I've Failed Before, and So Did I.

Discussing the art of blowing it bigly and recovering.

I stepped in it. I botched it. Biffed it. Screwed it up. Made an ass of myself. I clammed. I fracked. My eyes were not on target. I let you down. I confused Grammarly, and I befuddled my tuner and metronome.

What did I do? EVERYTHING AND IT WAS BAD!… and I’m still here to talk about it.

See how easy that was?

For some reason, a mistake I made in my third month on the job TWENTY YEARS AGO has followed me like a puppy dog looking for a home.

At the end of the retirement ceremony for General John Jumper, Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, we performed the “Washington Post” march by Sousa as the guests departed. The end of the piece has a wonderful, low B flat, punctuating the end of the march. The final note. The “stinger.” Dedicated to my craft, I laid into that final note like a boss, ending the long outdoor ceremony with more verve and enthusiasm than a little leaguer hitting their first home run.

The note was the most magnificent, beautiful, fattest B flat of my professional career. It was played by me and only me. No one else. Crap.

Since we were in formation, there was no collapsing, no shaking my head, no apologies to my colleagues. No running up to General (retired) Jumper and foisting an excuse for why I opted to mar his ceremony with my accidental musical utterance. I stood at attention like a well-trained airman should. It was a long three minutes marching back to the busses. The only sounds were the drum tap and my teeth grinding into a powdery paste. Once the drum major halted us and commanded us to fall out, the razzing began.

“Jay, what were you thinking?”

“Wow, man!”

“No stingers when you’re wearing a hat, dude.”

“Loud and proud. Strong and wrong.”

One of my colleagues gleefully told me that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flinched and looked back at the band as if someone had farted in his office.

Twenty years later, every time we play a march with a stinger in the last bar, I hear some of my colleagues—most of whom were not at the retirement ceremony—say “Jaaaaay…” as a warning. Thanks to my traumatic moment, I have never played the last note of any march because I pull the horn off my face to avoid a second occurrence.

When in doubt, leave it out!

Failure in the art of writing is a very different beast. We fail every time we sit down and start typing, and with a far greater frequency than one glorious wrongly placed note. Thankfully, the backspace key performs its miracles every time we need it, and no reader is the wiser to our errors. I’m sure this draft has been backspaced at least forty times during the drafting phase. Technically, it is a failure, but not a Secretary Rumsfeld-grimacing failure.

Writing provides us with the free opportunity to fail every time we craft. There are countless stages of the writing process where a failure is corrected by the author, the critique partner, the editor, the proofreader, the publisher, and hopefully more, all before the reader. It takes a lot to get your failure published… but it happens.

Like that time my spirit animal Toby Ziegler from The West Wing found a typo in the Constitution of the United States. It was a comma that changed the meaning of the Takings Clause (Season 7, Episode 21). Whoo boy, our democracy is in trouble now, amirite?

When you audition for my band or orchestra, or I hear you perform anything, anywhere, I don’t care if you make a mistake. It’s unfortunate, and it happens. What I care about is how you recover. I don’t even need a “my bad” from you. I know it, you know it, we all know it. What matters is the note directly after your mistake. If you can bounce back from an epic faff of any kind, mad respect. That’s ownership and resiliency.

If your mistake turns you into a pile of goo, A) It better be colossal, like everyone’s gonna die kind of bad, so you have to sit there and think about what you did, or B) that’s your sign to go do something else and never speak of it again.

Loud and proud, strong and wrong.

Colossal mistakes come from colossal effort. Slamming into the wall like Wile E. Coyote means you were going at top speed. That’s bravery and confidence in your effort. Mistakes are less common than doing something correctly, so everything else around it probably rocks. I love to reward that as well.

I found a passage from Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden that captures the brave mindset of the writer. I believe it applies to all aspects of life.

Own your rejections and own your failures; they are an excellent wall to smash and to kick against.

Almost every day, I begin my morning writing sessions with a social media post acknowledging and encouraging my fellow #5amWritersClub members. There are some normal people out there who can sleep past 6 a.m., so intentionally waking prior to that to actually craft words is worthy of praise. It’s never about word counts or meeting goals, as nice as those achievements are. It’s about showing up.

I define failure as not showing up! If your butt is in the seat, you win. If you stare at the screen and don’t type a word but ponder the possibilities of your story, you win. Every time you click “Save,” you win. Every time you write those magical two words, “The End,” you win!

If you generate a failure along the way, own it. We’ve all been there and recognize the discomfort. If you don’t make any mistakes, you’re either not trying hard enough or are not human.

Now rub some dirt on your injury and get back in there! The game’s not over yet.

Write on!