Fail Better Club

fail better, feel better

This past Sunday (8/4/24), there was an article in the New York Times about Sundance Labs (unlocked link) which is an annual gathering of newer screenwriters and more experienced writers, directors, and actors. The screenwriters film two scenes from their screenplays (with the help of the directors and actors) and then they get critiqued by the mentors.

Here are the two parts that got me excited: 

Michelle Satter, the founding senior director of the institute, and Ilyse McKimmie, deputy director of feature film, helped the fellows identify the scenes they’d shoot: not their darlings, but sequences that vexed or stumped them, that felt essential yet elusive. In a sense, they were here not to succeed but to falter and in doing so perhaps become the filmmakers their projects require. The advisers were there to help them embrace that conundrum.

and

“We always say that failure is just a steppingstone to profound learning,” Satter said over the din of lunch. “I also tell them that your worst day of the lab is going to be your best day of the lab.”

I know, deeply, that this is true, and necessary for making good art. You need to come to a cooperative space not with your best, shiny work, but with your problem children that need fixing. Which is hard. If you’re meeting with professionals, it feels counterintuitive to bring your problems. The sense is that if you bring the work you know is great, the professionals will press the button that causes confetti to fall from the ceiling, and you’ll get whisked away to the special room. (The special room is one where someone else does the hard work of revising for you and you are presented with a finished book and a barrel of money.)

But what if, in fact, the special room is a place where you spread out your manuscript on the floor and cover it with red ink? In the special room, you can focus on the problem of your story until you figure it out. It’s a place where you are supported and inspired to make your story the best it can be. I want to create the special room right here. Let’s make a space where we can bring the scenes that are causing us trouble and figure them out together. The ethos of Do the Work is an acknowledgement that writing is work and writing is hard (but also: writing is fun and rewarding). So let’s do the work.

It is hard to embrace failure. Going into something with the knowledge that you will fail is a major (and understandable!) cause of resistance. But it is that process of building the story up and knocking it down again that makes it a good story. The process of committing, with a community, to failing better,¹ will give you inspired momentum to finish one story and then the next. 

Cosmo believes in you.

I love talking about stories. I love fixing stories. I believe we need more great stories in the world. Selfishly, I want to be someone who writes them. Also selfishly, I want to read them. Please write great stories.

Here’s how it will work. Anyone who is a paying subscriber to Do the Work is welcome to join Fail Better Club. Fail Better Club will be one week, the week of August 19. Choose one pesky and problematic manuscript, story, or idea.² This should be something where you have worked on it a bit, and you know it’s good, but something isn’t sitting right.

1. If you want to participate, send me an email by replying to this newsletter (or, if you don’t receive emails, email me at julie AT juliefalatko dot com). I will reply with further instructions.

2. We will discuss your problem / manuscript / idea³ via Voxer.⁴ This way we can talk back and forth a bit asynchronously, and it allows you to work on your idea for a few days and come back and talk more. (This won’t be hours and hours of talking, mind you. I’m expecting it’ll be about 10-15 minutes of talking on my end at most.)

3. If you don’t have Voxer and really, really don’t want it, we will meet via Zoom, one time, for 10-15 minutes to talk about your story’s problem and how you might fix it.

4. Lastly, there will be a space for all of us to talk together about stories, writing, and how to make writing better. You can swap stories with each other if you want, but that’s really up to you. It’ll be more of a space where we can talk about what makes a story great and how to get there, or about revelations we’re having during this week. I’m hoping we can be specific (e.g., “is an ice cream cone falling onto the sidewalk enough of a dark night of the soul, if my character really really loves ice cream?”) I’m currently leaning toward Discord for this, but we could also do it in Substack Chats. Let me know if you have a preference.

This is an experiment! I’m fired up by this idea of us failing better together, and with that in mind, Fail Better Club will, itself, fail and fail better going forward, if it seems to be working in some manner. I’d love to bring in other mentor writers or professionals in the future. Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions. Let’s revise and rework to make the very best stories we can.

Thoughts and Links

• I will be reading my farm book, Help Wanted: One Rooster, at a farmer’s market. Where else can you buy a book and a tomato at the same place? I’ll be at the Back Cove Books story time at the Woodford’s Corner Farmer’s Market in Portland, Maine, on August 22nd at 4 pm, AND I will be with Alexandra Penfold, who will be reading her book All Are Neighbors, since it’s a neighborhood farmer’s market. Perfect. I hope to see you there!

• Lose yourself in these incredible photos from the Olympics; thanks to Platonic Love for the link.

• I spent many glorious minutes at the Poline color palette generator (link via Holisticism). Apparently my current mood can be described as Herbal Witch meets Canadian Moon. That sounds correct, yes.

• Excuse me, have you all been making homemade ricotta all this time and not telling me? Because I made the Smitten Kitchen Summer Ricotta with Vegetables (she says grilled, I oven roasted them) and it felt like cheating to make cheese from scratch in 12 minutes.

Books I read recently and loved

• Holy cow: You Can’t Kill Snow White by Beatrice Alemagna. It’s the second title published under Enchanted Lion’s Unruly imprint of picture books for teens and adults, and it’s stunning — the Snow White story told from the villain’s perspective, a woman who is heartbroken, cruel, and misunderstood. This book, the writing and paintings, is emotional, beautiful, macabre, and grotesque. “Stunned by life, and the dazzling sun…” It’s so good. Even the actual binding of the book is cool. If, like me, you are still vibrating with the delicious spite intensity of Lindsay Eagar’s Made Glorious, read this book.

1. Stealing, of course, from Samuel Beckett, who famously wrote, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

2. Only one, please!

3. This might be a picture book manuscript, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re working on a novel, I won’t be able to read your entire novel, but we will talk about the specific part of your novel that is giving you trouble. If you are a writer who outlines and comes up with the entire idea before writing, and there’s something about the idea itself or plot that isn’t working, then we can talk about that.

4. Voxer calls itself a walkie-talkie app. Essentially it’s leaving voice notes for people, and they can listen and respond whenever they get a chance. I use Voxer with my critique partners, and I find it really helpful for working out story problems. The process of talking my story out loud to people I trust often gets me to the solution all on my own.