Finding Joy In Failure

The Writer’s Guild of America registers around 50,000 scripts each year. Even by an extremely conservative estimate that another 25,000 scripts are written and unregistered, that’s 75,000 scripts written each year in just the United States alone. In 2022, an estimated 16 spec scripts were sold. If you define success as selling a screenplay, this equates to a depressing 0.02% rate of success.

Put differently, 99.98% of writers failed to sell a script last year.

Now, that doesn’t mean we are failures. I’m very mindful about not tying up too much of my own self-worth in my work, as it’s something I’ve struggled with in the past. But we do fail. The more often we try, the more often we experience failure. We’ve likely all heard the aphorism “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” Or the Thomas Edison quote “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Those quotes sure sound inspirational, but if Thomas Edison wrote 10,000 screenplays and not a single one of them sold, I don’t know if he’d be quite as plucky about it. Writing a script is a labor of love. Writers put their hearts and souls into their work, and often tell very personal stories. To share that with the world is an act of deepest vulnerability; to be rejected is a Mike Tyson level punch to the gut.

To double-down on this analogy real quick: I feel that most healthy people could withstand a full strength stomach punch from Mike Tyson. You would definitely get hurt, maybe even throw up, but you’d probably be able to at least stand back up and stay in the fight. But if every time you entered the ring you got gut-punched before you could even get into your stance, you’d probably not want to box anymore.

So how do we keep going?

Research shows that failure is an important part of any endeavor. They say that’s it’s not the act of failure, but how we fail that’s important. A person’s ability to look at their failures and extrapolate lessons to help them improve going forward is a key metric of future successes.

Personally, I don’t think that’s enough. It’s certainly an encouraging data point in favor of grit and perseverance, but it does nothing to ease the sting of rejection or the negative self-talk that comes after our script failed yet again to make it beyond the quarter finals of that competition.

This is where I take a radical approach and say that it's not enough to learn from our failures. We need to find joy in them.

To do so requires a shift in perspective. There are so many people in the world who never chased their dreams and who never will. Whether due to life circumstances, illness, racial or geographic inequities, or just plain fear, they’ve never sat down and done the work.

I know how much rejection hurts; but if you've written even one screenplay or pilot, you’ve done something amazing. Seriously. It can be hard to feel any sort of accomplishment from this when you hear stories about people who wrote their acclaimed screenplay in a weekend or writers who sold on their very first attempt, but believe me, these stories are one-in-a-million outliers.

If you’ve finished a script, you’ve likely overcome a massive amount of procrastination, self-doubt, general life busyness, and creative blocks. If writing is your dream, then you’ve actually taken a step towards it, and I’m proud of you for that. I don’t care if your screenplay is the worst piece of garbage ever written. At least it’s written.

Forget the laurels. Forget the awards, the contest prize money, being on the Black List — all of it. That will either come or it won’t. And staking your happiness on a future outcome that you can’t control is a guarantee of misery. If writing brings you joy, then feel joyful in the act itself. Feel joyful in failure; because if you are failing then at least you’re trying. At least you’re being brave and putting yourself out there and sharing something that you love with the world.

After all, if you really do love it, then you won’t quit no matter how many times you get knocked back. The lioness doesn’t give up on eating if she has an unsuccessful hunt. A sunflower doesn’t give up growing due to a couple of cloudy days. If you are someone to whom creating is primal — as fundamental to you as the sun is to the flower — then failure is just another walking companion on your path. Eventually, it won’t even sting anymore. It will be nothing more than a slight twinge of discomfort that you can feel and dismiss. You can continue on with your head held high, holding onto the joy that comes from knowing that out of the many reasons you could have given up, you didn’t.

Remember that the next time you check your email and see that your screenplay wasn’t chosen to advance in the contest. If you need to, take a day to be upset, and then get back to work. Get back to your joy, and keep going.