Rejection and the Silver Lining

I'm currently working as an administrative and editorial assistant at a liberal arts college. Like many who work in a secretarial capacity at small private institutions, a variety of tasks fall under the aegis of "my job." My favorite of these responsibilities involves an artist-in-residence program that, for the purposes of the privacy of all concerned, I shall dub "the Bananafana Fiction Prize." It goes like this: Authors (typically between the ages of twenty-five and forty) submit a CV, a brief description of the WIP they're planning on working on during their time at the college, and a few copies of their published novel. Every autumn, the Bananafana Fiction Prize Committee agrees upon the best novel and most suitable candidate, and the winning author receives some money and an appointment as writer-in-residence for the spring semester. He or she gives one public reading upon arrival (and is feted afterward by the extended literary academic community at a spectacular dinner I've been honored to attend a couple of times), and the rest of their time here is spent being an informal mentor to the students and pursuing creative goals with the support and encouragement of everyone here. It's a sweet deal. And it's a great experience for me, too! Every year, I'm exposed to new authors whose work I might not otherwise have read. (And I confess I draw a certain amount of self-importance from the collection of great writers in my professional address book, even if the full extent of our correspondence is mostly me acknowledging the receipt of their materials and thanking them for their submission.)

So, t'is the season, and the 2011 Bananafana Fiction Prize applications have been rolling in. A few weeks ago, I came into the office to discover a trio of skinny 10x12 envelopes addressed to the Fiction Prize Committee, sitting on my desk awaiting attention. These envelopes each turned out to contain a brief cover letter, a short-story (manuscript), and a self-addressed stamped envelope. The letters all expressed appreciation for my consideration of the enclosed 2,000-some word story for this year's prize, included a sentence-long description of the story, and closed with a signature in the awkwardly idiosyncratic cursive common to young people. Perhaps it was the care with which the papers had been assembled, or the increasingly unusual, almost quaint sight of the SASE (complete with Forever Stamp), or the fact that this had never happened to me before, but I was completely charmed.

I took the manuscripts home and read them. I wrestled with myself over whether I'd mark the copy. I worried that drawing attention only to the errors would cause the students to see failure instead of potential. On the other hand, circling the occasional solecism might encourage the kids to revise their stories and (per the advice I was already drafting in my head) consider submitting their work somewhere more appropriate. I resolved to find at least one valuable thing to say about each story. It occurred to me that my responses to these applications might constitute the first rejection letters these writers would ever receive. And the first time should be special, shouldn't it? I would be gentle. Patient. Kind. Genuine. I admit I fancied myself a bit of a Francis P. Church, holding the illusions and imaginations of so many young people in my hot, ink-stained little hands.

The following afternoon, the mail guy delivered six more applications identical to the first few, each with cover letter, SASE, and story. I thought, "Hm! Now I have kind of a lot of these," but I was nonetheless still smitten. I took the second set home, too, and read them all. Like the stories I'd received the day before, these were also fictional biographies and fictive recastings of historical events. I decided not to mark the papers, in part because deviations in the quality of the manuscripts were beginning to make themselves apparent, enough to make me question the depth of my investment in a project I'd decided to take on outside of work. Copyediting some 25,000 words and crafting personalized responses to each story presented a time commitment that could put a considerable dent in my weekend "me" time.

Maybe you can see where this is going.

On Monday, I arrived at my desk to find a three-inch-tall stack of 10x12 envelopes. I tore into them to verify that they were what I figured and feared they might be. They were. The honeymoon period was over.

Here's an illustrated summary of our time together:

MS Paint artwork inspired by [read: directly ripped off from] the wry, witty, and wise Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half, who knows that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery on the internet.

When my boss suggested that maybe someone ought to change the website (which, incidentally, features not only a full description of the prize but pictures of past winners and blurbs about the novels they wrote), I banged my fists on the table, raged against people who don't follow directions, and defended the website as though I had given birth to it myself.

