In defense of petulance (sort of)

Following a lot of literary journals online as I do, I sometimes see their editors post about the bad behavior of writers. Often, it's writers angry about being rejected lashing out at the journal. Past posts by Roxane Gay and a local journal called Barrelhouse stand out in memory for the way they called out (anonymously, I think) writers who had responded with pique when they'd been rejected. In Gay's case, I think she posted the words of a man who'd responded somewhat condescendingly when he'd been rejected, words to the effect of how nobody would ever pay attention to whatever journal she'd responded on behalf of if they didn't publish work like his. In the case of Barrelhouse, they'd had a writer approach them at a conference to tell them that a story they'd rejected had later been accepted by a better journal.

In both cases, those posting about the responses were holding up this behavior as a cautionary tale of how not to behave. And it is, it is. The correct response when you get a rejection, any rejection, is to not think about it and move on to the next journal. If I get positive words to go with the rejection, I will keep those in my inbox, but anything else, I immediately delete and don't give a second thought to.

At the same time, I understand those writers' reactions. There are three options here:

1. The stories did not merit publication.
2. The stories did merit publication, but the editors erred and picked other, less deserving stories.
3. The stories rejected were roughly the same level of quality as those selected for publication, but the editors chose the other ones for difficult reasons to explain, but which include personal preference and what kinds of other stories had already been picked for publication. 

If it's numbers two or three, the writer's disappointment is at least understandable. This disappointment shouldn't bubble up into a treatise on how wronged the author is lobbed at the editors, but every hundred or so such disappointments, maybe a writer is entitled to such a reaction. If you happen to be the editor who suffered, maybe you could act like writers are supposed to act and just ignore it and move on. It's quite possible the writer, having vented his spleen, later feels sheepish about having done so. There's no real reason to remind the writer later of what he did, or to flog the writer in public, unless the moment of frustration was so over-the-top as to be openly violent, sexist, or racist. 

Let's say, though, that the editors got it right. The work wasn't as good as the writer believed it was, and it didn't deserve publication as much as the stories selected. I still think editors ought to give writers a little slack when they blow off steam. Believing your garbage is good is part of the natural evolution of a writer.  As Octavia Butler said, "You don't start off writing good stuff. You start off writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it."

I've never fired off an angry letter to an editor. But I did once blog about something a reviewer I paid to look at my stuff wrote, and I later regretted it. Moreover, every time I get a rejection, my instinctive reaction is, "Fuck you, you ingrates, that's a brilliant story." I just had that reaction twice this week, even though I'm only a week removed from the best news I've ever received as a writer (more on that soon).

Over the last seven years, I've eventually gotten over my anger enough to "gradually get better at it," but the anger is part of that process. To write anything is an act of enormous chutzpah. It's saying that with all the thousands and thousands of stories being published every year, the world really needs your story, because it's different and it's important and needs to be read. We all write because the story we want to read hasn't been written yet, so we must write it ourselves. That means we're all going to be partial to our own stories, because they're the thing we wanted to see nobody else made. If you don't think your story is better than the ones that do get published, what on Earth are you sending it in for? And if you really think it's better, which you should, then you ought to be angry every time it gets rejected. The world is wronging you. 

That may not be the truth, but if part of you doesn't feel like it's the truth, what are you writing for?

Writing as a business in America is now so much about authors building a brand, we no longer tolerate misanthropic, mean drunks who lob insults at their editors, readers, or the public (unless it's at the politically inclined the writing world has deemed worthy of our disdain). We like our writers humble, Tweeting about the normal people things they do that make them seem approachable and not at all aloof or weird or egotistical. I think we're missing out on something with this as the new cultural norm for writers. We shouldn't always be trying to break writers of their habit of reacting with anger when they're rejected. We should be encouraging them to write something even better so that the world literally cannot miss how good it is. We should tell writers to use their anger to get better, even if what they sent in wasn't good enough to get angry about rejection in the first place. 

