The Writing Life
A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottle and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back. – Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art”
To be a better writer, you have to have a sense of humor about what you do. You have to be able to poke fun at yourself. You have to be able to laugh even when your work is critiqued and you feel yourself to be a failure.
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We hollow out without utility. – Kyle McCord, “I’m Concerned You Will be Reincarnated as Office Supplies”
For sure, you have to be lost to find a place that can’t be found, else ways everyone would know where it was. – Captain Barbossa, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
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While I like the sentiment of “failure is not an option,” I can’t agree with the statement in its entirety. Failure happens, sometimes because of something I’ve done or failed to do and sometimes because of circumstances entirely out of my control. When it does, how will I stand up under it if I live life by the credo “failure is not an option”?
Writers put a lot of stock in finding the right word. Justifiably so; the right word is the right word. No other word but that one will do. Sometimes, though, the right word simply doesn’t exist.