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88 pages

English

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From Brandon Stosuy, cofounder of the Creative Independent, an interactive guide to navigating disappointments and finding happy accidents in a creative life, filled with advice from artists across disciplinesThe third in a series of three interactive guides to the practical and emotional sides of living a creative life, How to Fail Successfully tackles the inevitable challenges that come with making work and releasing it into the world. Whether you are confronting "failure" in the form of fear, imposter syndrome, or negative feedback, this book provides insights and exercises to help you reframe these vulnerabilities as vital components to your process. Working artists from all walks of life-such as musicians, authors, filmmakers, dancers, designers, and visual artists-offer their advice throughout the book, providing ample evidence that even the most accomplished among us deal with ongoing self-doubt. Part memoir, part zine, part "how-to," and part oral history, in How to Fail Successfully author and curator Brandon Stosuy taps into his own experiences and an incredible network of talent to provide diverse (and diverging) perspectives on how success and failure are intertwined. Taken as a stand-alone guide or the finale of a series (including Make Time for Creativity and Stay Inspired), this book provides the support you need to take creative risks and make work on your terms. The book also includes quotes by Jason Reynolds (YA author), Bjork (musician), Matthew Day Jackson (visual artist), Josh Fadem (comedian), Hanif Abdurraqib (poet and author), Sasha Grey (actor and DJ), Sigrid Lauren (choreographer), and many more.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	21 juin 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781647003784
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0777€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Editor: Samantha Weiner
Freelance Editor: Karrie Witkin
Designers: Kristian Henson and Jenice Kim
Managing Editor: Glenn Ramirez
Production Manager: Rachael Marks
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946861
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4654-3
eISBN: 978-1-64700-378-4
Text 2022 Brandon Stosuy
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Image, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Abrams Image books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
Abrams Image is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Failure in Process
Chapter 2: Failure after Launch
Chapter 3: Failure, Time, and Timing
Chapter 4: Failure and Opportunity
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I ve gotten used to hearing no in various forms throughout my life as an artist and as a person, which means I ve tried to form a creative practice and a living practice around building things for myself and others that we ve otherwise been denied.
Hanif Abdurraqib
(Poet, writer, curator, author of They Can t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, A Fortune for Your Disaster , and A Little Devil in America)
I love the feeling of entering the unknown. You have to allow yourself a lot of mistakes, and then when you get it right, it s so rewarding.
Bj rk
(Musician, songwriter, composer, producer, DJ) *
I m way more scared of never failing than I am of failure itself. If I m failing it means there s still a lot to learn, and I hope I never stop learning.
Noelia Towers
(Visual artist)
I m not afraid of failure. If you challenge yourself in your day-to-day life, you re bound to fail, and I m not interested in simply coasting. I really do like working toward things. As my wife, Jane, said to someone the other day, Brandon likes to bite off more than he can chew, and then somehow find a way to chew it.
Here s a tangible example of a project that would have failed if I stopped chewing on it: this book. My agent and I had initially pitched a much different idea from what you re now holding. My original plan was to write a more straightforward memoir of sorts, the story of a working-class kid growing up in a small town who discovered punk and found a path to a life he hadn t expected. When my editor and collaborator, Karrie Witkin, read that proposal, she saw another idea within it: Instead of focusing on what I d done, what if we focused on how I did it? I was intrigued instead of insulted. And then I thought, because collaboration has always been central to what I do, what if we looked at how my collaborators and friends do what they do, too?
On the surface, this may not sound like failure, but that s only because we kept going. I could have easily said, No, that wasn t my intention, and taken the book idea somewhere else. The thing is, I m not sure the original idea was a good one. If I had seen the new suggestion as failure, or didn t allow space for collaboration, this book wouldn t exist. Sometimes failure occurs because you force a thing to fail due to ego or shortsightedness. If your first idea doesn t get to the finish line unchanged, is that failure? I don t think so. Making this series has been one of the most rewarding projects of my life.
As it stands, How to Fail Successfully is the third volume in a three-part series designed to demystify the creative process and guide people through different aspects of a creative life. The series begins with Make Time for Creativity (because carving out time for creative projects is challenging, but fundamental), followed by Stay Inspired (which focuses on strategies for generating creative ideas). How to Fail Successfully , then, is about how to keep going when you hit various roadblocks.
When I asked Anna Fox Rochinski-one of the musicians I manage-how she characterizes failure in the context of creativity, she responded: I think micro- and macro-failures are necessary for breakthroughs. The creative process is a series of many small (or big) judgment calls about whether or not to pursue an idea to completion. When you make something new, you start with an idea and submit yourself to a series of unknowns. Different types of failure will assail you at different moments. For that reason, How to Fail Successfully is divided into four chapters, each one representing an approach to different expressions of failure: Failure in Process (handling self-doubt while making work), Failure after Launch (dealing with disappointing results and criticism after the work is released), Failure, Time, and Timing (setting priorities based on what you can control), and Failure and Opportunity (seeing new possibilities in failure).
Failure is absolutely inevitable in our creative lives (and in life in general); we rarely make gains without mistakes, wrong directions, or any variety of pains. From a young age, we learn to look at what we did wrong with a project-the red ink on the school essay-and this lingers longer than any encouraging words we might have received. And when things go right, we tend to erase the mishaps that led to that success. We compartmentalize our successes and failures.
Part of sustaining a creative practice is recasting this kind of thinking and truly learning to see failure as an opportunity; it s inextricable from success. We ll also examine how our ideas of success evolve, which means constantly moving our goal posts to difficult-to-reach places. Writer Hua Hsu provides a poignant example of this: I think we have professional goals, which often involve just being able to continue doing whatever it is you re doing. And then sometimes we have these more abstract goals: In my case, there s a book I ve been working on-or just thinking about, actually-since I was twenty-one. My personal feeling of success is reserved for this thing that s very intimate and as yet unformed, and there have been times when I ve felt bummed that professionalism has kept me from doing it. It s a type of failure, insofar as it s failing the principles, impulses, or desires that led me to picking up a pen in the first place.
External validation won t cement your successes or quell your failures. The real work is internal and ongoing.
A Type of Lesson
Failure is how you learn. It s just a lesson. And if you see it as anything else and project it onto your self-worth, you will crumble. That low self-worth takes up a lotof room in your head. You will give space to jealousy, bitterness, comparing yourself to your peers . . . and that s less room for the creative process to unfold.
Elle Nash
(Writer, critic, author of Animals Eat Each Other and Nudes , founder of Witch Craft Magazine)
The first major lesson, before you go any further into the book, is to look at a setback or deviation in your plan as a pause rather than a failure. Sometimes you need that pause, whether you recognize it or not. It can be a good spot to rest, refuel, and recalibrate so that you can return to your projects from a new (perhaps more exciting) perspective or angle. But before all of that, you need to address what s in your head. Take a moment to jot down any failures that you re carrying with you right now.

