Failure is a part of being a creative. It’s how we grow as creators and as artists. Without knowing that we’ve failed, we can’t know how to improve. Without knowing where we’ve fallen short, we can’t know what to strive for. We fail, we take a good hard look at why we failed, we try again, and we do better. Every good artist is built up on a foundation of failures and the examination of their failures. To throw your work out into the world and to have it spat back out with a thumbs down – whether critical or commercial – is part of the art and craft of making things for other people.
It also sucks.
If you are reading this article, then you probably know what I mean. A good-faith attempt to make art – be it a poem or a novel or a game – takes effort. More than that, it takes intention and emotion and vulnerability. You put something of yourself into what’s on the screen or on the page. To send that out into the world for other people takes courage. It also takes pride and self-belief – a conviction in the idea that other people should see this thing you’ve made, that other people would be better off spending their time and effort experiencing this thing you made, that this thing you made is the best of what you are capable of, and a representation of your worth as a person and as a creator.
To have that handed back to you with a “do better” or a “this has problems” or even a “this sucks, never try again” will hurt. It will never stop hurting. I’ve been doing this for nearly twenty years now, and although I’ve gotten pretty good at tempering my expectations, I’ve also come to realise that it is simply not possible to be proud enough of a work to send it out into the open, and simultaneously not be proud of it enough to not have high expectations in its reception and be invested in this success. There are people who are capable of creating indifferently and suboptimally and releasing for the sake of chasing a paycheque or an RoI, who feed a prompt into a machine and plate whatever it shits out. That’s where we get the term “slop” from.
But I’m not talking about slop. I’m talking about art – and when you make art, it hurts when it isn’t received the way you’d hoped it’d be. That pain is going to be discouraging, and maybe even leave some emotional scars, but that pain also means something more important: it means you tried, it means you put yourself into what you made, and it means you pushed yourself hard enough to create something you were proud of. That, if nothing else, is what distinguishes art from slop. If you worked on something hard enough to be hurt when it fails, then you have created something meaningful – if not to other people, then at least to you.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it still won’t hurt. If you’re like me, every negative review will feel like a deep personal cut – this may be unavoidable. Yet there are things which are always worth keeping in mind when those negative reviews come rolling in, things which will help you keep everything in context, and stop you from making any decisions you might regret.
The first thing to keep in mind is that your work is always going to be a failure in some aspect to someone. There is no such thing as a perfect work of art. No matter what you create, no matter how much time or effort or skill or resources you put into any given work, there will be people who don’t like it. There are award-winning and near-universally acclaimed games and movies and books which I just didn’t like. That’s true for everyone else too. If your work reaches a large enough audience, it will reach someone who doesn’t like it, which is to say that it will reach someone who sees it as a failure. It is up to you to decide whether their judgement is valid or not, whether they are claiming your work has failed them for a good or a bad reason. Sometimes, you’ll find that the ‘failure’ of your work to them is simply that they refuse to engage with it on the merits that it was intended for – they came in expecting something other than what you made. If you’ve tried to do your best to represent what your work is to your audience before they engage with it, then you cannot be blamed if someone comes in expecting something different and is disappointed or outraged.
That being said, if you do feel like a negative reaction is warranted, then that is not merely a rebuke, but an opportunity. Natural talent is not real. It is a scam made up by the kinds of people who want you to believe that some human beings are just born better than others. All ‘talent’ comes down to is interest and applied effort – and the way to apply that effort is through seeking out the points where you genuinely have failed to achieve your objectives, and coming up with a way to correct those shortcomings. This is why I love long, negative reviews which lay out the reviewer’s reasoning in detail. Make no mistake, I love positive reviews too, for obvious reasons, but the negative ones which explain why a given mechanic or plot or tone or character didn’t work for them gives me material I can work with in ways that a short review doesn’t. Even if the assumptions which the reviewer makes are off base, it gives me clues which let me diagnose the mistakes I’ve made for my subsequent post-mortem (which I’ve started making a habit of doing) and give me a way to avoid or mitigate those same mistakes the next time.
And there should be a next time.
A sufficiently negative review – or a sufficient volume of negative reviews, or bad sales numbers, or any number of types of feedback which could qualify as a response to a “failure” can be very discouraging. A manifest impression that this is not something you are good at can create a strong temptation to “never cook again”, as the kids say these days. However, just as natural talent is mostly made up, so is natural incompetence. Everyone starts off bad at making art, and they can only get better at it by continuing to be bad at it. Diagnose your mistakes, do better the next time. At the worst, you will simply make different mistakes. At best, you will fail less than the last time, and then less again, and again, and again.
There is one thing I’m taking for granted in saying this, and there’s a reason I’m doing this. Getting better at art – especially when it comes to the creation of large projects like full-sized novels or games – is not the hard part. The hard part is actually finishing those projects for the first time, and silencing the voice in the back of your head which tells you that a project like this is something you can’t do. If you finish a project – even if it’s a failure on release – it remains something you’ve finished. Earning the ability to tell yourself that you are capable of finishing a book, or a game, or a film, is perhaps the hardest part of setting out as a creator, and by doing so – even if what you create is deeply flawed – you have given yourself the knowledge that you can do it again and again and again. So long as you stay humble enough to engage with – though not necessarily accept – outside feedback, you have a clear path towards an never-ending and ever-ascending road towards improvement.
This isn’t theory, or guesswork. This comes from personal experience. My first piece of long-form fiction to be published was Sabres of Infinity, back in 2013. It was reviewed pretty well. Its prose is rough and spare and its characterisation is unpolished and its worldbuilding makes major errors which I am still suffering for even today, but it was praised for all of those things by the vast majority of those who engaged with and reviewed it and as a result, I was anointed with the title of “good writer”.
Yet this is not the start of my story as a writer. It is the midpoint. Before that point was almost a decade of writing in other spaces, of abortive attempts to write a novel, a tabletop game, collaborative storytelling, forum RPs, and a whole host of other attempts to write fiction. At the beginning, most of it was very bad fiction, but as time went on, and I received an unending torrent of feedback – some pleasant, some extremely mean – from people who I still owe an unquantifiable debt to, it became mediocre fiction, then good fiction, then fiction good enough to get published and for other people to pay money for and write fanfiction about.
But none of it was finished. My writing came in fragments, in dribs and drabs and micro-passages and half-poems and the other bullshit you’ll find scattered as WIPs in my documents folder. My writing was – by all accounts – good, but it didn’t matter because becoming a good writer was the easy part. I had reached that level of proficiency in the art of writing almost without even trying. The difficult part was the craft of writing, the actual discipline of knuckling down and finishing the stories which I’d started so well. It wasn’t until years after I’d started writing – years after I’d started writing well – that I was finally able to finish something which could show that writing off to a wider audience.
So, to sum all of this up: you’re never going to satisfy everyone, your failures are an opportunity to develop as an artist, and a completed work that fails is still mostly a success – because it means you’ve still had it in you to complete it, which is more than almost anyone else can say.
Your individual works can fail – if you keep doing this sort of thing, your individual works will fail, perhaps even catastrophically. Yet it’s important to remember that the failure of a work of art only reflects upon your abilities at a given moment in time. It cannot pass judgement on your overall skills as an artist. The only way that failure defines you – the only way you allow the failure of your work to make you a failure as an artist – is if you let that setback discourage you into giving up altogether.
So long as you pick yourself up, and keep trying. So long as you treat your failures as a stepping-stone to success, you have not failed, and you will not fail.
Paul Wang 