The Failure Artist: Writing Bullshit, Getting Rejected, and Keeping at It

A few years ago, in a moment of white-hot inspiration, I wrote the climactic scene of a book I had only half finished. The novel is a love story, and at that point, one of the few things I knew about how it would end was that one of the characters would reveal a deep and embarrassing secret he’d been holding back since the beginning.

So I wrote a scene in which the two characters, a man and a woman, are in bed. It’s early morning and the guy is awakened by the crying of one of the woman’s children by her first husband. Her kids do not want this guy in their mother’s bed, but now in the middle of the night, he handles her child’s distress surprisingly well, and when he returns to her bed, one of the big questions of the book—Can this man enter this woman’s life without destroying it?—seems to have been answered. The affair they’re having, which at first seems so self-destructive, might just work. She’s turned on by his domesticity, he’s turned on by the fact that he might not be so wrong for her after all. Things are getting steamy—and then the secret comes tumbling out.

I loved the scene’s intimacy, its rawness. I also loved the fact that it existed. The rest of