It seems to me that if you take a writer who naturally wants to tell a story and then put that writer under pressure over time from the frustration of not getting to tell it, you're more likely to get a diamond than if you encourage writers to smile and enroll in the next class by the journal that rejected them. Getting an angry letter from a spurned writer should be to editors what getting a canned rejection letter is to writers. 

But still, writers, seriously: for you own sake, turn the anger toward the next story, not toward your missive on why you were wronged. If you can.  

The process of deciding what to publish never seems less legitimate than when I'm in charge of it

For the last few weeks, I've been part of a couple of processes to help pick the winners in writing contests. One was Sixfold's writing contest, which I've written about already and in which I only played a small role. (A very, very small role, since the winners were stories I didn't like.) But I have a much bigger role in the Washington Writers' Publishing House fiction contest. The deadline to enter was November 15th.

The publishing house is a co-op. We run a poetry contest and a fiction contest every year. Anyone within 75 miles of D.C. is eligible to enter. So it's aimed at giving a boost to local writers. And it has. A few of the past winners, like Melanie Hatter and Dave Ebenbach, have gone on to pretty big things after winning our contest. The way it's supposed to work is that after you win, you come give of your time to the publishing house for at least two years afterwards. This is my third year after my own win. I'm now in charge of running the fiction contest. That doesn't mean I have sole responsibility for picking the winner, but I am the one getting everyone else together to make the decision, and so I have a lot of influence over the eventual winner.

We got the most entries this year since I've been part of judging it. I've really put a lot of effort into trying to pick the best entry, but no matter what I do, I can't get past the feeling that what we're doing just isn't good enough. I always felt this way during my year I spent as an editor for the Baltimore Review, as well.

One reason our method for picking what to publish seems so inadequate has to do with the review/analysis I've been doing for the past few years on the Best American Short Stories or other anthologies. One of the important things I've learned from doing this is how often my impression of a story ends up being profoundly different after a second reading than it was after a first. That probably sounds a little bit obvious. Everyone knows a story is different the second time through. But I've been really surprised just how different the second reading sometimes leaves matters. Many stories I didn't like after one read became my favorites the second time through.

So really, the minimum I ought to do for the entries is to give them each two reads. But it's also impossible. I don't have time to read them all twice. Nobody helping to make the decision does. The fact is we don't read most entries all the way through once. The process is something like this: I read roughly the first 25 pages of each entry. I pick the five to seven most promising out of that. Everyone else is welcome to do the same. I offer my list to everyone else. Those with time to read through everything and make recommendations send out their lists. The people with less time just read through our recommended best lists. So only two or three people are deciding what the whole board of five or six even narrow in on. Our of the five to seven I picked as the most promising, I then read those all the way through once. Unless I don't, because sometimes about halfway through a reading, I just know it's not going to be a winner and I move on.

I've always consoled myself with this sampling approach by saying that if I don't want to keep reading something after 25 pages, no potential reader we're trying to market to would, either. But I don't know how satisfying that really is, given how profoundly I've changed my opinion after giving something a deeper reading than I otherwise might have. Even if I didn't love it immediately, if we market the book well, the reader is going to give it the benefit of the doubt and get past the beginning to place where she loves it like we did.

Beyond just the basic philosophical question of fairness, there's an emotional aspect to the process. I get rejected over a hundred times a year, and one of the biggest questions I always have is how that decision was made. Was it a really skilled editor whose opinion I would respect? If so, did he hate it completely, or was it just a shade shy of making it? Or was it some grad student just looking for credit for working on the school's lit mag? Did the person or people who voted down on it give it serious consideration, or were they just trying to clear out the queue, so they latched onto something unimportant and used that a reason to make a quick no-vote and move on? Every hint of laziness I see in myself makes me wonder how many other decision makers allow themselves an equal or greater latitude.

