Failing, failing, and failing again

Posted by Roger Whitson on January 26th, 2014

I was inspired by Chuck Wendig’s post shared via Liana Silva Ford Facebook page to talk about my own academic writing habits. I’ve been writing literary scholarship non-stop since my high school years, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out my own writing style. I’m still figuring out what it means to be a scholar. But I was particularly moved by something Wendig said in his post regarding the bad work he’s produced over the years.

“But those books I wrote — the ones that were bad? — mattered. You’ll never see them; they’re part of the foundation of this metaphorical house. It’s all under the earth, just rocks and packed dirt, but part of what holds the structure up. The freelance writing, too, that put me out there with editors and developers who helped me learn the craft — their input like hard stones whetting a blade.”

Wendig’s insistence that all the bad stuff still matters reminded me of all my failed experiments. I wrote a paper during my Master’s program, for instance, that attempted a post-structuralist critique of John Ashbery’s poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I tried making the article as self-reflexive as possible. I kept referring to the poem as my reflection, not the author’s. I added quotes from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Signature, Event, Context” talking about the trace of the signature (heightened, I added, by the fact that the article I was writing quoted from a photocopy of a mass produced book that included Derrida’s copied chirographic signature pasted at the end of a typeset chapter). My work even eschewed “linear argument” and attempted to mimic a palindromic form. Ideas from the introduction were repeated in different form in the conclusion, ideas in the first paragraph reemerged in the second to last paragraph, and so on. I spent hours making sure that the title mirrored itself: I reversed letters, even flipped them - so that it looked like the title was in the middle of an endlessly reflecting series of fun house mirrors.

The comment I received from my professor? “You aren’t Derrida. Stop trying to be.”

My dissertation was likewise comprised of failure after failure. I originally wanted to write about Blake’s adaptations in 20th century literature and their relationship to ideas in the radical religious left. I read up on Derrida, Benjamin, Spinoza - all looking for ideas of prophecy that I could apply to Blake (I heard prophet applied to Blake by himself and by other scholars of religion in the Romantic period). Then I saw Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s and Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker’s Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827 — two books that (I swear!) were written just to mess up my life. I decided to combine discussions of Blake’s afterlife with stuff on Byron and celebrity culture. The next month Tom Mole’s Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Celebrity was published. I wrote no less than six drafts of the first chapter, fully-fleshed arguments that were entirely scrapped, before I decided that I just wanted to be done.

The dissertation that emerged from that process is literally the textual manifestation of a series of failures and rhetorical maneuvers against a scholarly tradition that seemed to have anticipated everything I was trying to say. I’m pretty sure I’ll never publish my dissertation as a book. That’s ok for me, since it served a very different purpose: it made me less anxious about anticipating my failures and more willing to situate my work in a specific rhetorical situation (who is my audience? what’s the conversation?). I only realized afterwords that I was practicing a form of media studies or anything that could be considered related to the digital humanities (particularly because I talked about the difficulties of reading Shelley Jackson’s The Patchwork Girl in the final chapter). I had a conversation with a scholar after completing the dissertation who said, “wait, you do Media Studies and Digital Humanities, right?” My response, “uh, yeah, I guess.”

The lesson I learned is no different from Wendig’s. I’ve failed many times as a writer and a teacher. But I continue to put myself out there, and I will myself to fail again and again until someone responds positively to some of my work. It isn’t easy to be judged constantly and found wanting most of the time. Yet all of these failures are part of my writing and the scholar I’m becoming. They sharpen my critical and editorial skills. They allow me to write more quickly and to address other scholars’s concerns more adequately. People have asked me how I can focus on my writing so easily. The short answer? It wasn’t easy in the beginning. It was difficult. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. I felt inadequate because I couldn’t master the ideas being presented to me. I felt like I hadn’t read enough or thought enough. But I kept forcing myself through those feelings, and eventually it became a little easier.