I am teaching a short workshop on the vagaries of the publishing industry and the writing life next weekend. You can book here.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. I’ve been a published writer since 1994, I keep learning, and I keep failing at things.
It seems to me that while success often teaches you very little, failure is always instructive. If you’re prepared to look at it, and reflect on it. No one likes to fail, and so often the writing career narrative is an endless success machine, with some serious blindspots. I'll be drawing on my own experience as a writer and as a bookseller.
I'm a little bit looking forward to it, still, there is something terribly embarrassing about failure, about admitting it, particularly in a professional context, as though you are somehow cursing your future projects. Hopefully the workshop is useful. Reading through my prep, it’s surprisingly upbeat.
I’m used to teaching craft workshops, so this is very much a departure for me, we’ll see if it succeeds or fails next weekend, but it’ll probably be a bit of both, and I'm ok with that.