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<\/p>\nExcerpted from \u201cA Long Game\u201d by Elizabeth McCracken, Radcliffe fellow \u201908<\/p>\n
Once at an excellent weekend writers\u2019 conference, I gave a craft talk. It was called \u201cOn Failure\u201d and at least partly concerned why I refused to participate in karaoke. In the car from the airport to the conference site, one of my fellow writers had asked me what my go-to karaoke song was. I didn\u2019t have one. Everyone else in the car \u2014 two fellow faculty and the conference\u2019s organizer \u2014 seemed shocked. I tried to explain my own limitations \u2014 I don\u2019t like people and I don\u2019t like fun and I don\u2019t like being the physical center of attention, or playing pretend, or ordinary competition \u2014 but the truth was more complicated.<\/p>\n
I am in my late fifties. Most of the odd mental habits of my teenage years are behind me. I no longer think that an article of clothing might change my life. I don\u2019t believe I can transform my bad habits in the course of a summer in such a way as to cause my enemies pain. I don\u2019t memorize long poems under the delusion that someday I will be at a party where the ability to recite much of \u201cThe Ballad of Reading Gaol\u201d will come in handy. But when I hear a song I love, late at night or driving alone, I sing along, con brio, pretending that I\u2019m in front of a small adoring crowd, just as I did when I was 14, that much yearning and delusion.<\/p>\n
There are plenty of talents I\u2019d like to have: painting, acting, close-up magic. I\u2019d like to tap-dance. To dance in general. To draw. To lecture off the top of my head. But I\u2019m fine not doing any of these things. Perhaps I even believe I could, if I applied myself; perhaps one day I\u2019ll take lessons. I\u2019ll be a diligent student. I will practice, as I never did the flute. Would I trade writing for sculpture or grace on the dance floor? Of course not.<\/p>\n
Would I trade it for the ability to sing really well in front of people? I\u2019m not talking about a career as a vocalist, just the ability to floor a local audience, a room full of astounded listeners, a song in which I specifically command people to love me and they do. (The subtext of all my writing is love me.)<\/p>\n
\u201cTreat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t know she could do this,\u201d my dream audience thinks. \u201cWe didn\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
But I can\u2019t trade, can\u2019t sing, and so I write on.<\/p>\n
To generalize: most fiction writers wish they were really vocalists, and some fiction writers love karaoke because it allows them to live out their dreams. I save that longing for my fiction. I edit by reading aloud; I imagine myself in a packed theater, houselights down, no specific face in the audience visible. Man, do I knock \u2019em dead \u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One of the karaoke-performing writers at\u00a0the conference \u2014 she owned a karaoke machine, so she\u2019d given it some thought \u2014 told me that karaoke is about confronting your mortal self. (Karaoke is a kind of mirror.) What I think she meant: you put yourself in peril and you push through doubt and survive. The centerpiece of my craft talk on failure was my one experience attempting karaoke, during which I did think I might die. It took place in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a place I have made important, improving mistakes. I\u2019d gone to Drag Queen Karaoke at the Governor Bradford, not intending, never intending, to perform, when I decided to sing a truly awful,\u00a0retrograde, sexist song: \u201cA Hundred Pounds of Clay.\u201d It\u2019s about God creating \u201ca woman and a-lots of lovin\u2019 for a man.\u201d Perhaps you\u2019ve never heard of this song. Nobody at Drag Queen Karaoke had, nor anyone years later at the craft talk.<\/p>\n
\u201cI prefer failure to doubt. Doubt\u2019s a wavering thing, never solid underfoot. It\u2019s tough to launch from the bog of doubt. Failure is hard, motivating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even now I don\u2019t know why I decided to sing it, other than it was on the menu of available songs and I recognized it from the oldies station. Perhaps I thought the oddity of the choice would mask my inability to carry a tune. In other words, I had no connection to my material, and I hated my narrator, and I hadn\u2019t considered whether my audience would have any interest at all.<\/p>\n
I know exactly nothing about music, but \u201cA Hundred Pounds of Clay\u201d wasn\u2019t in my range, no matter how you define \u201crange.\u201d I made it one line in, or three. If I recall correctly, the drag queens did nothing to stop me from bailing. Some failures aren\u2019t worth watching, even by those in the business of mockery.<\/p>\n
What I discovered singing three lines of karaoke was that I didn\u2019t have the stomach for failing at it. To do anything, and enjoy it and improve, you have to have the stomach \u2014 the heart \u2014 for failure. \u201cThis is painful. I\u2019m awful at it. A flop. Better not quit.\u201d<\/p>\n
