Failure

“I’ve learned that people—writers and non-writers alike—don’t like that word. Failure….  I take a bizarre pleasure, now, in using that word. Maybe because during my decade as a failed writer, the one thing that took the edge off was wallowing in that failure—carefully, in a proscribed fashion, like having a drink when you’re still hungover.” Stephanie Feldman writes for Vol. 1 Brooklyn about being a literary failure, about the two books she wrote and never published, and about the one she finally did. Pair with the stories of these 5 writers and their failed “novels in drawers.”

is a staff writer for The Millions. She lives in New York and every so often writes things at kaulielewis.wordpress.com.