I wonder if this isn't having an impact on content in American literature. Some people have made the criticism that a lot of American literature, especially that coming from writing program graduates, all sound the same. I don't agree that it all sounds the same, but sometimes I do wonder if I'm not just reading a variety of ways to say something similar. The political viewpoints of most stories I read in good journals now is pretty much similar to everything else. I don't mean that as a dog whistle, like it would be if someone wrote that in Quilette. I'm not asking for more stories written with traditional, nationalist political viewpoints. But I wouldn't mind some heterogeneity within the side of the political spectrum I did I identify with.  It's not just themes; a lot of the subject matter is becoming very familiar. I wonder if writers aren't learning to hit the things that overworked editors have shown will respond to. I know the stories I've written that got published tend to fit this mold more than the ones that haven't, although some of the ones I've written that haven't are quite likely better. The more stories with certain characteristics get published, the more they lead to other work doing something similar.

Maybe that's too alarmist. I really don't know. I only have my own very small experience as a writer, editor, and reader to go off of. But even if the editorial processes out there aren't actively killing American literature, I think it's almost a given that there is great work getting missed, and it's our fault--the fault of those of us who, at any level, play gatekeeper without living up to the responsibility.

At the very least, if you're a writer I've rejected in my life, just know I didn't take any joy in it, and I haven't yet become calloused about doing it. I hate every rejection I give, and I know exactly what you feel when you get one.

The results are out, and they seem to say that people need to be ruled

I recently mentioned that I entered a story in a Sixfold contest, the literary journal that picks its stories through reader voting rather than a board. I finished in the middle. I didn't even get out of round one.

I actually happen to have read the top three stories that won. They were assigned to me during the final round of voting. I didn't vote very high for two of them, including the winner, which I thought was pretty weak. The second place story was awful. The third place story is okay. If I had been on an editorial board and they had picked the two top stories over some of the other, better entries I saw, I'd have quit the magazine. It's a little hard to tell, because not everybody lets their names go into the final voting list, but I don't see any of the stories I actually liked during voting anywhere near the top. So I think my preferences just don't match the magazine's. I honestly don't think most of the stories they picked as the winners would make it through a halfway decent literary magazine with an editorial board.

As far as the feedback I got on my story from the voters goes, the funniest feedback I got was from one reader who said she gave my story a high vote. But she actually put my story fifth out of six in the first round. That means she was confused about how the ranking works: one is the highest and six is the lowest. She meant to put me second, but she put me next-to-last. Her misunderstanding might have been enough to knock me out after round one. Overall, out of the six votes I got in round one, I got three second place votes, two fifth, one of which was by mistake, and a fourth place vote. The other person who put me in fifth wrote this: " I found the presentation of Jenna as a ‘hypocrite’ for being a powerful woman, but also having emotions, quite problematic. It wasn’t clear enough to me whether this was an intentional comment on the catch 22 of being a powerful woman or not, but it definitely struck me a little incongruous with the overall effect that I think you were trying to create." I don't know what to tell you, dude. It's a first-person story with an obviously flawed narrator, and I found it incredibly clear that you shouldn't take his attitude as the attitude of the story. If you don't get that it's satire after the uber-absurd ending, I don't know how to help you.

Overall, I'm sorry to say that Sixfold's voting process does not seem to work better than a board. There were, like there are with most journals, a lot of bad stories submitted, and each of those bad writers got a vote. The results are sad to me, because I really think it's a great idea to try. I wonder if more journals tried it, if there'd be a place where it worked better. I think the problem with this particular journal, based on the stories I read, is that the taste of the people submitting is rather sentimental. There were a lot of stories where the whole story was a series of sad events resolved with a sudden happy ending that referred to the title, which is kind of a bush league writing tactic. But I can imagine a community forming that has a different taste. If other journals did this, I think you might see identifiable styles emerge from those communities. Sixfold's idea is solid, it just so happens that the writers who submitted, at least in the contest I entered, don't seem to really like sophisticated stories, based on what I read and what I see the readers chose. I'd like to see other journals that try this idea, but with a grass-roots push for a particular aesthetic at the same time. I would describe Sixfold's aesthetic as "ninth-grade girl who's watched a lot of Hallmark Channel."