I prefer failure to doubt. Doubt\u2019s a wavering thing, never solid underfoot. It\u2019s tough to launch from the bog of doubt. Failure is hard, motivating. Those kinetic swings between delusions of grandeur and extreme self-loathing are how I get anything at all done. If you suffer from these extremes, they will afflict you all your life. At least, they have me: I require the momentum, which means I must accept sometimes that I\u2019ve absolutely failed. Otherwise, I\u2019m in the quivering zone of uncertainty, where I might be okay and might not. Quivering is movement without progress.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Hundred Pounds of Clay\u201d was the last\u00a0time I sang in public. The time before that was in the eighth grade, when I decided to try out for the school production of \u201cOliver!\u201d My best friend had a piano, and we flipped through her family sheet music and discussed what we might choose for our auditions, in the way that we readied ourselves together for school dances, curling and feathering our hair and wondering what we might dance to. I was aware that my friend was more musical than me, though like most 13-year-olds I still had one foot in fairyland; I thought it was possible that I had a beautiful singing voice that I\u2019d managed to keep secret from everyone, myself included, like a birthmark that proved I was royalty.<\/p>\n
I have always been given to fits of honesty over things about to become self-evident. In Paris, I declare, \u201cJe ne parle Fran\u00e7ais tr\u00e9s bien.\u201d At the \u201cOliver!\u201d audition, I stood in front of the assembled music teachers and said, \u201cI can\u2019t really sing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The song that I\u2019d chosen, which I had practiced alone and in front of my friend, was \u201cThe Theme from M*A*S*H.\u201d Perhaps you didn\u2019t know that \u201cThe Theme from M*A*S*H\u201d has lyrics. It grieves me to report that it does. Not only is it a challenging piece of music, covering octaves and key changes, but its actual title is \u201cSuicide is Painless.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was this that I had decided to belt out in front of my junior high school music teachers, hoping to land the part of a plucky orphan.<\/p>\n
\u201cCongratulations,\u201d the nicest of them said when I had finished. \u201cMost kids don\u2019t know they can\u2019t sing. You do!\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the moral of this story? For years I took the congratulations to heart. \u201cKnow thyself.\u201d I never again tried out for anything musical.<\/p>\n
Now I think it\u2019s a story about ambition and longing. What I didn\u2019t tell those teachers, or my friend: I was obsessed with \u201cOliver!\u201d When I felt misunderstood by my family I would go into the book-lined spare room we grandly called The Library, which also housed the hi-fi and the convertible sofa upholstered in an ugly, durable fabric called Herculon, and I would put on our copy of the cast album. I knew every word of every song. I was particularly devoted to \u201cWhere Is Love?,\u201d the eponymous Oliver demanding: \u201cLove me.\u201d I would sit under a table and mouth the words with passion and hand gestures.<\/p>\n
The \u201cwhere\u201d of \u201cWhere Is Love?\u201d is five syllables long, and I knew better than to sing that for the teachers, but I might have managed a painless \u201cConsider Yourself.\u201d Painless for both me and the teachers. Instead, I chose an unrelated song, because I dreaded the judgment of grown-ups, not about my voice, but my longing. I didn\u2019t want them to know how much I cared.<\/p>\n
I have written a lot of bad fiction in my time, not wanting to reveal my own longing to the world. I have worried about what I\u2019m good at in writing and what I\u2019m bad at, and every second of that worry has been wasted.<\/p>\n
The most difficult thing for ambitious writers is to dismiss thoughts of what other people think. It\u2019s a paradox. You write because you want people to read what you\u2019ve written and swoon or weep or even fling the book across the room. At the same time, you cannot care. Fiction writers are particularly liable to be control freaks, will want to manage reader interpretations. This is the reason for 97 percent of misused adverbs.<\/p>\n
You have to write the best work you can and cede all interpretive control. Readers will think what they want, goddammit, God love them.<\/p>\n
Why do I write these days? I want to be loved. But I don\u2019t care whether anybody approves of me.<\/p>\n
Copyright \u00a9 2025 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Excerpted from \u201cA Long Game\u201d by Elizabeth McCracken, Radcliffe fellow \u201908 Once at an excellent weekend writers\u2019 conference,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236248,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[412,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-236247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}