Benjamin Percy
The Dark Side
Posted by Urban Waite, April 16, 2013 2:00 pm
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Filed under: Original Essays.
Every night after I finish work, I sit down to write this essay, and every night I fail. And failure, believe it or not, is one of the best things that can happen to a writer . Trying to write and then coming up short is all part of the process. It means that the writing hasn't measured up. It means the work can be better and this goal of something better is what's important.
One of the best tips I've received on talking about my work is to give the reader something they cannot find in the pages of my novels. So let's start there. I failed myself when I started down the path to what would become my second novel, The Carrion Birds. I had false starts. I had scenes that didn't go anywhere, characters that didn't seem real enough, even 20,000-word sections that didn't measure up. So I held onto it, believing the good writing — the writing The Carrion Birds deserved — would come.
For a long time I struggled over this essay because what I was writing didn't seem like something from my own mouth. It seemed like something in the voice of one of my ...
