The struggle! Every climber knows the struggle of climbing. We all pretty much suck when we first start, we fall, and fall, and fall, and fall. And then, all of the sudden, we send. We may not always recognize it, but it’s because of all those falls that we improve. It’s through failing and repetition that we become stronger, more calloused, more seasoned. We get better at recognizing our weaknesses, we come up with tricks to overcome our shortcomings. Through failure and repetition, we get better.
Not that I am a great climber by any stretch of the imagination, but anytime I’m asked how to get better, it’s always the same answer. Failure and repetition! It is so powerful to work really hard on a difficult route, and then seemingly out of nowhere, finish it. The reenforcing mechanisms at play when we send a project are unmatched by nearly any other activity. This is precisely why so many of us keep coming back for more.
The failure to success ratio is off the charts when it comes to climbing, but climbers don’t tend to be overly bothered by it. We learn pretty early on that failure should be celebrated as an opportunity for growth.
I don’t imagine many of us would stick with climbing if we were criticized and punished in the early stages of our climbing journeys. This is one of the reasons I try to celebrate the failures of new climbers. Failure and repetition! Fail and fail some more! In climbing, we actually have a word for failure, we call it progress! That positive spin on what amounts to a synonymous reference does wonders to the disposition of a climber!
While failure and progress aren’t completely synonymous, there is what I believe to be a supervenient relationship.
In philosophy we rely on the notion of supervenient relationships to describe a dependency between two sets of properties, where a higher-level set depends on a lower-level base set. Meaning that no change can occur in one set without a corresponding change in the other. Progress supervenes on failure, or rather change doesn’t occur to progress without a corresponding change in failure. In other words, without failure we don’t progress!
The world of climbing has something important figured out. Namely, failure is good, because failure means progress, and progress is good because progress leads us closer to success.
There is a point to be made here about almost anything but specifically about writing.
The world needs more bad writers!
I am telling you from experience, that we are at the cusp of a writing endemic. More and more students are writing less and less. The blame for the reduction of writers and in turn the reduction of writing falls on a million different causal conditions, but chief among them is the notion that failure is bad. Students are punished for poor writing, most particularly through lower grades. The message that progress supervenes on failure is lost on our students, and it’s pushing them in the wrong direction. Rather than ending up in writing labs working with writing tutors and mentors, students are turning to AI in droves. And for those teachers/professors who believe that they can catch any student using AI, you’re wrong. The sophistication of student prompts and the ability of generative algorithms to comply just keeps getting better and better (complete with the inclusion of common writing errors, and just enough mistakes to clear the bar for originality).
Writing is very much like climbing in that you only get better by doing it. However, AI is not primed to replace climbing. People want to climb because while it’s difficult and painful and frustrating, it’s also rewarding and fun and celebrated. In climbing, the failure is part of the progress, and it too is celebrated rather than punished. There is the rub. In writing, our failures are not celebrated1 they are all too often punished, and because of this, AI is primed to replace it, and in many ways it already has.
This then is my plea…please write, write poorly, fail often, there is joy in writing, not only for the writer, but also for the reader. The world is losing writers by the buttload (I’m not sure exactly what a “buttload” is, but by volume, but I suspect it is significant), and less writers means less art, and less art means… well that is a road I really don’t want to go down.
Writers like Joyce, Thoreau, Muir, and Dostoyevsky for example are rare enough in a world where writing was still done by humans. As silicone-based authors proliferate, the scarcity of greatness will only increase.
I have heard a hundred different ideas to get students to write, but from my point of view, the best one is to treat writing like climbing, i.e. we should all encourage and reward failure.
So, to all the poets, novelists, scriptwriters, bloggers, journalist, and journalers, that is, to all the writers, I say congrats on all your failures, errors, typos, run on sentences, and “mistakes”. I say thank you, the world is better because we write!2
- This is not a universal statement, I work with and know a lot of very creative, encouraging, and supportive professors and teachers who are doing amazing work with student writers. However, with that I know of just as many who couldn’t be bothered by the changing times.
- To celebrate your failures, I want to offer our platform to any writer, aspiring or otherwise, who wants a venue to publish your work. If you have anything climbing, adventure, or nature related that you would like to share with our audience, send it our way. Short or long, good or bad, it doesn’t matter. As long as your work is respectful and in line with common courtesy and acceptance of others, we are here for you!
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