“A trial attorney is not a good trial attorney until they have lost a case”.
A lawyer’s adage
Your cannot be at your best until you have faced and absorbed defeat. Your best draft of a first novel is rejected by your peers. After devoting substantial time to your characters, a reviewer states that they are one dimensional. A promised contract does not appear. A publicist stops responding to you email. Your interview by the media may become a public relations disaster. A public reading to other novelists fails. These types of setbacks lead to loss of public stature, loss of respect for your writing, loss of prestige, and, if you get paid to write, then, maybe the loss of your job.
There is perhaps no better time for you to understand who you are than in the face of failure. All eyes are on you to determine how you conduct yourself in this moment of crisis. Will you engage in either character destruction or character construction? Your choice is based on your source of self-worth.
The performance-significance point of view (i.e., the perspective that permits your sense of self-value to float up or down based on your performance) fails miserably here. By linking your own sense of value to the success or failure of your operation, a spectacular failure dictates that you’re of less worth. Demanding superior judgment from yourself in this time of crisis can be a near impossible expectation when you have permitted your sense of self-worth to be diminished. Reduced self-worth produces in you an awkward and unbalanced approach to a threatening environment of failure. This deep loss that you feel can be quickly transmitted to others.
By patiently building up a sense of self-worth that is independent of your activities and performance, you rely on that undiminished sense of value to power your actions during this time of crisis. You’re able to retain your judgment, your standard, your intellectual prowess and your ability to appraise a situation during these threatening days. You remember that defeat is a necessary step on the way to your long term goal, because it’s only in the presence of failure that you open up and learn important life teachings that are unlearnable in any other circumstance. You are permeable to life’s lessons.
With no fear of loss of self-value, you’re not threatened in an important way, and face no lasting damage from the defeat. This fundamental understanding of the limited impact that defeat has on you personally permits you to be confident and reassured. Your confidence is easily sensed by outsiders as well. With this spirit of assuredness, you’re free to apply the best of your talents to learning the major lessons from your failure.
Becoming a good novelist involves the ability to accept and absorb the right lessons from defeat. Specifically, these right lessons are only those lessons that lead to the growth of your author abilities. Discard everything else. As the author, you should first take responsibility for the defeat. It’s not the editor who gave you the bad advice, or that new writing-style book that led you astray, or the artificial intelligence software that ruined your book’s trajectory. It was you. Your intact self-value absorbs that and carries on, permitting you the solid foundation to focus on learning the right lesson that led to the defeat. Don’t fix the blame ─ fix the problem.
As an author, times of defeat can be among your best because you don’t destroy yourself, but grow in character and therefore as a writer. You can absorb the blame with no lasting damage, and then learn the right lessons that make you a better writer.
Defeat hurts. However, there is a difference between the initial painful reaction to a loss, and the creation of long-term personal damage. And while it’s true that defeat can and will break your heart, also know that it’s only the broken heart that can heal and strengthen.