Now, here's the thing. I subscribe to the blogs of a number of literary magazines, authors, agents, editorial assistants, and self-described rejectors and rejectionists. I followed the #queryfail debacle on Twitter. I read SlushPile Hell every day. I know exactly how common it is for people to ignore submission guidelines and send their work to agents and contest judges who will not read it, and I am well familiar with the deluge of snark and scorn that these writers bring down upon themselves in this fashion. But what became inarguably apparent to me as I tore through the final stack of envelopes was the following awful truth: Someone told them to do this. Some adult to whom the educations of young people are entrusted gave their entire class instructions to do something that arouses nothing but rage and loathing in the editorial community. This person provided envelopes, stamps, and the college's address, so that a room full of writers could waste everyone's time. It is infuriating.

It's tragic, too, because there's a bunch of kids in Texas who won't be getting a real rejection letter from me, but rather what might more properly be called a "letter of disqualification." I made it myself. It looks like this:

Dear [Name],

I am writing to you on behalf of the Bananafana Fiction Prize Committee to thank you for your application. We appreciate your interest in the prize, and I enjoyed reading your short story, "[title]." Unfortunately, your submission does not meet our needs. The Bananafana Fiction Prize does not accept unpublished manuscripts for consideration, and high school students are not eligible to apply.

Because you and your classmates have the distinction of being the youngest applicants in the history of the Bananafana Fiction Prize, I hope you'll permit me, as a longtime aspiring writer myself, to offer you some advice.

Rejection is a staple of the writing life. Failure presents a valuable learning experience, and it’s important to cultivate the ability to do it as well as possible. For starters, dismiss any negativity you might be feeling and welcome the circumstances. The more you fail, the more opportunities you give yourself to succeed.

Secondly, be aware of precisely what it is you’ve failed to achieve. One way to make the most of potential failures is to make sure in advance that what you're applying for is something you really want. Effort should always be conscious. Your greatest successes and your worst failures all have one thing in common: their significance to you. To determine whether an award, publication, or other opportunity is right for you, take time to learn about the people who have already achieved the goals you’ve set for yourself. For example, the current Bananafana Fiction Prize writer-in-residence is [name redacted]. Her novel [title redacted] is a work of historical fiction based on the life of [here's a hint: mad scientist with a penchant for pigeons]. Reading her novel would be especially useful to writers interested in transforming biographical material into fiction, in the same way that you did in the short story you submitted. But reading her novel (or those of past winners of the Bananafana Fiction Prize) would also provide you with a solid idea of the kind and quality of writing that the committee hopes to see among the submissions every year. If you know what you want, be sure to do your research and follow directions—you don’t want to fail for the wrong reasons; and if you do fail, it should be for reasons that are constructive and useful.

Lastly, think about what, if anything, the experience has cost you and how you can benefit from it. (This may also prevent you from making the same mistakes in the future.) Put your analysis of what went wrong to use as soon as you can. Make revisions to your work if you need to, and then submit it to a short-story contest or literary magazine, and then another, and then another--rinse, repeat. Don’t give up. Failing well just might be what really trying is all about; and once you master failure, you’ll be that much readier to succeed. Good luck.


Sincerely,

[my real name goes here]
Administrative Assistant to the Bananafana Fiction Prize

Perhaps what upsets me the most about the ordeal is that it really didn't have to be this way. Instead of being told to put together these packets and send them somewhere they don't know or care about, somebody could have learned something. What happened here is the poor execution of an otherwise laudable idea. Personally, I feel like I waited too long to start collecting rejection letters--because I valued what I considered an "unblemished" submission history, and also because, quite frankly, I was suffering from the well-trod delusion that I would be knocking them out of the park from day one. Since then, I've certainly thought that if I were to teach a creative writing class at the high school level, I would have my students research potential venues for the publication of their work (by, for example, perusing literary magazines or reading contest-winning material), so that they're actually invested in the endeavor when they invariably get rejected. Hell, I'd buy a class subscription to The Paris Review, and then we could all send our short stories and get our rejection letters and put marshmallows in our hot cocoa and commiserate together! It would be grand. It's a good idea to introduce young writers to contest rejection early on, to normalize it quickly. But it should at least be an honest-to-goodness rejection, not a you-didn't-read-the-rules-and-never-stood-a-chance rejection. The lesson is important.