I'm really kind of sad. Not that I didn't do well. I mean, I wish I'd done better, mostly so it didn't seem so much like I'm just questioning the results now because I didn't do well. But I sort of thought, after reading the stories I saw during voting, that this wasn't my audience. I just really hoped that readers voting would lead to better work getting selected. I wanted to believe in democracy. But it turns out that, as the Internet proves every day, the masses quite often aren't very discerning.

Still going farther, but not forever

I've wanted to be a writer since I was in the fourth grade and wrote stories about the super hero Electroman and his sidekick Fluffy, but I didn't work intentionally at it until I was 41. That may seem like a lie, since I had finished a B.A. and an M.A. in English by 31, the M.A. with a focus in creative writing. But I never really focused on the nuts and bolts of how to write. I just thought I'd read the writing of brilliant writers and somehow, I'd become brilliant, too. Like a lot of people who showed some ability at a young age, I was cocky, and I thought it was beneath me to do something as low-brow as read a book on how to write fiction. I got the results you'd expect from this approach, which is to say I failed, not only to get published, but also to write something worth reading. There were flashes of something interesting back then in what I wrote, but because I was too impatient wanting to be recognized for being brilliant, I only noticed the few flashes of what was good and refused to address the glaring holes. Then I quit, got a job, started a family, and didn't think much about writing for ten years. Work at least made me feel like I was good at something, and having a family scratched another deep itch.

On October 1st, 2013, my work shut down for four days. It wasn't a big deal, nothing more than what you might call a management dispute. It was a foregone conclusion that before too long, we'd get started back up and things would go back to normal. But for some reason, I found it so unsettling in those four days to not be at work, I started wondering what I would be without my job. Not much, it felt like. I needed to be something more than what I was at work. What else was there? It took about two seconds to realize what I wanted was to be a writer.

Maybe it was the wisdom of age, but this time, I was no longer too proud to look for help. I read a number of books on the mechanics of writing, figured out for about forty bucks what I'd gotten into 30K of debt failing to learn in grad school.

I didn't really have an organized list of goals in mind, but I knew I wanted to get somewhere. Looking back now, I think I can put my hoped-for progress into this order:

1) Write something
2) Write something I don't think is terrible
3) Submit something
4) Submit something and get proof someone else doesn't think it's terrible
5) Get something published by someone other than myself
6) Get more things published
7) Get something published in a place that's really hard to get published
8) Start to be recognized primarily as a writer

#8 is where I wanted to get to starting off back in October of 2013. Some of these steps took a lot longer than others. Going from one to five was actually not too painful. Once I was willing to learn a few things, it's amazing how quickly things came together a little bit. I had my first story published in under a year from when I started. But going from five to six--getting my second and third publications, that is--took longer than getting the first story published. I really was close to giving up. In fact, I did give up. It was after deciding to give up, in fact, that one story after another just poured out of me. I kept writing, all the time wondering why I was doing it, because I'd already quit. I got my second story published in fall 2016, then a month later the third, then the fourth a few months after that and finally the Washington Writers' Publishing House called me in February of 2017 to tell me I'd won their fiction contest and they were going to pay me to publish my book. Whatever else happens in my life, I've had a book published, which means I am a writer.

Life after the book

But I still wanted more, and here's where I get a little bit fuzzy on my own motivations, which is another way of saying I'm not sure how good of a person I am. There are legitimate reasons to want to be more widely known as a writer, like caring about the things I write about and wanting others to care about them in the way I do. There are neutral reasons, like just wanting to feel like I'm getting better at something I enjoy. This is sort of an extension of having decided to write seriously in order to be a more complete person than just a guy who worked and took care of his family. Nothing wrong with it. It isn't really a noble reason to write, because it's more about just feeling fulfilled than bringing something to others, but it's certainly not an evil reason for wanting to be more noticed for my writing.

