Escape to Paradise--Find Trouble!
Last time we took a long trip in our camper van, I kept notes on each day’s failures. Reliably, a small or large problem would upset our plans, along with any sense of control over the travel. Our van’s water hookup leaked suddenly. Electricity was wonky. My dog ate nettles at a rest area and drooled for hours. I slammed my thumb in the heavy lid of our cargo box. A shortcut, wasn’t.
We replaced the hose, got a better surge protector for the electrical hookup, learned to recognize nettles hidden in the grass, got very cautious about the lid of the cargo box, and thought more carefully about shortcuts. Each failure, because of its consequences, taught us something important for next time. I began to think of failure as a welcome part of the routine of traveling—like a frustrating detour that turned out to offer a gift.
In my writing life, I’ve had many creative failures. Moments I almost gave up, because it was all too hard. The times I thought I was finally going to paradise, that place where dreams come true, and I wound up disappointed or worse.
We all encounter these moments. They can be terrifically hard to live through. It’s what happened afterwards that makes all the difference. What do we learn that can propel us the next step?
Photo by Nihal Demirci Erenay on Unsplash
At age nineteen, I was not a writer at all. In fact, I had chosen the scary and exciting career of foreign language translator. Not a dream I started life with—but my best friend in middle school was a girl named Masha.
Masha had long blond hair and spoke three languages. She was a fairytale princess, to me. Her family escaped the former Soviet Union during one of the more traumatic periods of government, and when we hung out after class, she enthralled me with wild stories of her family’s exotic life there and here.
I blame Masha for my decision, at that young age, to study Russian. My school offered it as an elective. I wanted to be able to converse with her family whenever I was invited over for dinner.
I changed schools a few years later, said goodbye to my friend, but kept going with Russian, which was also offered, strangely enough, by the high school I attended next. I didn’t bother to analyze my weird (and growing) fascination with the language and people, their culture, their literature and arts. I also was a stubborn person, determined not to waste all the years I’d given this language study so far. It didn’t come easy at all. I struggled more than most language students. But I persisted.
I even majored in Russian in college, went on to grad school to study more.
Looking back now, I was setting myself up for failure in many ways. I chose a path because of a friend I admired. I spent eleven years with this language before I finally gave it up.
Why do we choose creative avenues that we suspect will become one of those shortcuts that isn’t? Maybe simple fascination, interest from another time, a pivotal person in our lives who says, Try this! I went forward with zero awareness of the job market, the future possibilities of this career path. (Speaking and reading the Russian language wasn’t high on the list of skills for grads.) But I felt something. I loved the way speaking Russian, fairly fluently by now, made me feel. I dreamed lives in Russia, on the Siberian plains, holed up in a tiny house with snow piled to the windows, playing chess.
My last year of college, nearing my degree in Russian Language and Literature, I read Tolstoy and Turgenev in the original, and I made a new best friend, a young and fierce Ukrainian woman named Olga. Olga was dedicated to increasing my skills in Russian—again, an odd thing, given where we are today. She wanted me to pursue a career as a translator or interpreter.
Eventually, I learned that the New York City ballet was touring Leningrad. They needed interpreters. The application requirements frightened me: a random phone interview with a native speaker, an interview with the CIA, and many tests of fluency and awareness of cultural affairs. But what else was I going to do with my multiple degrees and hard-achieved fluency?
The CIA interview was not the scariest event on that application roster for me. They asked very interesting questions—but it didn’t faze me as much as the phone interview.
I was told the native speaker could call anytime, and I should be ready. No prep for the kinds of questions they’d ask to get me talking and see how I responded. I remember I shared an apartment in Boston in those days with three other college-age friends. No cell phones back then, so all calls came through the shared landline. I practiced each day, I kept my notes by the phone.
When the call came, I was amazed at my calm. I was truly fluent. I answered the interviewer’s questions in Russian and apparently did well enough—he even praised my accent.
