Overcoming the Fear of Failure

I’m still continuing the big job of scanning all my artwork. It’s a bigger job than I imagined as I had the idea of not being as productive as I actually was. My own impression of most of the time I’ve been doing comics is suffering over a blank page terrified of spoiling its pure beauty by my scrawly messy lines. Although, there is certainly truth to that. I own a lot of sketchbooks that are empty. I bought them with pure intentions thinking that this would be the one, the sketchbook that was hungry for my ideas and I could use as a platform for becoming a better artist. However, they remain as blank as the day I bought them.

But there were also times where I was filling pages up like nobody’s business. I was surprised at the amount of art I did at the beginning. It wasn’t great art, but I was at least using my pencil for something. Then there would be a long dry spell where I couldn’t get past my intention to draw. Why did this happen? Why was I suddenly so unproductive despite my willingness to create?

Probably the number one problem I faced was not a lack of ideas. The one thing that has dogged my creative life has been a fear of failure.

How The Fear of Failure Developed

This hasn’t been a constant thing. There are periods where I wasn’t concerned with failure, probably because I had nothing to lose. When I first started doing online comics, I was among a group of amateurs, and we did art mainly for ourselves rather than the outside world. It was here I was really productive, because I wasn’t really aware of an audience, just a group of friends who had the same interests as I did. You can’t really fail in this situation. If you fail, you laugh it off and go on to the next picture. Everything we did was for fun and the love of what we were doing.

I also had a small community for the comic in a BBS. It was a group of about 20 regulars and a greater number of people passing through but the spirit was always positive, everything was done in fun and I really didn’t worry about their approval because we had this friendly acknowledgement of each other as people. The comic always felt second to the community, and this was, for me at least, a reason to keep going.

However, when Sexy Losers was starting to take off, the fear of failure reared its ugly head. Suddenly, the comic I was doing for my friends with my friends was mainly for a bunch of people I didn’t know. Without my friends to make it fun, I started worrying about the approval of a bunch of strangers I didn’t know. If I made a good strip, I’d hear about it, and that was nice. But If I made a crappy strip, I’d hear about that too, and that wasn’t so nice. With my friends as readers, I never heard any snarkiness, any negativity. Now I was hearing it.

Soon, I was feeling I had to hit home runs every time I went to bat, and if I didn’t, it was a hit to my self-esteem. All the comments from people started to weigh on me. There were always positive ones but I’d tend to focus on trying to minimize the negative ones. I was beginning to double guess my ideas, feel my art was inadequate, and find that task of drawing more of a chore than something fun.

The fear of failing had its full grip on me.

When this happened, the blank page began to become a wall between me and my ideas. I was afraid that when I drew that first line it was the beginning of what would ultimately be a failure. A picture no one understands. A scene that would betray the limitations of my artistic skill to everyone. A phrase that would be awkward and unnatural. A joke that just wouldn’t land.

This also affected my casual drawing or sketches. I’d be in an art school and see a beautiful sketchbook that I wanted to put my ideas into. I’d buy it and it would remain blank, as I’d be afraid to stain it with my art.

This lasted a long time. However, soon people stopped expecting updates that never came, a result of my artistic paralysis. And I stopped trying. You couldn’t fail if you didn’t try, not understanding that not trying is the worst failure of all.

An Opportunity to Reinvent

In 2011, I got a second chance. I received a mail from someone who wanted to buy my old artwork. This surprised me as I didn’t think that my art had any value. Why would anyone want it, let alone want to purchase it? I decided that I would make a few more strips and sell the originals. It took a while, but I figured out a format I could work with so that the originals would be sellable. I would do the comics on a single sheet of paper, and color them with Copic markers. I had lost access to my old site because of disuse, so I posted them on Tumblr, looking to capture the same large audience I used to have.

It never happened. I did about twenty comics and for the most part they were not seen by anyone. A failure, but it did get me drawing again, and I was starting to fill out sketchbooks again. I was finding my love of drawing again because that fear of failure was nowhere to be seen — I was starting from scratch again, and failure just meant I’d go on to the next picture. I was back being a nobody again and was free of the pressure that I was putting on myself to please strangers on the internet.

I was starting to take risks again. Later that year I started depression comix, which was in a different style and tackling mental health issues. I started off drawing two strips a week. I was back in coffee shops and restaurants drawing with every scrap of of free time I could get my hands on. Back with nothing to lose, I started doing other comics without worry of what people thought, like The Dead Sisters and Haunted Me. I could do whatever I wanted, because there was no more fear of failure. I was doing the comics because I liked doing them and if people liked them it was great, but I would primarily do what I felt was best for the story, not the likes.

I still occasionally draw Sexy Losers strips, but the fear of failure still exists for that. I put up a new comic and the snarky comments return. I truly feel like I can’t please that audience. And for some reason I can’t tell, it matters if I can’t.

So how can you face the fear of failure?

I guess the best way for me is to throw everything away and start from scratch. I can’t fail if I’m at the bottom. And I need to keep that mindset — that I’m already at the lowest point I can reach — so that I can enjoy the process and not worry about losing other people’s approval. And as for community, I have the discord channel, and it has a number of regulars and it feels like the community is once more as important as the work it connects with.

To me that’s the important part. With comics like depression comix and Dead Sisters there is no history, no audience to please. There might be one, but I remain blissfully unaware of it. With Sexy Losers, there is a history and a vocal audience, so when I work on that I will get feedback if it fails. This causes me to second guess everything I do and the enjoyment of doing that particular comic becomes less and less.

For those of you who are dealing with the fear of failure, the best advice I can give is to do something different. A fear of failure is generally a sign that you are locked in to what you are doing, that instead of worrying about developing as an artist you’re more concerned about giving the audience what they want or expect. In some ways this is necessary, especially if your income depends on it. But if it becomes an obsession or something you think deeply about before the pencil touches the paper, it can become a mental block that will stop you from producing.

Some things I try to keep in mind while doing my work:

• You can’t control what people think about your work. They may love it or hate it, and it can be very difficult to predict. This is simply beyond your control so whatever energy is used to guess what the audience will approve of is simply wasted. Do what you like, so you know at least one person enjoys your work.
• When you finish something, let it go. Don’t worry about how much it’s liked, its performance on social media, or whatever metric you use to measure its external value. The best thing I have found to do is just post it, and then go on to the next blank piece of paper.
• Don’t engage so much with the big social media sites. They are incredibly toxic so you’re likely to waste time and get demotivated by interacting on it. Find smaller communities and interact there, you’re likely to find greater support and more positive interactions.
• Remember that everything you do has value, and everything that you didn’t do has no value at all. Looking back at old mistakes reminds me of how far I’ve come, the things I’ve learned, and might even inspire future work. But if I was afraid to put mistakes down on paper, these learning moments might never have happened.
• Finally, be your best fan. That doesn’t mean comparing your work and successes to other people, but celebrating your own accomplishments and your own growth. Be grateful to yourself for everything you’ve done, including your mistakes as they help point you towards a better path. Look at everything you’ve done with pride — you put the pencil on the paper instead of putting the pencil away, and you’re a better creator for it.

I don’t claim to have the answers to conquering the fear of failure. But at the end of the day, I think the best thing we can do as creators is to keep moving forward, embracing the imperfections, the mistakes, and the risks that come with making something new. Because failure isn’t the real enemy—stagnation is. Remember that not only does the world needs your art, but more importantly, you need your art. Let’s keep those pencils going and dirty up some paper!