Pat Conroy vs. Bo Duke: Failure Can be Good for the Soul
Writer: Cliff Yeargin
I write a series of Southern based mysteries that feature Jake Eliam, a former baseball player who spent the vast portion of his playing career in the Minor Leagues. His experience is filled with the ONE common theme that runs through the game: FAILURE. Baseball is a game of failure. Hit .250 in Class AA and you will end up with a one-way bus ticket home. If you get a hit just 3 of 10 times, you hit .300. That’s still failure, but just enough failure to make a difference. As the Kevin Costner character, Crash Davis, in the movie Bull Durham tells Nuke Laloosh, “Just one more dying quail a week…one more ground ball with eyes and you end up in Yankee Stadium, :The margin between failure and success is measured in inches. Dive into the world of writing and you might find yourself looking for one more ‘dying quail’ to turn failure into success.
Yes, there are stories of first time and skyrocketing success, like Amy Tan and ‘The Joy Luck Club’, but that is FAR from the norm. Writing is a game of FAILURE. So, you might as well embrace it.
James Lee Burke, the talented Southern crime writer, a man who can turn a line of prose into poetry, received 111 rejections for his novel ‘The Lost Get-Back Boogie’. Go pick up that novel and read just a few pages and try to figure out just who the hell were those 111 people who thought the Pulitzer Prize nominated book was bad?? FAILURE.
84 of the same type people rejected ‘The Big Bounce’ by Elmore Leonard. FAILURE.
John Grisham still keeps all the letters from 30 publishers who rejected ‘A Time To Kill.’ When it was accepted by a small company, only 5000 copies were printed and according to Grisham, “We couldn’t give them away…” FAILURE. Then came the movie and about 300 Million book sales later, he still embraces the failure of his first.
Mystery writer Laura Lippman was working at a Baltimore Newspaper when her Editor told her she wasn’t a good writer and should consider another line of work. FAILURE. Filled with fear of being fired by the man she called ‘a cold-blooded professional assassin,’ she wrote her first novel, Baltimore Blues…that was 23 Novels ago and a spot on the NY Times Best Seller List.
Sometimes failure can be good for your soul AND your writing career. The big boss lady of an agency in New York City rejected my first book with this note, “When we said we were looking for new Southern writers, we meant the NEXT Pat Conroy…Not the NEXT Dukes of Hazzard.”
FAILURE. Embrace it. She had identified my Target Audience and my Brand…for FREE! Besides, the Dukes of Hazzard was on the air for six years and 147 episodes. And down in my neck of the woods, more people know less about Amy Tan and Mahjong and a LOT MORE about Rosco P. Coltrane and Boss Hogg.
FAILURE. EMBRACE IT.
About the Writer
Cliff Yeargin has spent his life as a ‘Storyteller, traveling the U.S. as a Writer/Producer/Photographer and Editor in Broadcast journalism. His travels as a broadcaster have taken him to dozens of Major League ballparks, World Series, Super Bowls, National Championships and he managed to convince his bosses for many, many years that staying at a Baseball Spring Training camp for two months involved hard work and sacrifice. All while submitting a staggering number of falsified expense reports. He currently lives in Atlanta and works for CNN. He is the Author of the Award Winning ChickenBone Mystery Series.
Website: cliffyeargin.com