Do you have any works-in-progress that you re struggling with at the moment? These could be projects that you can t seem to start or finish, or projects that aren t shaping up as you d envisioned. Describe them and what is happening (or isn t happening):

Have you launched a finished product into the world and been disappointed by its reception or the results? Write about what happened and how you feel:

Failure is part of the creative process no matter how long (or frequently) you ve been doing what you re doing. Making things never gets easy. Again, this shouldn t be seen as scary or threatening. In a way, it s a comfort. The creative process is a spiral; we constantly return to same issues (and revisit the same failures), but each time, we re armed with more techniques and approaches to make it a little bit easier.
In each chapter, I offer my personal stories of failure while also presenting the advice, observations, and anecdotal experiences of different types of working artists (including musicians, authors, filmmakers, dancers, designers, and visual artists). Purposely, there are a number of different voices here, each helping to suggest the wide variety of ways failure can affect us. As I did with the first two books in the series, I approached friends and people I ve collaborated with at one time or another with the aim of making the book feel like a community gathering. These are all people I know, and sometimes we ve failed together.
As in the first two books, I also left space for you to jot down your own thoughts and experiences. While reading through-and meditating on-the experiences of all these people, I created prompts to help you draw out your own thoughts and revelations about failure. That s something to remember: You may recognize bits and pieces here or there, or feel some echoes or resonances, but failure is personal, and nobody s experience will be a carbon copy of yours (and shouldn t be).
What s maybe the most important to keep in mind as you read How to Fail Successfully is that you re essentially finding ways to keep going when failure does strike. The worst kind of failure is simply stopping. That s the only failure I fear . . . so let s get going.

* Stosuy, Brandon, Bj rk on nature and technology, The Creative Independent, September 27, 2016.
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