For the longest time, though I desperately wanted to be a writer, I was convinced that I was incapable. It took me a ridiculously long time to prove to anyone that this wasn’t true.
Many years ago, in Chicago, my first writing gig was reviewing books for a popular local weekly. Somehow I had the confidence to pursue and land this plum position, which possibly could have been a springboard to the career I imagined. But I had no sense how to foster my small corner of literary real estate.
I’ll skip ahead here to when my first review appeared, and I nervously flipped pages through the weekly to find it, and almost as quickly, my heart sank.
I was so angry that I couldn’t see straight.
In the great tradition for writers everywhere, I faced the outrage of having my work messed with by an editor.
That same afternoon while at my day job (unrelated to writing), I phoned this editor—I’ll call him Sam—to argue the deconstruction done to my four-hundred-word review. As my voice got louder, I drew curious looks from co-workers. I was convinced Sam had it in for me, attacking me through my work—as if he had nothing better to do. Annoyed with me, he explained how out of line I was and hung up.
A few weeks later I was surprised when Sam included me in his e-mail list of prospective reviewers, among which several were up and coming local authors. This must have been a mistake. He must have forgotten that we had had it out on the phone. Seeing my name in that email, however, reignited my anger and made me feel . . . humiliated. And something of a fraud. Realizing I had oversold my ability, I never followed up for another review. My writing career seemed finished just as soon as it had begun.
In the long look back, it’s a wonder that I managed to continue with trying to publish.
This was around the same time I had weekly confrontations with a writing group that bedeviled me about my meager grasp of writing fundamentals.
Writing is about perseverance in the face of rejection and indifference.
Up until that point, I had written little more than some passionate journal scribblings about books I loved, pieces that wouldn’t cohere, and a floundering novel, as well as a handful of fragments that I’d tried to anneal into stories or had installed like garish set pieces into my lumpy novel; I had published nothing before that short review. So, when I got that gig, I was overjoyed that an editor was willing to take me on—it must have meant I was a writer.
Before that fateful review, I knew nothing of how to organize a piece of writing, how to bring it under control, let alone how to edit. It’s fair to say crafting a piece of writing was an unknowable, alchemical process that I would have to spend years at before I could appreciate, in retrospect, the triage done to my work. My writing then was in that precious stage such that allowing anyone to touch it was an affront to my creative sensibility. I’d prided myself on my iconoclasm, but I was merely driven by hubris and naivete. I wanted to be published as a sign of legitimacy, so that I could say, “I’m a writer”; clearly, getting published came about a dozen steps too soon.
I still find it astounding that I was cavalier with an editor who had tried to give me a break. On the other hand, I’m humbled at my younger self’s willingness to put himself into a strange trial by fire before he’d even understood the ground rules. It’s hard not to think that this job could have helped me get further along, sooner, had I not retreated so quickly.
What that humiliation did was forced me to overcome all of the voices telling me (including my own) that I couldn’t do it. Perhaps I was afraid I could not improve, and then I’d eventually be rejected by the next editor. Maybe I was convinced that I couldn’t write, and I was letting my earnest attempt—because it was earnest—become a foregone conclusion.
Those years between that first writing assignment, and when I decided to really get serious about writing, was a necessary interregnum.
One point was clear: if I really did want to be a writer, I was going to have to learn the rules—especially if I wanted to break them. No more could I rest on the assumed laurels of my journal writing. I would have to prove myself every time I put my work out for a reader, be it someone in my writing group, an advisor, or an unknown editor.
It was only after I began to listen and understand what needed to change that I improved, and in that time I gained the confidence to start sending out my fiction to literary journals. Sending work out meant facing inevitable rejection. I once had a goal of getting 100 rejections and then I was going to celebrate. I got so busy sending work out that I forgot to celebrate. But I did, eventually, get published. In the years since I’ve received encouraging recognition along the way, and publishing has occurred almost as a matter of course. Certainly, getting published offers a frisson of satisfaction that can have long term positive effects, but I see my earlier expectations differently, now. The reality is, I wasn’t ready when I landed that gig. I needed years of practice before I could understand that you have to put in the time and effort to become a writer.
Writing is about writing. Doing the work: completing a draft of a story, or a novel, so that you can return to it and revise it. It’s about perseverance in the face of rejection and indifference.
Because I have persevered, writing, the hard work and years of commitment, have gotten me closer to where I wanted to be. To where I couldn’t have even imagined was possible. It has been a long, at times grueling, not always rewarding, ascent. But the irony is that perseverance is one of the best lessons I learned from writing.