Failure is an Artform...

Right, last week I touched briefly upon the rejections you face as a writer. I may have described my one professional 'achievement' (although I hesitate to use that word), but I could spin many, many more yarns about my professional failures.

It's hard to put into words (but that won't stop me...) the gut-punch of someone turning down something you've spent hours/days/weeks/months/years on. 'How dare you do this to me!' you think, 'I've seen telly and things and I know that this is better than some of that'. You feel the rage of every embarrassment and failure swelling inside you until this tumescence of seething hatred bursts out like an alien life-form (or is filed for use at a later date).

In the initial stages you can harness that fury to fuel creativity, but rejection's a crafty bugger and it slowly wears you down to the point where, instead of rattling off a furious and hastily-crafted Phillipic aimed at your tormentors, you simply fall face down in your bed and think that perhaps spending all that time coming up with an awards acceptance speech may have been somewhat premature.

You never quite get used to it... well, until the point when you are dulled entirely to emotion by the sheer volume of rejections. You have to try and not take things personally, which is astonishingly difficult but I imagine you're untouchable if you can manage it. You can laugh about it (even though every laugh is like a stab on in the inside...) and satirise your own misery. However, my attention was drawn to a fairly novel way of conquering failure- By celebrating it.

Dazed and Refused showcases work rejected by the panel of the BP National Portrait Award (and on the website you can view a classic catch-all rejection letter, much like the ones I mentioned last week).

It's a tough point to argue, producing a showcase of failures. As much as rejection hurts, in some cases (many, in my own experience) they're sparing you the blushes of public embarrassment. And yet, something about it really appeals to me. There's a kind of downtrodden yet defiant chutzpah about it. Why shouldn't us failures be given an even break? Let the public judge for themselves instead of aloof, highfalutin successful types. Yet, this is tempered by a niggling little feeling of reservation. With the greatest of respect (and some of them are fantastic paintings), as I mentioned earlier, there is often a valid reason for any rejection and sometimes, just sometimes, judges know what they're doing and that, no matter the quality of the brushwork, no-one really wants to see a portrait of Brian Belo...

But good luck to 'em. Never say never. (Hey, it worked for Justin Bieber... even if the pre-pubescent scrote wouldn't know professional failure and hardship if it smacked him on the bonce with a euphonium...)



Now, some quick pieces of housekeeping...

Lifestyle Rule #1
If you're name is Weiner, at no point shall you do anything embarrassing involving your penis.

Also...
I feel I should come clean about something. I know you think I'm a 20 year old English writer, but I am, in fact, a Syrian lesbian.