JK Rowling Benefits of Failure

JK Rowling on the benefits of failure and extolling the crucial importance of imagination. A thought on JK Rowling's 2008 Harvard commencement address.

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

I'm assuming most in the world have heard of JK Rowling and subsequently have read her commencement address to Harvard in 2008. However assumptions can be dangerous. Only this month I've been repeatedly explaining the notions of clickbait and to be woke. Best not to assume too much.

So partly for my own personal archive and partly because I think on the chance that you haven't read it it's a wonderful speech all about the power of imagination, and the benefits of failure.

"What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality" - Plutarch

You can watch her below and extracts from her text follow. The complete text is here. It chimes with Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life and with Neil Gaiman, in his commencement address, on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; it even has much in common with Nassim Taleb's commencement address, though they be political opposites (they both admire Seneca).

.....Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. ...

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

...Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. ...

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.....

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

....And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
 

The complete text is here. It chimes with Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life and with Neil Gaiman, in his commencement address, on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; it even has much in common with Nassim Taleb's commencement address, though they be political opposites (they both admire Seneca).

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here and ideas on the arts here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations. 

Writing Competitions

Several poetry, short story, art and a play writing competitions with deadlines coming up. The Oxford Brookes Poetry (28 Aug, deadline) competition. Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, both poetry and short story (31 Aug) and an art prize. Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award (28 Sep, need to be published writer). Manchester Poetry Prize for best portfolio of poems and the Manchester Fiction Prize for best short story (29 Sep). Taking Flight, play competition (30-60 mins, 1 Oct, Asian writers). The big one in poetry, The Poetry Society’s annual National Poetry Competition (31 Oct).   Get ready, get set - write - draw - go !

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The Oxford Brookes Poetry  competition. 
The competition is open to both new and established poets aged 18 and over from across the globe and has two categories:
1) Open category (open to all poets aged 18 years and over)
2) English as an Additional Language (EAL) category (open to all poets aged 18 and over who write in English as an Additional Language
The winners of each category will receive £1000 and both runners up £200.

Aesthetica Creative Writing Award
The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award is an international literary prize that celebrates excellence in Poetry and Short Fiction. The prize is now in its 11th year, hosted by Aesthetica Magazine. With the aim to support and nurture new writing talent, it awards publication within an inspiring anthology to a shortlist of 60 writers, including a winner from each category.

The winners are also presented with further opportunities to expand their literary careers: £1,000 cash prize each, a consultation with literary agency Redhammer Management, a Full Membership to The Poetry Society, a subscription to Granta and books courtesy of Bloodaxe Books and Vintage Books.

• Poetry entries should be no more than 40 lines
• Fiction entries should be no more than 2,000 words
• Works published elsewhere are accepted

They also run an Art prize.   There are two awards for entry: the Main Art Prize and the Emerging Art Prize. The Emerging Art Prize is open to current students and artists who have graduated within the last two years. The Main Art Prize is open to all, including those eligible for the Emerging Art Prize.

The 2018 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
The prize, worth £30,000 to the winner, is an international award, founded in 2010, that is open to any story of up to 6,000 words written in English. Stories need to have been either previously unpublished or only published after 31 December 2016. Five other authors shortlisted for the award will each receive £1,000. The prize is administered by the Society of Authors. To be eligible, the author must simply have a record of prior publication in creative writing in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

The Manchester Writing Competition was established by Carol Ann Duffy in 2008. It offers the UK’s biggest literary prizes for unpublished writing and has awarded more than £135,000 to its winners. Each year two £10,000* prizes are awarded: the Manchester Poetry Prize for best portfolio of poems and the Manchester Fiction Prize for best short story. Designed to encourage and celebrate new writing across the globe the competition is open internationally to new and established writers.
> Manchester Poetry Prize - £10,000* 
> Manchester Fiction Prize - £10,000*

There is a play writing competition from Red Dragonfly. It's aimed for Asian writers in the UK only. They are looking for i) a thirty minute to an hour stage play, the subject of which can be anything you want – from something contemporary to more traditional folk and fairy tales- as long as it is family friendly – and we mean the whole family not just small children ii) The play should be written for a cast of up to five actors – although they can double up on characters if you want and iii) workable with a minimal set, however do not let this restrict your imagination – it's amazing what can be accomplished on a stage with very little. Applicants need to be over eighteen and based in the UK but otherwise we are truly open to hearing from anybody.

Finally in this summary, the big Poetry Society competition, it's open globally.  

1. All entries are judged anonymously and the poet’s name must not appear on the poem itself.
2. All poems must have a title and must not exceed 40 lines in length (excluding title). Entries can be on any subject.
3. Poems must be the original work of the entrant.
4. Entries must not have been published, self-published, published on a website, broadcast or featured among the winners in another competition before 31 March 2018.

Get ready, get set - write - draw - go !

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here and ideas on the arts here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations. 

Life Operating Manual

Ursula K Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea impressed upon me the idea of words, the essence of words, as magic - as items of power. A brilliant story with a thread of understanding about the world we live in told through a completely other world. It made an impact early enough that I didn't understand "genre" so I could appreciate the work without knowing what I "should" or shouldn't like.

She also over her long career has written insightful pieces on the writing process, (a few words to a young writer, here 1968 rejection letter), creativity and Taoism (she has translated Lao Tzu -  saying:  “The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth".

Here is her talking in 1975 at Worldcon.

Some of this is collected in Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016.

The piece (extracts below) on literature as a manual for life is worth the price of the book alone, if you measure such things in dollars and gold. Neil Gamain's commencement speech chimes although David Ogilvy takes the creativity for business much to Le Guin's despair I expect. The book reviews Le Guin gives are of more interest if you are a Le Guin fan.

The Operating Instructions (talk given at Oregon Literary Arts meeting in 2002)

"A poet has been appointed ambassador. A playwright is elected president. Construction workers stand in line with office managers to buy a new novel. Adults seek moral guidance and intellectual challenge in stories about warrior monkeys, one-eyed giants, and crazy knights who fight windmills. Literacy is considered a beginning, not an end. . . . Well, maybe in some other country, but not this one. In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. ...


... Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination. Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We have to learn to use it, and how to use it, like any other tool. Children have imagination to start with, as they have body, intellect, the capacity for language: things essential to their humanity, things they need to learn how to use, how to use well. ...

Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its children how to be people and members of their people—Hmong, !Kung, Hopi, Quechua, French, Californian. . . .

.... Literature remains comparatively, and amazingly, honest and reliable. ...

...Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten ... and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words. The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life...."

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here and ideas on the arts here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations. 

** according to the Nerdist, the Ghibli film didn't use much of Le Guin's source material at all, but it did bring father and son back together again, so there is that.