Well, she and I might have to have it out about that one at a later date–but I see what she’s getting at. Giving up is the only way to truly fail–as long as you haven’t given up, you’re trying, not failing. And giving up is wildly easier than persevering.

With this poem, though, I get a bit hung up on the qualifier–failing “with land in sight.” That doesn’t seem easy. That seems horrible. You’re within sight of the promised land and you give up then? Who does that?? Someone who’s afraid of succeeding. And a lot of us, I think, are conditioned to think that we don’t deserve success. As a woman, wife, and mother, I feel a bit like a carnivorous unicorn when I start talking about ambition–are moms supposed to even have ambitions? Maybe to take over the PTA, but certainly not pretensions to literary greatness or anything highfalutin’ like that. Fortunately, one of the gorgeous things about hitting your 40s is that you suddenly cease to care whether people are looking at you as if you are a meat-eating unicorn, and you just bare your teeth and flash your horn and smile. Still, being over 40 does not make failing easier. If anything, it makes it harder. Some days it feels like time is loudly ticking.

I keep reminding myself that every time I hear of a writer “making it,” becoming “an overnight success,” that writer has worked for years to become an overnight success.

Nights can be very, very long.

~Brenna