When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan writes a novel, it may go through 50 or 60 drafts.
The first one begins simply. She sits down with a legal pad and an open mind, deliberately creating by hand. She attempts to write about a half-dozen pages a day. At some point, the first draft is done.
Then comes, as she puts it, the "unpleasant tasks."
She types the whole thing. She reads it. Almost invariably, she says, "it's terrible." But in her review, she gives herself concrete ways to fix it -- edits, outlines (the one for her book "Look at Me" ran to 80 pages), discussions with other writers. All of which leads to more drafts, more frustration, more refinement.
Egan knows what she's in for.
"The key is struggling a lot," she says.
The struggle, of course, is often about fear: the fear of getting it wrong, of hitting a dead end, of wasting time. Of failing.
Failure. It's such an ugly word, isn't it? It reeks of cancer, of loss: the sense that what once went wrong cannot be set right, that the world has come to an end, that failures are failures forever -- that it's not just the project that failed, but you. Successful people, we imagine, are somehow blessed with more optimism, bigger brains and higher ideals than the rest of us.
But it's not true. Successful people -- creative people -- fail every day, just like everybody else. Except they don't view failure as a verdict. They view it as an opportunity. Indeed, it's failure that paves the way for creativity.
John Seely Brown is the former head of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Xerox lab responsible for digital printing, the computer mouse and Ethernet. He says "trafficking in unlimited failure" let PARC's employees invent once-unimaginable technologies.
"My mantra inside PARC, which was never particularly appreciated in corporate headquarters, was at least 75% of the things we did failed," he says.
Investment manager Diane Garnick, who taught a course on failure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it succinctly. "We learn more from our failures than we could ever learn from our successes," she told the site Bodyhacker.
Ups and downs
Egan, 49, would probably be described as a success. The Chicago-born, San Francisco-bred author won the Pulitzer last year for her novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad." Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker. She's a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and the author of several other highly esteemed works, including "Look at Me" and "The Keep."
Her demeanor is welcoming and considerate, but her eyes miss nothing, displaying a determined curiosity. She works from a cozy Brooklyn brownstone she shares with her husband, theater director David Herskovits, and their two grade-school sons, whose exuberant artwork decorates the ground floor.
Her life has had its ups and downs, but she retains an even-keeled perspective, describing her creative growth as "incremental all the way."
Such a long-term outlook is key to coping with failure. Not necessarily getting it right the first time? That's fine -- you're recording something, anything, so that other ideas can rise to the surface. Hitting a dead end? Take a breath, take time to understand and try something else. That's your creative drive kicking into gear.
Robert Epstein, a former editor of Psychology Today and founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, likens the process to being stuck in a locked room. The doorknob isn't responding. You turn it, you jiggle it, you lift it. Nothing.
"When you're ineffective and you can't turn that knob, lots and lots of different behaviors and thoughts and ideas all pop up simultaneously, more or less -- and that's the stuff of creativity," he says. "That's where the inner connections occur."
The wonderful thing about such creative sparks is they'll feed off one another. The terrible thing is that emotions might take over and reduce you to mush. Epstein observes that the person in the locked room eventually starts banging on the door and, if left long enough, cries for his or her mother.
Egan can relate.
When she was a teenager, she took a year off between high school and college to travel in Europe. It was great at first. "The exaltation of being propelled alone into a totally alien place was really remarkable," she says.
But, eventually, the aloneness became too much. She suffered panic attacks and ended up calling her parents to help get her home.
So Europe didn't work out, not in the way Egan imagined. On the other hand, she found a new passion: writing. She kept a journal -- she still has it -- and the pleasure she got from developing her thoughts on paper prompted her to consider writing as a career.
Having 'grit'