How Failure Made My Writing Stronger

Graduation season is upon us. To all of you who wear the cap and gown this year, congratulations! Your happy Facebook pictures with your diplomas and leis make me smile, and though I may not be there with you, I celebrate you in my heart.

It takes me back to my own college graduation just two years ago.

I crossed the finish line of that last semester like an exhausted racehorse, limping, panting, in last place but glad to make it to the end. I commuted more than sixty miles every day for class. I had a one-year-old at home and my wife was pregnant with our second child. Our only income came from a single summer and some Fridays I spent cutting grass at another university.

I was ready to be done with school and find a new job. My family was ready, too.

So I marched in the procession with my head held high. A pipe band led my fellow graduates and me across the college campus, past cheering lines of berobed professors, and into the packed arena where our friends and families waited and the university orchestra pounded out Pomp and Circumstance. My heart raced with the dizzying perfection of the moment. This was it. I had finished college, and everything looked up from here.

Different graduation, but I look better in this one anyway.

Except I didn't graduate.

Final grades went up a few days after the celebration. And instead of a diploma, I received a D in playwriting.

That dealt a devastating blow. After countless hours researching and drafting and revising everything from poetry to annotated bibliographies; sleepless nights forcing out coherent sentences with five tabs open on my browser and three books open on my kitchen table; early mornings on cold train platforms and long days away from my family; I came out empty handed.

I let myself down. I let my family down. What were we going to do now?

So I did what I assume all sensible people do when they fail at life. I wallowed in self-pity for a few days. Applied for what few writing jobs might take me. Hooked myself up to an ice cream IV drip.

Mmm, chocolate.
Image credit: Ketamine Advocacy Network

But I didn't come this far to fail. My wife and I looked at summer classes. The college offered the one course I had wanted to take but never had room for in my schedule. It would satisfy my final graduation requirement, and we had just enough money left for me to enroll in it.

The first day of the summer semester after I should have graduated, I walked into my advanced creative nonfiction writing class and hoped no one would notice me. I shouldn't have been there, not with failure stamped in bold letters on my forehead. I sat in the back and busied myself with my notebook.

It didn't take long, though, before I realized not graduating in the spring was the best thing that could have happened to me. I believe I grew more as a writer in that one semester than I did in all the years before it. The writers I surrounded myself with that summer helped me open up and give more to my readers, unpack scenes and savor every moment on the page, and embrace even the dark parts of my story and myself.

At the end of the class, I received my diploma. But I gained more than that. Like a phoenix from its ashes, I came out of failure a stronger writer than I'd ever been before.

Selfie
Image credit: Salvador Davila

Writers deal with failure all the time. We might get halfway through a draft before we realize the story's going nowhere. We might get piles of rejection letters before we see our work anywhere in print. Readers might leave negative reviews online.

And that's all good. Because nothing forces you to grow like failure.

Rejection is a gift. Negative reviews are gold. Think of them as opportunities to learn: to make your writing sharper, your stories bolder, your voice more yours.

But failure isn't just for writers. Sane people fail sometimes, too. And good for them!

Maybe you didn't get that promotion. Maybe your mother came over before you could clean. Maybe you miscalculated the trajectory of that shuttle launch and sent a whole crew of astronauts hurtling through the eternal void of space.

This is a great chance for you to learn something. You're gonna grow so much--just you wait and see! Someday you'll be glad this happened.

I know now if I could change the past and earn a higher grade in playwriting, I wouldn't do it. Not with everything that failure gave me.

What's With the Whole "Sly Pig" Thing?

I'm halfway through my sophomore year of high school. And it's dead silent in my debate class.

Our teacher, Mr. Hawkes, sits up front and center, facing the class in a borrowed desk and marking the roll while we research our speeches for a coming tournament. He exemplifies what I at fifteen think an intellectual might look and act like. Daily he engages us in political and philosophical discussion. He uses poetry to teach us verbal presentation. He's studying for law school and gives the class a practice LSAT. He wears long hair, plays chess at lunch, and is known affectionately to students as the Vegan Ninja.

Several minutes pass and Mr. Hawkes looks up from his roll. Out of nowhere, he shatters the silence.

"Oh, I get it!" he announces. "Sly Pig!"

And then he laughs. Hard. And we laugh with him--for a solid minute.

Image credit: Know Your Meme

I've grown to enjoy people's random light bulb moments as they've figured out my nickname. By this point in the school year, I've stopped explaining it. It's much more fun to see my friends and teachers get it on their own.

But it hasn't always been that way. Do you know how annoying a name like Cunningham can be when you're growing up?

My earliest memories of elementary school include classmates, each in turn, having a stroke of genius and saying, every single nose-picking time, "Your name is Cutting Ham! Get it? Cutting? Ham?"

Then they'd giggle in triumph, as if they'd just sailed from Spain and discovered the New World without knowing the whole rest of the class, like the Vikings, beat them to it before recess.

"Cutting Ham! Get it? Cutting? Ham?"
Image Credit: Architect of the Capitol

I'm not just talking kindergarten, either. In sixth grade I still ran into truly clever souls on the playground who shouted, "Hey, it's Nathan Cutting Ham! Get it? Cutting? Ham?"

And I'd laugh, because I'd never heard it before, so it was hilarious.

Kids these days get points for originality, though. After we got married, my wife went back to her job as a kindergarten aide and one student called her "Mrs. Candy Cane." I had to appreciate that one just for being new. It was January; the kid probably still had some Christmas candy left.

The kids at school would have never guessed the proud history of the Cunningham name: how we fought for Scottish independence in the fourteenth century; how we received earldom in the late fifteenth century; how the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns, composed a passionate tribute to his patron, James Cunningham. Man, we even had some castles. Freaking castles.

Finlaystone Castle, historic seat of the Cunningham Earls of Glencairn
Image credit: Geograph

But sure, whatever. I like the taste of ham. And Heaven knows I've cut my fair share of it over the years. That Cutting Ham thing just got old, though--before I even reached first grade.

Maybe that's why I adopted a new nickname with such enthusiasm after I turned twelve. For whatever reason, the boys in my Scout troop at the time liked to call each other by their last names. So we had a Schultz. A Brenk. A Porter and some Danielses. I don't know what it was about my name--maybe it was just too long--but right away the other boys went to work improving on it. As all good Scouts will do.

So Sly Pig was born. And if you haven't figured out the play on words by now, just think cunning ham. Feeling stupid? Don't; it took a committee of clever Boy Scouts to come up with it. And man, was it a refreshing change from Cutting Ham!

I ran with the new nickname. By ninth grade, I had not just friends, but teachers calling me Sly Pig. In high school it became my email address and every online username. During senior year, a friend gave me a stuffed Sly Pig, complete with scheming eyebrows. And after graduation, I slapped the name onto personalized license plates and hit the town.

I suspect if I had let it go on longer, I might have tried to make a little cash on t-shirts, mugs, and bumper stickers. But contrary to popular belief, I don't snort or play in the mud. Eventually I had to cool the Sly Pig thing down a little.

And yet, after all the nicknames I've been given since then--and I've had some good ones, like Clever Bacon and Stunningham--nothing's ever beaten Sly Pig.

So I hold on to it. Use it online. Give it to my website and explain myself to visitors.

'Cause hey--it sure beats Cutting Ham.