Work: Surviving the Arts / Failure Porn

~by Scott Pinkmountain

 

I was getting notes together for an article on coping with, let’s not say, “failure,” but yet-unattained success as an artist: how to cope with rejection, how to avoid feeling alienated when there’s no audience for your work, how to get motivated to make new work when there’s an already moldering pile of your unpublished work looming so large it threatens to smother you and everyone in your intimate circle.

And then a writer friend called my attention to this article on The Hairpin by Christina Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick offers some great tips on how to persevere with humor and grace in the face of long-term failure. In its own way, her article did all I’d hoped to and more.

Then a musician friend of mine posted this spot-on article from The Onion about squeezing in the work that’s most important to us in our barely existent spare time, pretty much nailing whatever else I might’ve hoped to cover.

Then I came across the New Yorker article entitled, “Cry Me A River: The Rise of the Failure Memoir,” by Giles Harvey (March 25, 2013 issue), which observes a trend of successful books by “failed” writers about their experience of having been failed writers. These books, it seems, differ from the nobody-to-somebody fairy tales like Paul Auster’s “Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure,” in that the stories don’t resolve in eventual acceptance, praise and success like Auster’s. Except of course, that once the memoir sells 10,000 copies, they do.

And then, I met this guy at a party. His name was Seymour. He heard I’m a writer and he immediately launched into giving me advice on how to land an agent (QueryTracker and many queries). I, being among the “not-yet-achieved-success” hordes try to listen quietly when people offer me suggestions that might help me change my status, so I leaned in close with the hopes of gaining that key nugget of truth I’d missed in the 40-plus other conversations I’ve had about agent-seeking. And as Seymour implored me to follow his wisdom, it was revealed that not only did he not have an agent himself, but he’d queried fewer agents than I have.

At which point I thought, “maybe it’s best to write my column about something else.”

This avalanche of failure porn alongside Seymour’s useless one-failure-to-the-other advice was enough to turn me off the whole genre for a while. There’s apparently plenty being written and said about how not to be a writer that I don’t need to add to the noise. Maybe this seems sad, but let’s spin it around. It’s an opportunity to think about what matters, always an excellent subject.

The discussion of surviving failure, begs the obvious question – failing at what? It forces me to examine what exactly I’m trying to succeed at with my creative work, what I’m trying to achieve or attain. Finding coping mechanisms for easing the pain of failure, or seeking to convert that failure into memoir sales, or somehow overcome it (win!!), all seem less like solutions than band-aids for the symptoms of the much greater problem of evaluating my creative success by the wrong standards.

Things generally work best, as in, I feel the least bad, when my first and foremost evaluation of success is – do I get to make things? Do I have any spare time, energy, ideas, inspiration, motivation, optimism, life force, vim, desire, drive, to do something beyond the minimum baseline of what’s expected and needed of me in order to exist. If the answer is yes, I’ve cleared all the biggest hurdles, and seriously, I’m way ahead of the curve. There’s a lot to revel in with that.

But I don’t believe it ends there. I’m not one to say that a maker should be entirely self-sufficient, and that anyone who seeks external validation is misguided, needy and insecure, and that only the weaklings care what other people think, etc… I actually think that critique is repugnant and sort of evil, in a particularly Ayn Randian, bootstrapper, myth of the rugged individualist, American way. As in my last post, I’ll poach a pseudo-biological argument that we, as a species, are not built to function in isolation. So yes, it makes sense for a measure of personal success to include communication – to alleviate the alienating nature of human existence, let’s say. But the desire to reach beyond more than a few people I respect and care about (“success” in some broader sense, as defined by the examples above) becomes a pure numbers game. How many people do I need to reach in order to be “successful?”

If my measure of success is earning a living making things, then I need X people at N dollars each. Or if my measure of success is having a book published by a press of certain prestige, then I need persons Y (agent) and Z (publisher) to like my work. Though “like” is not as accurate as it might have been 50 years ago. Better to say I need Y and Z to believe they can sell my book to X people at N dollars each. If my measure of success is simply about having some number of interested readers beyond what I’ve already got, then I have to ask myself why? How many readers are enough? If I reach that number, will I feel compelled to reach more, or I will then just be sated, and if so, then what? Why do I even feel a need to talk at a bunch of strangers? Or have them believe me to be searingly poignant or wry and whipsmart or unique with insight or good in bed..? Maybe I want to change the world for the better!

A close friend of mine, musician and writer David Henson – a reader, listener and supporter of my work, (and I of his) – recently said to me, “You already have the best fans you’ll ever have.” And he’s right. I mean, yes, maybe over my lifetime I’ll gain a handful more close friends and loved ones, creative people whom I have great respect and admiration for who feel similarly toward me, so they might join the ranks of my other best fans, but after thinking about things in that context, the money or critical praise, or attention of strangers seems so much less important. It is crucial, though, to have at least a handful, maybe even just one, serious supporter of my work. Someone who is actually waiting for me to churn out that next poem or album or multi-volume abstract screed. If I have that plus the spare life force thing, I am solid gold live.

And in case I lose sight of this, there’s always the fact Albert Ayler (among many others) pointed out; Music is the Healing Force of the Universe. Though I’d add that it’s not just music, but all human creativity. You probably don’t need proof to back this up (most creative makers I know feel that creative work – either someone else’s or the practice of making it themselves – has healed them, or often, saved their lives) but a recent New York Times article noted a scientific study that found singing to premature babies is beneficial to their health. Is this not changing the world for the better?

Compared to healing a premature baby, landing a book deal or getting signed by a label start to look a bit scrawny and cheap.

 

Scott Pinkmountain is a writer and musician living in Pioneertown, CA. His writing has appeared on This American Life, in The Rumpus, A Public Space, HTMLGIANT, and others. He has also released dozens of albums of both instrumental music and songs. He works as a music analyst for Pandora Radio.