It occurs to me that a key element of the creative process is failure.

I’m never happy with anything I’ve done. As much as people love her, I
never quite captured Kachiko’s spirit. 7th Sea wasn’t what I wanted or
saw in my head. Despite what rpg.net critics say, almost everyone who
talks to me about Orkworld says it’s beautiful, stirring, and tragic. But, I
look at it as something that I didn’t quite polish up right.

The creative process is about failure.

Who was the painter…

The story goes like this. There’s this painter and someone asked him,
“When do you know you’re done with a work?” And the painter’s reply
was, “When they take it away from me.”

(That’s a story for the next guy who tells me he’s been working on a roleplaying game for twelve years.)

The creative process is about failure.

Failure to capture what you see in your head.
Failure to capture the words you hear.
Failure to capture the poetry of it.

It’s up there, in the astral plane–in Yesod, if you prefer–the perfect story. I just get echoes of it.

What seperates the wise from the willing is knowing this simple truth.
You cannot succeed. You cannot capture the perfect story, perfect
novel, perfect roleplaying game, perfect chair, whatever.

It is the process of reaching that is important. That we even try.