Then there are the reasons I'm ashamed to admit exist. I want my ego stroked. I want to be admired. I want to show people they were wrong about me--not that I can really think of anyone who told me I was going to fail, so it's hard to find enemies. But spite has been a pretty good motivator for me in other areas of my life, so I try to find a way to make it work for me here. Spite-motivation comes at a cost, though: I am ashamed to admit this about myself, but envy of other writers getting the accolades I want has started to make it difficult for me to enjoy the works of other writers.

Normally, I don't worry too much that my motivations for doing something aren't 100% pure. Of course, nobody's motivations are entirely benign. We're all a mix of good and bad reasons why we do things, and to obsess over what particular blend of motivations is getting you out of bed on a particular day is to miss the point, which is to get out of bed however you need to.

But the last few weeks have made me worry about my own motivations, and wonder whether moving on to steps 7 and 8 is being withheld from me by the universe for my own good and the good of others.

So much closer than I've ever been

After the book came out in 2017, I wrote another half dozen stories. I thought they were at least as good as what went into the book, but I couldn't get any published anywhere. There were a few positive notes with the rejections, but nothing landed anywhere. I revised a few and eventually got two published at smaller journals. I should have been happy with that, especially because one of the stories was inspired by my daughter, and she really loved what I wrote. But step #7 was to get into some journal that was really hard to get into. To me, that meant a "top 50" journal, according to one of the lists I had been using for years to determine where to send stories. (This is one such list.) 

In summer 2018, I got on a roll. I wrote five stories, all of which seemed to me to be a clear step above anything I'd done before. No matter how much I account for my own bias toward my own stories, it's obvious reading them that I had some kind of breakthrough. I felt pretty good that one of them was going to get into a top journal.

The early returns seemed to justify my optimism. There weren't any acceptances right off the bat, but I did get personal notes from editors welcoming more writing. I knew these were different from the normal form rejections, because I'D GOTTEN the form rejections from these journals before. I got them from journals that'd never given me the time of day before, journals that had been represented in the "best-of" anthologies I'd been reading: Pank, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review (which I've always desperately wanted to get into because Gettysburg might be my favorite place on Earth), The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly, The Common, Shenandoah. Somehow, I have managed to make Glimmer Train's honor roll three times in the last year of their publication, including their last-ever new writer's contest (which I qualify for, having never been published in a journal with a circulation over 5,000). 

Every one of those "we liked it, it just wasn't quite there" responses meant I'd really taken a leap forward, but it also meant I was still short. Each one left me between ecstatic and crushed. I was grateful to each editor for letting me know that what I'd written was enough for them to take notice, but also bitter I still had work left to go. 

But no response had the dual effect this brief note I got two weeks ago did:

Dear Jacob,
Thank you for sending us "Love Hotel." We admire the way you write and regret that this story is not quite right for the magazine. We wish you the best of luck finding a home for the story, and we hope to read more of your work soon.
Sincerely,
The Editors

Doesn't sound like much, until you consider who "The Editors" are. They're the editors of the mother-humping New Yorker, a magazine ranked #1 or #2 in pretty much every "best journals" list. 

This is the part where I'm not proud of myself

With each near-miss, I felt both happiness and sadness, and the sadness was for a mix of good and bad reasons. The good reason was that I was sad something I cared about wouldn't get a chance to find a larger audience. The bad reason was vanity. When I got that response from The New Yorker and thought for a second about what would have happened if I'd been just a little bit better, just a little bit luckier, my response was completely taken over by vanity. I'd have been admired. People would have been talking about me. I'd have been relevant and important and a part of American letters. I don't know anyone particularly wishing bad things for me, but dangit if such a person were out there, I'd have sure showed him. This was my Sam Gamgee with the ring moment, except what pulled me back from the abyss wasn't plain, good hobbit sense, but the fact I didn't really possess the ring. I didn't feel good about myself.

