Thought for the Weekend - Samuel Beckett

Now I know lots of people have heard this quote before, but just like the reason why clichés become clichés, many people can relate to it.  The quote below is a slightly different one to the normal one, so I guess Mr Beckett was asked about failure more than once!

'Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.'

- Samuel Beckett - 

Novel Madness - Courage of a Lion

I doubt I've invented a new phenomenon, but of late I've started to consider which is worse, 'writers block' or 'action block', the latter being the affliction that I'm currently suffering from, although by logical reasoning, if I am suffering from 'action block' then I am not writing either, which means it's writers block without having to stare at the blank page.


Now being a person who likes to think long and hard about things,(and also someone who fails to come up with answers most of the time), I started to wonder 'why' I'm in a state of 'action block'? Could it be that I have no more interest in writing?  Has it all been a waste of energy?  And if I am not writing, why did I write in the first place?


Sometimes I think it's because thoughts comes inside my head, like this morning for example when I remembered something from way back when I was a kid and we lived in a flat.  Obviously we had no front garden, but we did live on the ground floor and therefore we had a front step.  Now a step may not be a big thing, but not having a garden, and others not having a front step, made it special, special that was to my mother who used to get us to scrub it.  This wasn't a bad thing, cause I loved making all the white suds, creating circles with the wire brush and in the process cleaning the said front step.  Anyhow years later we moved to a house and got a front garden with a hedge.  Now a hedge might not seem like a big thing, but when you're used to just a step, to my father, a hedge must have been special because the ritual of cleaning the step for my mother was replaced by trimming the hedge for my father, hence my thought this morning (after years of it festering somewhere dusty in my head), that when we moved, we swapped my mother's step for my father's hedge and perhaps the reason my mother stopped asking us to clean steps, was because everyone else had them.


Okay, so now you are getting the gist of it.  Sometimes these daft and sometimes not so daft things come into my head and I get the urge to write them down.  Other times I bravely believe that maybe something I write will make a difference or become mindblowingly 'popular', something that a reader will enjoy.  But whatever the reason, none of these explain why I have 'action block'.


Now blocks of the non-building kind are something that sound as if they require clearance, but to do so, we need to know what it is that we need to clear, which made me ask another question.  What am I afraid of?


Once the question was out, albeit inside my head 'out', it required an answer.  The best one I could come up with was that old devil 'the fear of failure', and I must admit as soon as I said this inside my head, it started to grow in a rather too familiar comfy manner.


What if people think my work is rubbish, what if no one ever says 'yes' that is worth sending out to the world to be read by many, what if it does not fit into what's popular, interesting, cutting edge, blah, blah and just for good measure more bloody blah!


At this point, I would love to say 'so what', but then I would be lying, and lying doesn't do one any real good.


So I figured if I can't say 'so what', and I am still worried about failure, maybe I need something else, like maybe a bit of courage.


Courage is not an easy thing to find, and I don't have a yellow brick road or anything like it, but I would imagine it's like most things, being an emotion that is there if you look for it.  So I did.


This afternoon after I finished all the 'jobs that pay the bills things', and a few necessary domestic obligations, I sat down and did work on the novel.  I read the blasted first 3 chapters AGAIN, edited them a little more and sent them off to 3 victims, I mean 3 loyal literary friends for feedback.  Now it might not seem like much, but it was an ACTION, which means in part, I have beaten my 'action block'.

I am really hoping it is not going to pounce on me again soon, but just in case it does, I've created my own version of what courage means, especially in relation to fear of failure in the writing world -

 Just do it, regardless of the bloody consequences, because not doing it, will certainly achieve nothing.