Fear, failure and f*cking wastes of time

Yesterday I picked up Janet Burroway's book, "Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft," which I understand is something of a staple in creative writing courses. I used to have another copy of it somewhere, or maybe I loaned it out and forgot about it, I don't know. I think I'm on my third copy. But it was worth buying again.

It's a dense book -- not physically, but thick with information and examples. You can tell a huge amount of effort and thought went into it. It's not easy reading. Anyway, I cracked it open again and ran into this bit from an extended quote about fear, from author Dorothy Allison:

"...The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in sweat of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough..."

This made me think of something Scott Kempner of The Dictators said in "Please Kill Me, The Uncensored Oral History of Punk." Kempner was talking about The Stooges and being "psychically wounded" watching Iggy Pop perform:

"...Iggy put life and limb into every show. I saw him bloody every single show. Every single show involved actual fucking blood.

"From then on, rock & roll could never be anything less to me. Whatever I did -- whether I was writing, or playing -- there was blood on the pages, there was blood on the strings, because anything less than that was just bullshit, and a waste of fucking time."

As I was thinking about these things, I was reminded how -- a bit of knowledge I picked up from my straight gig -- most small businesses fail. I don't know what the exact stats are, but the vast majority do no better than break even. Yet among the over 100s of CEOs and small business owners I've talked to over the years, most seem to have a practical outlook toward failure that I think writers could learn from.

I suppose it depends what your idea of failure is, of course. But I'd much rather fail than create something that was "just bullshit." Because my worst fear is doing exactly that.