What If You Could Not Fail

The Knowledge Shared by Churchill and My Coffee Cup

It’s time to revisit the name of this blog, and where it came from—www.whatifyoucouldnotfail.com.

In 2003, I resigned from a job I had been at for eleven-and-a-half years. Ten and a half of those years were heaven; the last twelve months, not so much. A few years later, after a stint with another firm, I struck out on my own.  It was a weird time, with some scary decisions and many sleepless nights, but it has worked out for the better. In the middle of it all, one of my sons gave me a coffee cup, saying, “Here, Dad, this reminds me of you.” 

Across the front of the cup was a quote: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

That quote became one of my mantras (there’s another one that I’ll discuss in a later blog). What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

I equate writing to my experience in sales.  I don’t consider myself a true salesperson, but I have learned a few things.

Sales Rule #1: If you don’t make the call, if you don’t give the pitch, if you don’t ask for the business, I guarantee you will never get the sale. So many times I hear, “I can’t stand the rejection.” How do you know you’ll be rejected? You’ve never made the call.

The writing equivalent of this is that if you never write the novel, if you never send out the agent queries, if you never follow up with the publisher, you will never see your words in print. You have to do these things.

Sales Rule #2: It takes an average of nine calls to a prospect to close the sale. Most salespeople quit after the fourth call.

The writing equivalent of this is persistence. At a recent seminar I attended on why writers don’t get published, one of the top reasons was that they give up too soon. After a handful of rejections, they tuck the manuscript away and go back to their day job.

What do you call a writer you never gives up? Published.  

Winston Church Hill once said, “Never give in. Never, never, never.” My coffee cup says, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

As writers, we have to believe in our story. We have to believe in our ability to tell it. We have to believe it will make a difference. 

 

The Courage of Cormac McCarthy

Last week I finished All the Pretty Horses, a novel by Cormac McCarthy. This is my third novel by this author.  I have also read No Country for Old Men and The Road.

McCarthy has come up with some of the best lines I have ever read.  In All the Pretty Horses, I stopped reading and actually looked for a pen when I came across, “He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.” In The Road, describing a father and his young son surviving in post-apocalyptic American, he writes, “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” That line gives me chills every time I read it.

What amazes me most about McCarthy, and what I admire, is the courage of his style. He’s not big on punctuation.  He uses periods—most of the time.  Commas are kind of hit and miss, and he never uses quotation marks—ever.  What’s real interesting is when he drops a period and forgets a capital letter at the same time.  You don’t know where one sentence ends and the next one begins. But McCarthy’s prose is such that you can figure it out.

And he gets away with it. McCarthy tells such compelling stories that his readers forgive him for his style. He has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, and a host of other awards. His name and the Nobel Prize are often mentioned in the same sentence.

I am amazed that he found an editor who would publish him back in the late 50s.. (His first editor at Random House also was Faulkner’s editor. That explains everything.) His manuscripts would never make it through a critique group.  People would go crazy.

Then I came across a blog post by Seth Godin (let me admit right here that I am not a big reader of Seth). He argues, “ … the contradiction (it seems) between Poke the Box, which argues that you must consistently ship innovations to the market (and frequently fail), and The Dip, [these are both books by Godin] which argues that quitting a project in the middle is dumb, that the real success comes after the quitters have left the building.”

On occasion you hear about writers who are working on an experimental novel (poking the box), but McCarthy started early and never quit (pushing through the dip). It takes a lot of courage. I only hope I have as much.

Seth Harwood, One of the Indie Publishing Kings

Every time I think I’ve decided how to pursue publishing, I run into Seth Harwood.

Seth Harwood is a crime writer who came out in 2006 with his first novel, Jack Wakes Up, on podcast. He gave it away for free. Random House picked him up and published it, but Seth has remained on the edge of independent, electronic and self-publishing for the last five years. He’s tried all sorts of things, but always comes back to the podcast.

I’ve been listening to Seth’s latest book, In Broad Daylight, about a female FBI agent tracking a serial killer in Alaska.

Seth is also in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, a way for artists to raise money to help produce their works. Through the campaign, Seth is taking pre-orders of some of his existing books, offering discounts and other items. The goal is to raise enough money to print some of his books and do some more e-publishing (WARNING:  I may have the details wrong. I’m not sure). He raised the cash he needed in 29 hours.

If you have an iPod and you commute or ride your bike a lot, or you’re just books on podcasts, listen to Seth. Look for Seth Harwood on iTunes. If you tap into Seth’s feed, you might also hear in interview with him on Interview for Your Ear-Piece at Spoken Word.

Also, look at Kickstarter, which bills itself as “the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world.”  Check out Seth’s kickstart campaign here.