Not long after, I got my acceptance. I would be touring with the ballet, as one of their interpreters. To the pinnacle location of Russian culture, the then-called Leningrad.
I’m writing this now, seeing the deja vu: I got a phone call a few weeks later, telling me that the former Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia and the cultural tour with the New York City Ballet was cancelled.
Probably the worst failure I’d faced so far. The nadir of my not-even-started career. I’d passed the most strenuous tests, was chosen for the job, then life shut that door fast and hard.
Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash
I don’t know about you, but often in my lifetime, my worst failures have meant the most to me, in some way I couldn’t see at the time. I look back now and I’m beyond grateful that the ballet tour never happened. I did get to Russia, I helped chaperone a group of high-schoolers from my alma mater, and I went on to get a Masters degree in the language, teach for a year as an assistant in the graduate program, teach a semester of summer school, and keep my language skills honed enough to continue to read classics in the original for another decade.
But I was derailed that day, and because of that derailment a whole other set of opportunities opened up for me. Namely, my writing career.
Casting about for something to do with myself after the Leningrad tour was cancelled, I remembered my love of cooking. During my last year of college, I’d lived as an exchange student in Paris, studying Russian (still) at the Sorbonne, and learning French cooking. I applied to work in the kitchen of a natural foods restaurant opening near our home. To my surprise, that interview also went better than expected—I was given the job of executive chef.
The rest is my food journalism history. From the restaurant job, I went on to open a cooking school, which got reviewed nationally (USA Today), which led to me being asked to write cookbooks with the California Culinary Academy, which led to my syndicated column with the Los Angeles Times. Which opened the way to several decades of a writing career in food. And that kindled my serious interest in writing fiction, which is where I am now.
I think back on that pivotal moment of true disappointment, despair, even, when I learned the tour to Leningrad and my Russian interpreting job was history. How I really didn’t see it as anything more than a failure, another dead end. I felt adrift.
Failures are like that—turning points, really—which ask us to look carefully at what we can create instead. And those moments lead to other opportunities, ones that are much more aligned to us, in many cases.
I’m not trying to sugarcoat the effect of disappointments, but I have been ruminating on them as I get closer to my 70th birthday in six weeks or so and the publication of my third novel, my fifthteenth book. I’ve had so many so-called failures, I could write a book about all of them. We look at others who have achieved some success, realized a dream, and we don’t realize the winding path they might have taken to get there.
Here are a few random examples from my life, shared so you’ll know how my successes have come after many years of failures and the turning points they’ve brought.
My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, was rejected by so many agents and publishers, I lost track. I had to decide to let it go or self-publish. I found a team and self-published. It went on to win the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” and make back many times the cost of producing it. It’s still a good seller twelve years later and sales have much more than compensated for my costs.
I had to query and be rejected by 40 agents before I signed with my current one. It was incredibly hard to keep going but I made myself. My current agent was instrumental in refining both of my new novels.
My dream business, my cooking school, was hit by the 1980s recession—who had money for cooking classes?—after its noble start; it closed right before I got my first cookbook contract. That led to a nationally syndicated food column with the Los Angeles Times and a lot more books.
I was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer and had to curtail my food journalism career during treatment. Because of this required pause, I got to re-evaluate my real dreams as a writer and go back to school for my MFA in fiction. I saw that was my real goal as a writer—to write stories that people would read and be changed by.
My MFA thesis novel, Qualities of Light, was rejected by dozens of publishers. It finally found a home and was published in 2009 by a small press, with the best editor I could imagine. I learned so much about what that story could be, just by her expert edits. It went on to be nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
This exercise is adapted from The Artist’s Way, which has always been encouraging about reframing failures.
This week, make a list of your apparent reversals in your creative life. What have you hoped for but not achieved? What has set you back?
Place them on a timeline, which can be as simple as a line drawn on a piece of paper with dates noted.
Then make a list of things that you feel very proud of. Successes in your life, if you will. Place them on the timeline as well.
Finally, note the cause and effect—did any of the apparent failures change your direction, to allow one or more of the successes?