The point of writing stories is to write something that people will read and make them want, in some way, to become a better version of themselves. There is a lot of room for a variety of meanings about what "a better version of themselves" equates to, but that's the point of stories, and really all art. If that's not it, then there is no point at all. But how can I be the right person to write such stories when their effect on me, the closer I get to achieving the goal, is to become a worse person? 

Then this note came in

One of the editors of one of the journals took the time to write a second note to me, beyond just the short "you nearly made it" response. I just got it today, while I was working on finishing up this post. It was sweet and earnest and kind. It included this line: "Concern yourself primarily with giving full life to your characters' stories, rather than obsessing about publication, and you'll likely create your best work." One conclusion I draw from this note is that the editor has taken the time to read this blog at some point in time. Hello. Thanks very much for the note. 

It's not the first time or the tenth time I've heard that advice. I've tried to convince myself of it before. It certainly has all the taste and smell of wisdom: I can't control getting published, I can only control what I write, and if I believe in what I write, that ought to be enough. If it isn't, then no amount of publication or praise ever will be enough.

But like all good advice, it's damned hard to follow. I'm not sure I even am totally in control of whether I can follow it. The same obsessiveness that drives me to care too much about publication is also what makes me write stories nearly good enough for some really excellent journals. I've always liked being graded. Having tried to write something pure and only for the joy of writing it, I still no sooner finish it than I want someone in authority to tell me if I did a good job. That's just me.

To some extent, I may give off a more dire impression about how hard I take these things than is really the case. For whatever reason, when I started this blog about five years ago, I wanted it to be a true testament to what it's like working your ass off to write good stories when nobody cares. That includes trying to give an honest account of a lot of the negative thoughts I have, because someday, some other writer is going to think the same thing, and I want this blog to be here to let that writer know that others had the same thoughts. So I need to be open about the bad thoughts, even when they make me look petty. I try to record the good things, too, but I've just had more discouraging moments than encouraging ones. That's being a writer for most people. Anyone thinking about following the path I've been down ought to know that.

They also ought to know that there is no guarantee of ultimate success. There may not even be a good reason to keep trying until the bitter end. The writing industry, much of which makes its money off the dreams of aspiring writers, wants you to keep going past the point where you ought to quit. They want you to pay another contest fee, go to another convention, but another pile of books. I just want this blog to be honest enough to suggest that might not be the best move for everyone.

I'm going to keep on going, but I make no promises that I'm going to keep on going forever. A more naturally optimistic person would have been banging away at more writing for the last six months, encouraged to see signs of nearly making a goal. I'm not that person. If I were, I wouldn't be writing stories nearly getting published in the better journals. Optimism is great for achieving things in life, but it's boring as hell to read about. The terribly pessimistic side of me is intimately linked to the part of me that writes stories from a place of authenticity. What I have to see now is whether I can still be that person and get down this next road I marked out for myself.

When failing better isn't good enough anymore

If you've ever tried to beat a video game, unless you're a really good player, you'll likely hit a number of cruxes. These are moments where you have a really hard time beating the level you're on, and at some point, you have to decide if it's worth the time you'll have to put into it to get past the part you're stuck on. Sure, if you keep at it forever, you're bound to beat it sometime, but do you really want to invest that much time in a video game? Don't you have other things you could be doing? Didn't the game stop being fun a while ago?

As you try and try to beat the game, you'll likely have a moment where you almost get it. Either you change your approach, or you get a little better at what you were trying, and you very nearly beat the level. Close, but not quite, and that's usually when you throw the controller down and spend some time asking yourself how much you really want to beat this game.

You've gotten closer than you ever got, but to get even better, you're going to need to change somehow. You're going to need a genuine gaming catharsis. You might also need just a little bit of luck, as some levels of the game require you to get the right random combination of things at the same time as you are playing at your best.

