A few months ago a friend told me about the notion of making failure a goal – to set out to fail at something so that when you do, there is a sense of accomplishment instead of guilt or shame. Go fail at something today. Don't think about it too hard.
My goal-oriented self liked the notion, but didn't see a way to take it from theory to action until this week. I’d thought about it too much.
I'm my writing *last week a door opened and a man looked up and said…what? I didn't know exactly. So this week I decided to fail.
I made a list called “dumb things he says” and I was off. There was no pressure to find the precise right thing this character would say that would perfectly tell a reader who he was and where he might go and what his presence might mean. I realized I'm constantly trying to do that and it's exhausting. Instead, I wrote so many dumb things and it was amazing. Dumb was easy. Dumb was freeing. Dumb was fun.
Then I noticed it was also useful.
As the list got longer I saw I could group the dumb stuff into categories. Nice dumb stuff, cruel dumb stuff, immature dumb stuff, intimate dumb stuff, cliche dumb stuff. Some of it was interesting, some of it didn't work. I found myself less clenched about individual words and more interested in making decisions about this character’s tone. Those decisions led to others that led to stray bits of story I've been trying to place maybe settling in somewhere.
My exercise in failure was helping me succeed. It felt like such a great hack that I'm wondering where else it could fit in my life. Which is probably over thinking it again.
Week 103: Dumb luck
Some everyday: No
(I'm in Nashville! *Writing this on my phone and substack is dumb in the bad way and makes it hard to add links in the body on mobile so I'm sorry to make you click around for last week’s post if you're interested.)
Words: 487
See you next week