The Writer's Craft: Learning From Failure

I’ve always been more intrigued by questions than answers, and I find the fluteplayer image painted or carved on cliff walls throughout the Americas (but most famously here in the Southwest) particularly evocative. Is the fluteplayer a traveling salesman, a supernatural being, or a specific individual? Does he symbolize fertility, rain, seeds, music, or a particular ceremony? 

Fluteplayer pictograph near Sedona, Arizona

I had a lot of time to contemplate these questions while acting as a volunteer docent at Palatki, near Sedona, leading tours of alcoves containing centuries of rock art. One afternoon, a set of possibilities magically shaped themselves into a children’s tale. Thus far, it is the only time in my writing life that I felt visited by a muse. I decided that destiny was playing its hand, and a couple weeks later I sent off the completed manuscript for Kokopelli’s Gift expecting great things: a major publisher, a fat advance, tons of sales, maybe even tie-in products like notecards or refrigerator magnets or, heck, why not a Kokopelli stuffed toy?

The manuscript limped back, rejected.

As the saying goes, this wasn’t my first rodeo, so I knew that I needed to detach, reprint, package, stamp, and send it to the next publisher on the list. And the next. And the next. And the next.

All tolled, I queried and pitched dozens of publishing companies, coming close only once before the book finally found a home at Kiva Publishing, a small company in California that specializes in Southwest-themed books. Owner/publisher Stephen Hill had a talent for matching up writers and illustrators, and he contracted a gifted artist from New Mexico's Santa Clara Pueblo, Michelle Tsosie Sisneros, to illustrate my story about a mysterious stranger who visited a drought-stricken village.

Though I’d expected fireworks from Kokopelli’s Gift, I received instead a small but steady flame that still burns. My articles and guidebooks have been ephemeral—useful to travelers I’m happy to say, but out-of-date in a month, a year, five years, whisked away by rack-jobbers or replaced by new editions. What pleases me most about Kokopelli’s Gift is that it's beautiful (thank you, Stephen and Michelle), and it endures (thank you, muse).

I might have given up on this story after the first round of rejection letters, but I once knew a novelist who sold a Gothic romance twenty years after writing the manuscript, when Gothic fiction resurged in popularity. The obvious moral is “never give up.” In other words, be committed. But there’s an equally important corollary to this moral: Don’t mistake attachment for commitment.

If you’re attached to your story, you may not make necessary revisions, or you may resist tailoring it to a publisher's needs. If you’re attached to a particular outcome—being published, getting a six-figure advance—a sense of failure is likely after a few tries or a few years, and you’ll probably throw in the towel.

But how can you be committed and detached at the same time? 

For most of us, this is one of life’s greatest questions, and there’s no easy answer. Like an archaeologist searching for the past, you may need to dig deep to uncover the origins of your attachment. My attachments, I’ve found, are often responses to feelings of lack or fear. When you’re able to bring up an attachment and look at it in the hard, bright light of day, you can begin to free yourself. Then, with renewed insight, you can commit to your progress as a writer.