66: Fear of Failure & Happy Accidents
9/12/2013
I accidentally finished my first scene for Dissolutions three days ago. By being so intimidated by the creative work in front of me, I spent such an excessive amount of time establishing a good scene outline that the outline became the actual scene.
This is scene two I’m referring to, not the first one. I have yet to write scene one, but its outline is already excessively worked out as well. It amuses me how this happened though with scene two. It’s only two pages long, but I just had to add one sentence and change a few words, and it was done.
This illustrates for me how stupidly frightened I am of facing the actual writing of my book that it has come to the point where it only gets written by accident.
Present-Day Reflection
7/30/2026
I was five or six years old when I fell in love for the first time in kindergarten. Her name was Alison, the little red-haired girl that every boy in school was in love with. In the 2nd grade, when I was eight, her best friend Joy told me at recess that Alison liked me. I chased Alison all over the playground yelling, “Is it true?” over and over again, finally pinning her down in the grass beneath a hundred-foot-tall Douglas Fir. I had no idea what to do next when the whistle blew for the end of recess.
This anecdote is one of the few intentionally biographical details that is translated into my work, written into the beginning chapters of Book Two: Tears of Stone – what I was struggling to get just right in this journal entry from 13 years ago. Having been the chosen one by the prettiest girl in school as my first love spoiled me. Alison became the benchmark that every girl afterward had to live up to. I was romantically doomed from the start, the memory of first love having been so heavily rewritten and idealized over the ensuing years that no real person could ever live up to it. Especially not me.
I’ve done the same thing with painting and writing, where the idealization of perfection and the fear of failure to measure up has haunted me most of my life. This is why some of my best work, and some of my best relationships, have been the result of happy accidents. I’ve gotten over this to some degree as I’ve grown older – the fear of death and running out of time outweighing the fears of my youth.
And yet, having recently revisited with a sense of nostalgia my childhood playground, I was glad to see that not much has changed. The tree is still there, as is the school and its playground field. Sitting there beneath our tree, with 46 years separating me from the ghost of the little red-haired girl, I was astonished at how little had changed.
