A forum for failure - Shawn Loughlin editorial

As part of the neverending quest for improvement we should all be taking, there is, inevitably, plenty of failure along the way. Failure is how we learn; everyone falls off the horse, it’s more about getting back up, etc. We know all of these anecdotes, but, in the moment, it can be difficult to accept failure after hard work.

 

This was really drilled into me in journalism school to prepare us young, vulnerable, wide-eyed writers for the cold, harsh world of criticism.

 

For example, back to my days at Humber College, there are two classes that stick out to this effect. The first one was a straight-up English and writing class taught by published author and former Director of The Humber School for Writers, Antanas Sileika. For this class, he was charged with teaching first-year journalism students the fundamentals of good grammar, spelling, writing and structure. I did pretty well in that course (I’ll stop short of saying “excelled”, though I did a lot better than many of my classmates, who were not ready for the there’s-a-right-way-and-a-wrong-way approach to grammar and writing). 

 

The reason for my success was writer’s craft at St. Mary Catholic Secondary School in Pickering, where Mr. Flynn taught harsh, unrelenting grammar lessons that high school students weren’t ready for. He admitted it was high-level, but said those who chose to pursue writing in their post-secondary education would thank him and I most certainly did. 

 

Back to Humber, before Sileika returned our short stories, as edited by him, he showed us the first page of one of his novels, marked up by his book editor and it was covered in red. I think that vulnerability he showed, and yet, all in the pursuit of a better end product, really stuck with us. I know it stuck with me.

 

The second one was another writing class, except this one built up to us writing one epic short story over the course of an entire semester, pouring our hearts, souls, blood, sweat and tears into one four-or-five-page document. What a creative paradise, right? 

 

It was and it wasn’t. Once we were all done, there were several classes in which the whole class would read the stories. One at a time, according to a schedule, you were to bring in 30 or so printed copies of the story for your classmates to read in real time, in front of you, and mark up with their edits. They would then discuss your story in front of you, offering their criticism (sometimes harsh, sometimes not) and then giving you 30 or so edited copies of your story for you to make improvements or stuff them down your throat as part of a failed suicide attempt. Either way, it was rough.

 

In an old episode of Parts Unknown, Tony Bourdain visited Copenhagen’s Noma, then the best restaurant in the world, and took part in its weekly Saturday night ritual, in which all of the cooks stay late after a long week and put up their own creations for colleague feedback.

 

“It’s not bad,” said Noma chef Rene Redzepi to which another cook immediately suggested, “It can be bad” to the laughter of the cooks.

 

Redzepi said the process is a forum for failure and that, in a way, that was the point.

 

It also recalls that great speech about journalism given by Marty Baron in Spotlight. “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on and there’s a fair share of blame to go around.”
It’s hard to face criticism, but, if it comes from the right place, in an effort to make the end product better, we should be all ears. That, of course, is much easier said than done.