On being bad at things

It’s about that time that I want to quit. I’m 50k words into my latest project, past the peak of “everything I write is brilliant” and into the trough of “none of this matters.” This would not be the first time I gave up on something. The amount of ventures I’ve picked up and put back down again are countless, a lengthening tail of all my failures. Some of them, I invested significant energy and money into, only to never think about them again: playing the piano, cheesemaking, sketching, Photoshop.

I spent 4 years of high school learning Spanish. I took another grueling semester of it in college, where I had to wake up at 7:30am every day to make it to my daily 8ams. Then I spent a semester abroad, living with a host family. My Spanish improved by leaps and bounds, my greatest achievement being when I was able to translate a love letter that my host brother’s exchange girlfriend wrote him for my host mom. She withdrew it from a blue glass bottle and handed it to me over a plate of berenjenas con miel. Translating it felt easy in a transcendent way. Small improvements built up over those months. There were more words that I could understand. Longer conversations that I could maintain. And yet I was acutely discontented with how far I still had to go. The further the language carried me, the more critical I was of how I couldn’t speak it quickly enough, how the slang and everyday conversational quality eluded me. I would keep at it, I told myself. When my Latin American coworkers visited, I tried to engage with them in Spanish. But too quickly, embarrassment kicked in. I was too slow, too rusty. I retreated. The other day, someone spoke to me in Spanish and I scrambled to reply, my brain a big blank. I had completely lost my grasp over a language that I once lived in.

Some people have trouble starting things, but that has never been a problem for me. I like the possibility and all the different directions something can go. I think that maybe I’m going to be a genius at this, or have some latent natural talent that will be discovered when I begin. It’s only after I begin that I grasp the real difficulty of the task. That is usually when I want to graduate from play to accomplishment. I examine my work with a more critical eye and see very clearly the ways that it falls short.

I think that’s why I tend to quit while I’m halfway in. I just can’t stand having my failure exposed, throbbing like a raw nerve, a truth about my capabilities that becomes visible. At least if I quit, I am withdrawing of my own volition, rather than letting the world expel me anyway, and that gives me a sense of control. When I was on submission with my first book, I constantly reassured myself that if things did not go well, I would disappear. I would delete my socials and retreat from the writing sphere, and nobody would miss me. The idea of not leaving a mark was a comfort. Because if I had no track record, I could still be anything. Two books in, I still think about it. It’s like that scene in a fantasy novel when the couple holds onto each other’s hands and say, “One day we will run away to a place where there is no war, nobody knows who we are, and we can truly be together.” I think that distancing myself from the problem will somehow make me happier. It would simply be the closing of a tab, the jettisoning of a fuel tank filled with ideas that only I cared about.

Staying with something you want to quit, though, is what leads to the breakthrough. Finishing my first draft is what led to revising it, then writing another book, then penning a query letter. Waking up every day for my language classes instead of dropping out led me to my host mom’s dining room, where I learned so much about her wild, wonderful life even though she knew no English. To this day I am stunned by the expansiveness of my love and understanding of her, even though we did not speak each other’s native languages. I came to terms with being bad, and because of that, I got better.

I was reading “Fail Better” by Zadie Smith when I came upon this passage:

Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true.

It struck true. In my daily failures, I was circling closer to a truth about myself.

When I resisted quitting, my pain tolerance grew. I advanced beyond the initial jab of rejection to the truth of what it meant. Deep in revisions of my first book, I saw how the most important pieces of the story fit together. With a ruthless hand, I removed entire scenes and deleted long sentences, departing from them the same way I would from a crowded party where a goodbye is hardly remembered. The ego and self-consciousness of beginning dissipated into a relentless obsession that had no space for anything else. I fell asleep thinking about the story and woke up looking forward to working on it. I had only felt like this when I read a particularly riveting book, or got personally invested in the revenge subplot of a Korean drama. It was a miracle that something of my own creation had ensnared me so completely.

After my first book, I stopped feeling embarrassed about the parts of myself that had seeped into my work, inciting speculation on who I was and what I cared about. I had failed because I could not prevent my personal biases from inflicting themselves on my work, but that was also the only way my story could be different from anyone else’s—because that small piece of my soul had catapulted itself into the book and become the energy at its center.

That’s what a writer does? We wear our vulnerability like a cloak for all the world to witness.

—Blue Moon

Something I wrote today:

“I didn’t know it was your birthday that day, and actually, I didn’t have a reservation here.”

I look at Jacob, but he is pondering his wineglass, as if he cannot quite figure out the color of the liquid inside. “I just thought that you seemed very sad.”