A few thoughts about writers and the F-word …

No, no, not that one. ‘Fuck’ has always seemed to me a much maligned little word, with a seemingly magical power to shock, relieve feelings and, almost incidentally, describe an extremely pleasurable activity. Despite what the occasional Premiership footballer might say about scoring crucial goals in international matches, anyone who says that something is ‘better than sex’ is almost certainly getting the sex wrong.

And, despite the bad press and the coy veil of asterisks it sometimes gets, ‘Fuck’ is a word that does no harm.No-one ever died from a prissily raised eyebrow.

Unlike the real F-word, which blights the lives of many innocent people, writers more than most. ‘Failure’. Or, if we’re going to be precious about it, ‘F*****e’.

It’s presented as a disaster, an invisible mark of Cain that sets one apart from the successful few. ‘Loser’ is a favourite taunt hurled by people who don’t know better to get under the skins of people who should.

For writers in particular, the people with whom I am most concerned, failure is a constant companion. All authors fail, all the time; however carefully they are set down, the sullen words on the page never quite reflect the dancing, glittering dreams that the writer wanted to convey. The phrase ‘successful author’ is an oxymoron. The most any writer can hope for is the deeply private feeling that many people would have written a piece differently, and a few might have written it better, but the words that he sees before him are the best that he can do.

And even that grudging satisfaction seldom lasts through a single sleepless night. When you stop rewriting what you’ve already written, it probably means that you’re dead.

But after all, how else can writers measure success? If it’s by sales, awards, or the stuff critics write in the newspapers when they’ve skimmed a couple of chapters of the book into which the author has poured his soul, then they are fooling themselves, nothing more than children striving to please different teachers. Philip Larkin would have laughed at the suggestion that he was a success; John Keats would have wept.

A.E. Housman, told that someone regarded him as the finest Classics scholar of his day, scoffed, ‘If I were, he wouldn’t know.’

In a recent little spat on Twitter, by contrast, my correspondent told me, ‘I do well, and I don’t apologise for it.’ Leaving aside the fact that most people who do well don’t need to say so, a claim like that raises two questions: What has she done, and what are her standards of success? If she thinks she’s done well, then she seems co-incidentally to have set the bar comfortingly just below the level of her achievement.

But I’m not saying anything here that we don’t all know – something that we may have forgotten, but that we learned, literally, at our mother’s knee. Anyone who has seen a little child take those first wobbly, uncertain steps that mark the transition from babyhood to the excitement of  being a toddler – anyone who has taken those steps – knows the truth. You don’t make progress without failing a few times.

Claims of success, if they are anything at all, are a smug glance backwards; taken properly, failure is a level stare into the future. Samuel Beckett put it succinctly: ‘Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Fail better. Always. It’s quite an ambition.