sketch: Jane Eaton Hamilton 2014
We’ve all been there on the receiving end of rejections that are ill-conceived and thoughtless. Your work is crap, these notes say, in whatever arguably neutral language they couch this in. Your work made me vomit. Go shovel walkways. Go work at Goonies. Just go away and please, please, please, and whatever you do, stop writing.
They aren’t actually that bad, and most of them aren’t bad at all. But we feel like they are, right?
It may be that, in fact, our work is crap. It happens to the best of us. After 35 years at this, I still write reams of garbage, and, sometimes, I send it out. But regardless of the status of my submissions, good or bad or in between, the stats for rejection/acceptance stay about 20-1. Which means that I get one acceptance per couple dozen rejections.
Does being queer enter into that? Of course it does. Pieces aren’t judged only by merit. Unless there’s a push for affirmative action at a magazine, an article/story/poem that is even tangentially about being queer is often overlooked. Oh, we published a lesbian piece last month. Not quite for our demographic. A little too avant garde for us.
Do I care? Yeah, a lot. I hate homophobia, and at my age, it’s a tired old saw. Go play with knives, already. Get over yourselves and ask more of your readers.
But even so, if I send a piece out–no matter what kind of piece it is–for long enough, with enough diligence, it will eventually find its home, and that won’t be the bottom of the barrel, that’ll be at a magazine/journal/online site where I’ll be proud to publish and they’ll be proud to have you.
Most of being a writer is showing up, keeping at it, being persistent when the whole damned enterprise seems keyed to shutting you down.
Here’s what I know, though. You can do one thing better than any other writer anywhere: you can be yourself.
Authors might have talents and skills you don’t have, but you have talents and skills they don’t have, as well. That’s the thing that strikes me over and over in this long-game: No one can write like I do. Often I whine and grumble about that–how I can’t stop being me for five minutes in order to write as brilliantly as, say, Eudora Welty–but really, ultimately, my uniqueness is a good thing. In fact, in an over-crowded marketplace, it’s the sum total of what I’ve got. My idiosyncracies? Those are my only commodities in publishing-land.
Do I wish I had other styles, other skills, other talents? Of course I do. Absolutely I do. If I could write like Arundhati Roy, or Karrie Higgins, or poetry like, say, Alice Anderson or Jane Hirschfield or Marilyn Hacker, or essays like Roxanne Gay, or one true sentence the way Ray Carver could, or a Lidia Yuknavich short chapter, I would die a perfectly fulfilled human being. If I could turn a sentence like Rebecca Brown or Lorrie Moore or Mavis Gallant or Toni Morrison I would be incandescent. But I can’t. That’s them. That’s their kick at the can. It’s not supposed to be mine.
Mine is the bit I got.
And that’s a lucky thing. Because if we all wrote like each other, reading would be a grim task indeed.
Your work is crap? Make more crap. Do it the Beckett way: If you’re going to fail–and you are going to fail–fail better.
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