I've had a lot of those kinds of moments lately with writing. No writer goes right from zero to success right away. It's a tough road for everyone, and even the extremely talented have to do some heavy lifting to get where they want to be. Earlier in my life, I decided writing seemed too hard for me, and I abandoned it for a decade or so. When I decided to really try it again five years ago, a big part of that decision was me agreeing with myself to keep pushing through a lot of failure. I didn't always keep that promise. I threw the controller down many times, but I always kept picking it back up after a break.

A really good rage quit is almost as satisfying as actually succeeding 

That led to "failing better," to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, and even to what you might call beating a few levels--publications in some smaller journals, the book, etc. For the last two years, I've been trying for a much harder level--cracking into one of the top 50 literary journals. At first, I didn't get very far, just form rejections. Last fall, I took a whole new approach to writing and cranked out five new stories. The results have been coming in for the last few months. In that time, I've gotten rejections but with encouraging notes from five of those journals: Glimmer Train (who put me on their honorable mention in a contest), Iowa Review ("we gave serious consideration to your submission and found it very promising"), The Common ("we were impressed by your writing and would like to see more work in the future"), Shenandoah ("we found much to admire in this story"), and One Story.

This is "failing better." Any writer will tell you a rejection with a note is far, far better than a form rejection. You got noticed off the slush pile, out of hundreds of manuscripts. You were probably in the last round of selections, you just didn't quite make it. I ought to be encouraged, but I'm kind of at a point where failing better isn't cutting it anymore.

This is where, to keep the video game analogy, I might just need a little luck to go with doing it better. An editor somewhere who has a personal connection to my subject matter, maybe, or just having someone read it on the right day to be in the mood for what I'm laying down.

I just don't know if I can stick with it that long. I'm not saying I quit, and I'm not saying I'm going to keep going. I'm saying I threw my controller down with one of those encouraging-but-not-quite messages, and I haven't gotten to where I can pick it back up yet. I might wake up one day and feel like I've got a way to get past the next boss, and I might decide I ought to do other things with my time.

One thing that's very different about writing from trying to beat a video game: the lag time between trying something and finding out if it works can take between a month and a year, and you don't always know what it was that killed you.

I'm sharing this in case other writers ever feel the same. I mistrust advice that tells you to keep going and believe in your dreams no matter what. I also mistrust advice that tells you the opposite. What I trust is when someone tries to tell me the truth, so that's what I'm trying to share with you. There will be moments as a writer when you don't know if you really ought or want to keep going. The only way to know if you should is to put down the controller for a bit and see how drawn you feel to pick it back up.

Now my failure is complete (and I'm fine with that)

Not only did the Washington Independent Review of Books review my debut book last year, one of their editors actually took enough interest in a local writer that she invited me to speak at this year's Washington Writers' Conference. Jenny Yacovissi, who holds down a full-time and part-time job in addition to volunteering for the WIRB, also organized the conference this year. Somehow, she found enough time to also read and review all the books of all the panelists she invited, including mine. I was on the last panel of the conference on May 5th, and she looked like she was about to drop after it.

The panel I was on was called "There's Always a First Time," and it featured four writers who recently had their first book published (five, including moderator Jenny, who also published a book). Here's us:

I didn't plan to be in the middle and look like I was important. Everyone just sort of moved around me.

We were supposed to be the inspirational end of the day. Leading up to the conference, though, as the five of us were sort of plotting out what kinds of things we might say, we realized we all might end up giving the message that it's all luck. That's not the point of a conference. When you've got hundreds of people looking for ways to make their writing dreams come true, you want to lead people to believe they really can do things that will make it happen.

I commented last year, after my first writing conference, that I was actually a little skeptical of the message of hope. Most of the people at any writing conference are unlikely to ever get a book published in something other than self-publishing. Those who do get published are unlikely to meet with any kind of commercial success. But the message at writing conferences is all about the million ways you can theoretically improve your odds. It rather reminds me of Christian conferences or revivals I attended when I was younger. The important thing is just to have an atmosphere of possibility and let people enjoy the emotional high of sharing that experience with others who want the same thing. Nobody presents at a Christian conference on the theme of "Why you will probably be the same person in ten years that you are now."

