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Fail Better

“You’re a writer? You will fail but you have to go on. There is no choice. ‘Fail better.”
‘Ever tried. Ever failed.’ says the nameless protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho. ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Forty years after the book’s publication, these words are often rolled out as encouragement by tutors to writers never to give up. The sentiment of this instruction, repeated several times in Beckett’s novella, contrasts with what, at first, appears to be its bleak premise that failure is inevitable. Don’t be fooled by Beckett’s reputed pessimism. At the heart of Worstward Ho is an argument for the primacy of endurance. You will fail but you have to go on. There is no choice. ‘Fail better.’

In May 2024, to give several writers the opportunity to fail, WritersMosaic embarked on a month-long initiative, establishing a retreat at Villa Lugara in northern Italy. The 16th century casa canonica, or church farmhouse, is situated at the foothills of the Apennine Mountains in Emilia Romagna and is surrounded by oak woods which lead to an ancient pathway for pilgrims. A sympathetically restored ruin, Villa Lugara offers a retreat from the fast pace of modern life.

Retreat, in one of its meanings at least, might be associated with shame and failure. But a retreat also signals a way out from defeat. A strategic retreat enables the chance to remuster and start again. After all, sometimes you have to go back before you can advance. And the retreat at Villa Lugara allowed the writers to reflect on the blockages in their writing and to chart paths of progress.

The craft of writing demands the excavation of ideas in words, sentences and paragraphs through trial and error. But fundamentally, the advice to ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.’ runs up against the cost of doing so. Few can afford the luxury of the writer who, for instance, having written a sentence in the morning, crosses it out in the afternoon and considers her day’s work done.

Similar expressions of the supposedly irony-free notion of a successful day’s writing, having produced nothing, that I’ve heard over the years on the lips of some of my more indulgent literary colleagues, always caused me to roll my eyes. Some of the same peers have also been known to repeat the dubious aphorism of the critic Cyril Connolly: ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’

Attending to the care of newborns need not be an impediment to writing; there are countless examples of writers who have recently become parents and yet continue to create. But if not the pram, there are myriad other obstacles that get in the way of the simple business of writing. They include: the expensive repair of that leaking roof you’ve been putting off mending for years; the unpaid bills; and the capitulation to paid overtime and to the self-generated earworm that whispers to you, ‘no one’s going to read that stuff anyway. Who do you think you are?’

A retreat is a relief from doubt. That, at least, was the thinking behind our investment, generously funded by the Hawthornden Foundation, at Villa Lugara. We hoped that a month away from home and family would be an adventure in writing. There was always a risk, however, that the successful applicants might be initially terrorised by the spectre of uninterrupted writing.

I recall my own writer’s paralysis a few years ago when I first signed up as a member of the London Library, an act which promoted me, I mistakenly believed, to the ranks of true author. Dutifully arriving at the library each morning, finding a desk, selecting the right pen, sharpening a pencil (more than once) and turning back the cover of my writing pad, I was often intimidated by the tyranny of the blank page and the sound of the nonstop, competitive writing of my peers. They tapped away at laptops, freely and tauntingly, as I dawdled, unable even to manage a sentence in the morning that might be deleted in the afternoon. We didn’t want that at Villa Lugara.

We did want, however, to foster a collegiate atmosphere. And so it came to pass. We were lucky in the first cohort of chosen writers: Saima Mir, Katy Massey, Clementine E. Burnley, Amanda Vilanova, Ishy Din and Peter Kalu. Not only was there an absence of friction between them but, very quickly, real friendships emerged.

Great claims have been made about how writers’ retreats might transform an individual’s life. But might there also be communal benefits? We didn’t want to encourage the romantic idea of the writer on retreat as a kind of pampered hermit, as depicted in the accounts by the attendees of fabled residences such as Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, with its fifty-five-room Tudor mansion. We wanted to complicate the model of sponsored solitude by providing opportunities for group experiences, including morning yoga beside the outdoor swimming pool, afternoon strolls through the sylvan beauty of the countryside, treks to local caves, visits to the opera house at Modena and socialising with local writers in Parma.

At Villa Lugana, breakfast would not be prepared by staff and left on a tray outside each writer’s bedroom to avoid disrupting the flow of their writing . Instead, as relayed in their testimonies, the Villa Lugara writers descended eagerly to the kitchen each morning where their excited interactions and the sharing of delicious food prefaced the welcome return to their work from the previous day. Coincidentally, most writers adopted a Graham Greene-like practice towards the working day. Greene’s typing always stopped once he’d reached five hundred words for the day, no matter what, even if the final sentence was incomplete; that sentence would be finished the next day.

After a full day of writing, the evenings at Villa Lugara took on a character that was reminiscent of what Trinidadians call ‘liming’; the collective fun of just hanging out and doing very little. ‘Encouragement sweetens labour,’ my mother used to tell me as a child. Liming sweetened the serious but rewarding business of writing and the results are transparent. The conscientious labour of the six writers is evident in their reflections, shared in this guest edition, and in the advance of the works-in-progress they brought with them to Italy.

During her stay at the villa, Saima Mir completed a draft for a new novel, The Assasination Agency, in which three siblings discover their deceased mother had been a contract killer. Clementine E. Burnley fine-tuned chapters of The Strangers’ Quarters, her memoir of leaving Cameroon at the age of seventeen to head to Scotland. Katy Massey began a novel which built on the formal experimentation of her memoir, Are We Home Yet? Amanda Vilanova fleshed out the beginnings of a trio of stories based on the lives of three generations of Puerto Rican women. Ishy Din completed a first draft of his play Champion, set around Mohammed Ali’s visit to South Shields in 1977. His enquiries around matters of race, class and belonging from his fellow scribes were both enlightening to him and food for thought for us all. Peter Kalu added to his inventive short story collection, Green England Haunting, which interweaves colonial stories with the British countryside.

All of the writers proved inspiring ambassadors for the group and for each other. In this WritersMosaic guest edition, they explore the value of writers’ retreats and what might be achieved in a month of communal living through concentrated thought and writing. Perhaps, if you never try, you never have to worry about failing. At Villa Lugara, we encouraged the writers to try to fail. They succeeded.

Colin Grant

Colin Grant’s books include Bageye at the Wheel, short-listed for the Pen Ackerley Prize, and Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His latest book is I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. His oral history of migration to Britain, What We Leave We Carry will be published in 2025. Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and director of WritersMosaic, an online magazine and division of the Royal Literary Fund. He also writes for a number of newspapers including the TLS, Guardian, Observer and New York Review of Books.

© Colin Grant
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