On Writing and Failure

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

"Fountain pen" by matsuyuki is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Failure is the body of a writer’s life. Success is only ever an attire. A paradox defines this business: The public only sees writers in their victories, but their real lives are mostly in defeat. I suppose that’s why, in the rare moments of triumph, writers always look so out of place–posing on the Books page in their half-considered outfits with their last-minute hair, desperately upping their most positive reviews on Instagram, or, at the strange ceremonies of winning prizes, like the Oscars for lumpy people, grinning like recently released prisoners readjusting themselves to society.

Failure is big right now–a subject of commencement speeches and business conferences like FailCon, at which triumphant entrepreneurs detail all their ideas that went bust. But businessmen are only amateurs at failure, just getting used to the notion. Writers are the real professionals. Three hundred thousand books are published every year in the United States alone. A few hundred, at most, could be called financial or creative successes. The majority of books by successful writers are failures. And then there are the would-be writers, those who have failed to be writers in the first place, a category which, if you believe what people tell you at parties, constitutes the bulk of the species.

… I would like somebody to be halfway honest about what it takes to live as a writer, in air clear from the fumes of pompous incense. The first job of a writer is to write. The second job is to persevere. If you want to write, or if you want to know what it’s like to write, you’re going to have to walk away from the paths of glory into the dark wilderness. Because that’s where it is.

— Stephen Marche, On Writing and Failure, Field Notes (Biblioasis, 2023)

Read on website

failure on olafalders.com

On Writing and Failure