The Necessity of Failure

KEVIN WILSON is the author of two novels, Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), and the story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Harper Perennial, 2009) which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch. He is an associate professor in the English department at Sewanee, the University of the South.

I WOULD rather succeed than fail. This is not a contentious or difficult position to take. I’d rather get an acceptance from the New Yorker than a rejection slip. I’d like the novel I spent two years writing to be considered good rather than watch every person who reads it look at me like I have a terminal disease. Yes, success is much better than failure.

But failure is inevitable. When we put words on the page, we are often disappointed by our inability to move what’s inside our heads into the larger world. So if failure is always a distinct possibility in our working lives, is there perhaps a way to understand its necessity to our art, instead of simply crying for a few hours and then being unbelievably rude for absolutely no reason when our partners ask us how the work is coming along? I think there is.

When I was in college at Vanderbilt, my professor Tony Earley was the single biggest reason I wanted to be a writer. His encouragement and kindness were what made me think I might have some facility for writing fiction. Even when what I wrote was not very good, which was often, Tony would highlight the positives, showing me where the story was working and where it wasn’t, and sending me back to my computer with the hope of making it perfect. He had filled me with the idea that writing, if done with a pure heart, would lead me toward something wonderful. I did not yet know how wrong I was about this.

I graduated, confident that I wanted to keep writing and that I wanted to become a writer. Then I went to graduate school at the University of Florida and studied with one of my literary idols, Padgett Powell. In the first workshop, Colonel Powell (I