This Dead Blog Makes Me Sad, or This Is Why You Can't Have Nice Things

When I was eleven, I had a teacher, one Mrs. Wilkinson, who had everyone in our seventh-grade English class keep a journal, which she would collect periodically, just to ensure that everyone was really putting effort into the assignment. She set aside class time for writing, although we were encouraged to write avidly outside of class, as well. I'd kept diaries on and off for a few years prior to that, but nothing as well-maintained as the project I was about to begin. I took it seriously.

I bought my first journal at a stationery store in Vienna, a few steps away from one of the tram stops between Grinzing and Schottentor on the #38 tram. The first book had a chartreuse paisley cover and, like all of its successors, was hardbound. Because I wasn't yet aware how much and how frequently I'd be writing, or that I'd be pressing everything from photographs to flowers between the pages, the first journal had a small, stiff spine. I took it everywhere with me. Writing became a solid part of my routine. I wrote when I woke up in the morning; I wrote during lunch at school; I wrote, elbow to elbow on dining-room tables, with my best friends; I wrote in bed, by flashlight; I wrote on field trips--in Graz, Salzburg, Hallstadt, and in Prague, Budapest, and Paris. I doodled, sketched, and painted in it, taped ticket stubs, postcards, cut-out snowflakes, bits of sheet music, candy wrappers, stickers, and friendship bracelets inside. When I ran out of pages, I'd go to the stationery store and buy another journal. Our class visited the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp; I wrote about that. My mother got sick and returned to the United States to get on the national transplant registry; I wrote about that, too. I documented the piercing of my ears, the euthanizing of our oldest family pet, my first experience skiing, the effects of war in Sarajevo, my debut as a clarinet soloist in a youth music festival, the harvesting of wine grapes with Cobenzl vineyard workers. I wrote (and meticulously taped construction-paper flaps over) awful poetry, first-kiss fantasies, lamentations on the subject of puberty, weird dreams, made-up stories, and racy passages copied from romance novels. I described the night my father and I drove on roads lining the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods, on a night so bright he turned the headlights off and navigated by moonlight alone. I described the night it was first suggested to me that he wasn't coming home. I described a few things that happen to you once in life and then never again.

I had about ten years' worth of writing, some eleven volumes, when I destroyed the entire collection.

I had a roundabout way of doing it. I fell in love, packed the journals in a big box, drove 900 miles across the country, and left them in my beloved's bedroom closet. I was nineteen. I thought I was coming back. I thought giving him my single most precious and irreplaceable possession would guarantee my return at a time when few things were certain. Here's why it's my fault: I never told him what the box contained and--either out of respect of my privacy or a complete lack of curiosity--he never looked inside it. We fell out of touch while the box was shuffled around among his things, deposited in a flood-prone basement, and then finally discarded by a disgruntled landlord, along with a smattering of other abandoned belongings.

Among friends, I've referred to the self-sabotaging tendency by which I lose or destroy the things I love best as my dispersionism. I am a dispersionist. My journals were the greatest thing I have ever made and lost. And while I'm wise to the fact that their loss lends them a vaster greatness, it is nevertheless true that words are stronger than memories, and that I greedily regret not having more of both.

