This is the Fundamental Reason Why Some People Succeed
Behind the Scenes #6 ...as described by Phil Stutz, plus why editing is like sewing a lace dress, loving The Gentlemen, fallure not failure and tree planting
Hello, I’m Sanjida. I’m an award-winning writer and I write about writing, wildlife and wilderness. Subscribe for free to enjoy one or two posts a month from me. Or, better yet, consider becoming a paid subscriber to see ALL my content, including exclusive resources on how to be a better writer — particularly thrillers and nature writing — read my book, Wilderness, on rewilding and belonging, and join The Coffee House, an online writing group. I’d love you to meet you…
Here’s what I’ve been up to this month - you’ll find out some thoughts about how to edit, why The Gentlemen is the bees’ knees, how to fail and the secret to success.
Plus I planted a few trees!
Editing
I’ve had some absolutely brilliant feedback from my agent on the thriller I’m writing (by ‘brilliant’ I mean helpful, useful, insightful and will result in a ton of work). It’s based on an award-winning short story, The Beautiful Game, originally published in The Perfect Crime by HarperCollins (available here).
The trouble with feedback though, is that one tiny change, according to an editor, can actually call for quite a big re-write.
In my thriller, a young woman, Hebe White, goes missing. My agent’s suggestion is that the reader should discover Hebe was more closely intertwined with the main characters’ lives earlier on in the story.
To make a plot change like this, which resonates throughout the whole novel, is a bit like taking a beautiful but fiddly lace dress that you have lovingly stitched together, unpicking all the seams, inserting several slivers of new fabric and the odd dart and tuck, and then sewing it all painstakingly back together so no one can see the joins.
What makes it harder for me (please excuse writerly winge) is that my story is solely narrated in the first person by one character, who spends most of her time in a Gothic mansion on the edge of Saddleworth Moor, isolated, gas lit and increasingly freaked out, whilst waiting for her Premier league football-playing boyfriend to finish his training as young women continue to disappear.
Thus many of the scenes occur in the same place and in the same person’s head.
I knew I was going to get myself into a muddle.
So I created a chronology - a scene by scene list of what actually happens as opposed to a) what I think happens or b) what I meant to write. I then turned all the parts of the plot to do with Hebe red so I could see, at a glance, that strand and if there was enough of it threaded through the chapters. Next I added in all the proposed changes in purple-blue.
Sugar and caffeine helped me power myself through the process!
The result: a monster of over 100,000 words.
One of the reviews of The Beautiful Game, said it was “simultaneously full of dread and good fun”; I hope I’ve managed to keep that spirit alive in this version.
Watching
I’m loving The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s new TV series on Netflix. It’s a clash of landed gentry versus urban gangsters, crossed with monied-glamour, razor-sharp wit and cut-glass cheekiness.
The script is what makes it for me: most of the long and somewhat erudite speeches are by the working class underclass.
Stanley Johnston: People either survive in the jungle or exist in the zoo. Few recognize the significance of the paradoxical reconciliation of the two. It takes a rare individual who understands how cunning and aggressive one has to be to acquire an estate such as yours. Your house is a testament to the synthesis of this culture. Refinement with aggression.
The Gentlemen by Guy Ritchie; Episode 1: Refined Aggression
Susie Glass: There's a dog in a man that the man can't control. So we had to control it for him. Know what the fundamental challenge with the human condition is?
Eddie Horniman: No. But filling in the blanks, is it too much dog and not enough man?
Susie Glass: Too much untrained dog. And we are in the dog training business.
The Gentlemen by Guy Ritchie; Episode 1: Refined Aggression
Reading
I’ve been reading The 12 Week Year by B Moran and M Lennington1, who quote rock climber and business man, Jim Collins. 2
Recently failure has been repurposed as a Positive Thing. But how you fail depends on your mindset.
Jim says that when you fail as a rock climber, you fall; there’s no visible difference between falling off a rock face as a failure or, as what he terms, a fallure.
Fallure: “You leave nothing in reserve no mental or physical resource untapped.” Jim Collins
However, in failure, you give yourself an out (“I might have made it if…”) but in fallure every last scrap of mental and physical energy is expended on the climb.
I don’t think the word is going to catch on, but the concept is useful.
“You’ll only find your true limit when you go to fallure, not failure.” Jim Collins
Usually when I fail, I blame myself, everyone else, become demoralised and wonder if I can learn anything from the process. After all, if your book is not published, or doesn’t sell well, it may not be your fault.
But as Moran and Lennington say, “Set it in your mind right now that the process is more important than the result. You can’t control the result; what you can control are your actions.”
And I do like writing. No matter what the outcome.
Listening
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You, a series of essays by Phil Stutz (of Stulz fame on Netflix), a psychotherapist who has numerous celebrity clients.
He recounted a conversation with a friend of his, an acting teacher who coaches many of the biggest names in Hollywood. One night he and Phil were discussing why some actors become stars whereas others, equally talented, do not.
“My friend claimed if you showed him a group of gifted young actors, he could predict which ones would make it,” Phil said, and laughed. But his friend was serious.
He said there was one specific aspect of an actor’s personality that would determine success or failure.
Their secret, he said, was how they dealt with auditions.
“Since I’ve had many actors as patients, I’m aware of how difficult it is. You have to walk into a room full of strangers and bare your soul. You’re given five minutes to impress them and believe me, they’re not easily impressed.” Phil Stutz
“All the stars had one thing in common, said Phil’s friend. It wasn’t how well they prepared for their audition. The key was how they reacted after the audition. They never attacked themselves. Even if things went badly, they found some way to tell themselves they did okay.”
And I think that is a lesson we could all use. Writers face rejection and failure spectacularly often, but everyone, in any walk of life, encounters rejection and failure, no matter how hard we all try and avoid it.
So there’s the key to success: find something positive about difficult experiences, no matter what. Control the only variable you can control: your reaction.
Yeah, I know. Hard.
Doing
So far this year I’ve planted 100 trees in our mini rewilding project at Wild Pinebeck. Thirty more hazels to go!!
You can find out more about our project and my nature book, Wilderness, which I’m serialising on Substack here. I’ve made the first chapter free!
about how to get more done in 12 weeks than most people do in a year. I’m finding it’s helping me prioritise as I really can’t work for the
, edit my thriller, learn Spanish, complete a masterclass with Jed Mercurio and run my writing workshops All At The Same Time.‘Leadership Lessons of a Rock Climber’ published in Fast Company.