what Grouchy Goat can teach us about persistence
refusing to quit + a thank you & online event for Pocket Universe
Well, here we are, in the very last day of February. How are you all doing? I’d kind of secretly themed this month’s newsletters around “persistence”—but it turns out I have been mostly muddling through myself. (As poet and Friend of the Newsletter Brownen Tate put it more succinctly in her own newsletter, I Have Lost to February.)
But today! A few thoughts about writing and persistence, through the lens of a truly ugly video game creature, Grouchy Goat.
Is anyone out there watching Mythic Quest? It’s basically Silicon Valley, but set at a video game company. Which is to say, it’s The Office with really rich nerds.
There’s a season two subplot I keep thinking about. Rachel and Dana, the testers, get charged with creating a mobile game, and Dana quickly gets obsessed with the game she’s trying to make, called Grouchy Goat. The thing is: it’s terrible. Dana can’t code, and the goat doesn’t move right. The whole project gets shelved.
But Dana keeps working at it, even after she’s told to give up. Her bosses, Poppy and Ian, call her into a meeting, and when she enters, they’re staring at her game. (This is the final episode of season 2, and it’s much funnier if you just watch it instead of reading my paraphrase!)
They begin by telling her in no uncertain terms just how terrible it is—“it’s shit,” Ian says—and she says she knows, but she can’t stop working on it. She can just see it. She knows it can be so cool, even if it’s not there yet. What I love about this scene is how it subverts what might feel like a conventional narrative for the struggling artist. They haven’t called her in to tell her she’s great, that they’ve seen the brilliance in her work that no one else could recognize. But they know she won’t give up. Ian waves at all the other developers on the floor, and says,
These people out here, they will crumble the first time someone rejects one of their brilliant ideas, which happens all day every day. Now, are you going to make anything good? I don’t know. But you sure as shit aren’t going to quit until you do, obviously. All these people, they would give up almost right away.
The big reveal here isn’t that she’s a genius and she’s finally going to get the recognition she deserves. It’s that her art is terrible but she’ll keep working on it until it isn’t. Most people quit. But she won’t.
Maybe it’s just because I’m in a weird place with my writing right now, where I’ve gotten a couple of rejections and a bunch of almost-but-not-quites (which are more painful, imho!), but I found this scene genuinely moving. None of us can guarantee anything about the reception of our writing—but we can keep putting the work in. We can refuse to quit until we’ve made something good.
book news: Pocket Universe and The Long Devotion
The two books I’ve been working on since 2013 and 2018 respectively are now publishing within a couple weeks of each other! Pocket Universe’s official publication date is this Wednesday, March 2nd, and I wanted to share a thank you and an online event with you. (The Long Devotion is officially out in April; I’ll share more book and event info when we get closer!)
If you've already ordered the book, thank you! And I'd love to say thank you with a signed bookplate--it's a way for me to sign your book from afar. Just shoot me an email letting me know you'd like a book plate, and I'll pop it in the mail for you right away.
And if you haven't yet ordered, there's still time! You can order it from Bookshop, LSU, Amazon, or your favorite local bookstore. (And then email me requesting a bookplate, if you’d like.)
I'll be reading from the book and giving a little behind the scenes about the writing process on a facebook live event hosted by LSU Press on Thursday, March 10th at 3-4pm eastern. I'd love for you to join me! You can find info about that event here: https://fb.me/e/cw9wegFDa
I hope February has treated you well, and I’ll see you next week with some thoughts about writing through rejection.
How is your writing going? I’d love to hear from you.You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).