It's been about five years to the day I had the brief conversation--long distance, over the phone--about the fate of my journals. I tried to convince myself that maybe it was better this way; that the writing was probably all leg hair and slow dances anyway; that Past Me and Past Life were not as compelling as I'd like to believe; that it's silly and self-indulgent to be so backward-looking all the time; that it is far better to have nothing so dear to lose, no more paper to hoard and haul around, et cetera. And yet, within the last couple of years, I could still catch myself entertaining the deluded fantasy that my friend had actually held on to the box and was hoping to surprise me at some point with an unexpected reunion, or that there exists somewhere some landlord or dump-worker who thought, "Who could possibly throw this away? It must be important to someone. I'll hold on to it for a little while." (Even to describe the "chartreuse paisley cover" is a nod to the latter.) These are, of course, effects of denial--an inability to accept, or even grasp, the scope and permanence of the lack (together with, I admit, a splash of self-importance). Every now and then, I'll tell some half-remembered story, and someone might say, "You oughta write a book!" and I'll flinch to think of the resources I no longer have. It was the first loss of my adult life, the first for which I was solely accountable, and one which seemed to reiterate and worsen all preceding losses (the act of documentation itself being more often than not a futile attempt to salvage and recreate, in my case). I'm still sore about it today.

In time, though, the constellation of responses to something like this--the disbelief, denial, delusions, even disappointment--are superseded by acceptance. There is the sad old adage that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And so it is that I labor to convince myself that it is not the writing itself that mattered, but the fact of having written. The simple fact that "it was" is greater than whether it was actually good or bad, useful or not.

I've written, albeit ambivalently, about the writing cure--here, too, the process is of greater significance than the product. It is somewhat comforting to know that I can't obliterate the effect of all that work as easily as I did the work itself. Writing is--among other things--a craft. Aspiring writers are often advised to write every day, because improvement is a matter of practice. Maybe I'm a better writer now than I would have been if I hadn't poured so much energy into those journals. Maybe I'm a healthier, better-adjusted person than I would've otherwise been. I certainly have pretty penmanship. Consolation prizes, all!

The moral of this story brings me, finally, to the point of this post. When I started this blog, I looked at it as both an impetus and an opportunity to broaden my research and writing habits. I have interests that are not directly related to my job or creative endeavors, and I figured that keeping a blog would provide both an outlet for those interests and motivation for me to put time into, say, reading a pile of studies about the effectiveness of SSRIs versus behavioral therapy with regard to treatment for mild to moderate depression. I wanted to blog about research, about ideas. I wanted to avoid personal pronouns and navel-gazing. The unfortunate truth is that it takes me much, much longer to research, draft, edit, and publish posts about studies and ideas outside my realm of expertise than it would to just write about what I think. The other unfortunate truth is that it's much, much harder for me to consider an avalanche of personal thoughts and experiences as interesting or valuable as reportage and analysis.I try to remind myself that merely having done is more significant than having done well, or even poorly. I'd rather keep a regular blog than not, even a bad one. Really! I loathe being responsible for yet another piece of internet detritus.

My life now is different from what I imagined it would be about eight months ago. If I don't have time for the kinds of posts I was originally planning on writing, I certainly won't have time for them later. Still, I'd prefer to fill this space somehow. There is also the fact that, all things considered, the next year or so offers a bounty of newness that I want to document and share. I've been where I am now for longer than I've ever been anywhere. And I'm leaving. Cat and I are heading across the country. I'll be trying my hand at a super-selective, fancy-pants MFA program. I'll be teaching for the first time. I'll be in the company of writers I've admired for years. It could be wonderful; it could be a complete disaster; it could be variable amounts of both. But it'll be worth writing, I think, and the people who stop by here most often (hello, my friends!) might consider it worth reading.

I'm going to try to post here once a week. Topics may range from perspectives on solitude to the effects of consuming an entire pot of Earl Grey tea (biochemically no different from a tablespoon of ipecac, in case you're wondering). They may be 1,200 words long, or 12 words long, or may just be YouTube videos of toads bouncing down mountains. It doesn't matter. I'm doing it. Weekly. Promise. (In part because it's not easy to pack the internet into a cardboard box and accidentally the whole thing.) It could be bad, it could be good, but most importantly, it will be.

So, cheers to all that. And thank you, Mrs. Wilkinson.