Maybe It's You

I'm leaving tonight for a 4-day conference in Phoenix. One of the things to which I'm really looking forward is the "small group intensive." Me and four other people will be getting together over lunch every day and going over our writing, trying to refine our voices and perfect our technique in an effort to stem the tide of rejection that we all face as writers.

The thing is, as long as you're writing and submitting, you're going to face rejection. There are really three ways to react to the constant rejection that's part and parcel of being a newer writer:

1. You can give up.
   It's easy to say "I just suck" and stop submitting at all. What's worse is when, in anticipation of "I just suck," you don't submit at all. I can't begin to tell you how to develop the thick skin necessary to brave multiple rejections, but there are a couple of things that helped me:
   
   • Have a cheerleader. Having someone who's both unfailingly enthusiastic about your work and at the same time willing to give you honest criticism will help you feel like your work is something you can both take seriously and have some pride in.
   • Have someone else do the submitting. This one's a little harder and involves some expense, but there's no enthusiasm like the enthusiasm of the paid employee. After all, they're not the one getting rejected. It's not like it's any risk for them to keep your stuff in circulation.
   Really, you have to find the motivation and method yourself, otherwise it won't be yours.


2. You can examine your work, make improvements, and THEN resubmit. For me, there's nothing that feels better than getting good feedback on a piece of writing, making some edits, and ending up with a piece that I feel is even stronger. To get to this "no pain, no gain" attitude, though, I had to go through years of writing for a magazine, struggling through every paragraph and sentence, having every piece handed back to me multiple times with advice like "cut it by 150 words."
   
   I knew that my editor liked my writing. I knew that he wasn't criticizing me as a person, my style, my education, my "voice" or anything else personal. He was looking at the layout and seeing too many words for the amount of space he had on the page and needed fewer words. Or more. Or a lede with a better hook. Or something. He seemed to like me as a person just fine, but he was also tasked with making the writing for the magazine the best it could be. Other editors at other magazines for whom I don't work feel the same way, and it's up to you to take their rejections for what they are - indications that your writing may be just fine, but it doesn't work for the space the editor is trying to fill.
   
   It's rare when you get an editor who's willing to give you feedback on your story. If you get some, listen carefully to it - this is the voice of your potential audience. In most cases, though, you're going to need to recruit your own editors and get them to give you feedback. Don't use your mother, who's likely to be unfailingly generous and tell you what a genius you are for being able to spell all the words correctly. Find other people whose writing you know and trust - people who are willing to tell you the truth, but in a tactful way. I'm always wary of the person who says "I have to be honest with you..." and ends with a searing, insulting rant.


3. You can assume that anyone who rejects your work as "not good enough" is a moron and die bitter and alone. I've run into a ton of these people, and so have you. Their work may have the germ of a good story, but for whatever reason, it's not publishable. Instead of looking at their own work and saying "Readers don't understand it. I should fix that flaw," they say "Readers are a moron and don't deserve a genius of my caliber." I have been told by many an insufferable hack that I'm "too stupid to appreciate" his/her work. They rail against the publishing system that only rewards vapidity and commerciality (okay, that's partly true); they rail against editors who are all untutored fools who wouldn't recognize a good book if it landed in their laps; they rail against the reading public who are stuck on conventions like plot and readable sentences. Bastards!
   
   Their fiction is PERFECT. And not only is it perfect, often it was perfect on the first try. "Take that, Anne Lamott! Take that, Strunk & White! I don't need any of you because I am capable of wiping my ass and producing a work of inutterable...genius. I can dash off a first draft that's so far above anything being published today that no editor or publisher is even CAPABLE of recognizing its true genius." Sound familiar?

I have decided to spend more time this year polishing up my own prose, finishing things that need finishing and in general putting in the effort to get more of my stuff published. I have a plan, and that plan includes taking some serious time for reflection and learning from my past.

What's ironic is that I've been having a series of discussion with the Pirate about folks we know who are in this exact same boat - with their love lives. We know people who have just given up, too defeated to do the very hard work of fixing things. We know people who put a lot of time and effort into changing the things in themselves that they see as obstacles to romantic happiness. We also know a few people who have stated in no uncertain terms that they are PERFECT, and that the world is a MORON for not being able to appreciate their perfection.

The point is that publishing is a for-profit business. Publishers are looking for books that are going to sell lots of copies and therefore justify what it costs to produce them. Similarly, life is a for-profit business for each and every living creature. Individually, we are looking for people and things that add pleasure, or at least don't actively piss us off all the time. Being defeatist - giving up and never looking at yourself and your own actions - guarantees that you're never going to find what you're looking for. The other end of the spectrum, being so egotistical about your own worth that you think that the world should love you as you are, despite empirical evidence that it doesn't, is equally doomed. The people who are the most successful in publishing and in romance, are the ones who are willing to admit that they need some work, put their heads down, and get to it.