One of the people on the panel really was an inspirational story. Paula Whitacre (back right in the photo) pitched her book at this same conference two years ago, and her biography of Julia Wilbur was a result of her pitch at that conference.

Jenny is the one on the top left. The other two women are Caroline Kitchener, author of the non-fiction book Postgrad, and Melissa Scholes Young, author of the novel Flood. These two made me feel fairly out of place. They are both very successful and very young. Caroline wrote her book about young women facing the world after college when she was barely past that stage in life herself. But her obvious talent, which got her an internship at the Atlantic, also gave her an in to breaking through.

Melissa was--to me--even more impressive. Her novel, Flood, has been praised by some impressive company. It got some real backing and sold fairly well. One thing that caught my eye about her book was that the top blurb-providing name on the back of her book was Luis Urrea. Luis is a top-notch author, but I also have a personal connection to him. He was the instructor of a poetry workshop I took in my last seminar at University of Illinois at Chicago. He seemed to respond to my work. Moreover, he seemed to respond to me. He sent me an email once when I called a girl out in the class for writing poetry that was too esoteric to make any sense to anyone. She got upset, but he told me that I was spot-on. I really liked him. He did a lot of work with Latino kids at a time when I was still working with Latinos as a volunteer. We had a couple of good conversations. I thought we saw writing and the world in similar ways.

But when I wrote to him in grad school asking him pointedly how I could go about trying to break through, he never answered my email. He also never answered my email when I wrote him last year about the book getting published. I assume the first time he didn't write me back, it was because he couldn't come up with a polite way to say he didn't think I had the goods. The second time, I assume it was because he didn't remember me.

I made a joke about this at the conference, noting how you could measure Melissa's success relative to mine by how Luis responded to us. But it also kind of hurt a little bit. Sometimes, life gives you little pointed reminders of how you've failed. I was definitely on the stage with people who outclassed me.

I'd been dreading going for that very reason. I was worried this conference would feel like a final nail in the coffin of my lack of success as a writer. But at the end, realizing I may have definitively failed as a writer didn't really feel that bad. For one thing, a lot of it really is luck. Working on a literary journal has done nothing so much as confirm that belief. But even the parts of it you can control involve strategies I'd probably prefer not to put in place.

Author and Writer

The conference was full of talk about the business aspect of writing--separating the artistic role of "writer" from the professional role of "author." And all the things being pushed on us sounded terrible. I'd heard them before. One strategy that is considered a sine qua non for authors now is to have an active social media presence, particularly on Twitter. To me, it sounded a lot like we were being told to force our way into groups that could help promoting our books. A lot of that comes from helping other authors promote theirs. It sounded like kissing ass in order to have a social media network to help promote you.

I've known how important Twitter is considered for authors for a while now. Some agents I tried pitching my novel to basically said they wouldn't even talk to you unless your Twitter game was on point. But I never even had a Twitter account until a few weeks ago. I got one just to send one person a message, because her Twitter was the only contact I had for her. While I was there, I started following a few people to see what Twitter is really like. Twitter seems as awful to me as I always imagined it was. I know part of the Jonathan Franzen hate parade has to do with his opposition to Twitter, and I'm likely to end up also being considered both wrong and snobby, but my short introduction to the content on Twitter so far has confirmed what I suspected about it. I followed a few authors I admire, and I am suspicious that a fair amount of the re-tweeting and sharing of news of other authors is partly out of self-interest. That's doesn't mean they aren't promoting authors they really like (in the hope--at least partly--that those authors promote them back). But I don't believe all these writers are on Twitter because it's particularly a good place to soak up a vibe to improve your writing.

My dislike of Twitter isn't you won't find any good content through it. You can link to something smart with zero characters. But it is very hard to have an intelligent conversation about the linked topic through short messages. It leads to a rhetoric that is entirely built around quippiness and wit rather than sustained argument. It rather reminds me of courtly rhetorical styles that were encouraged in the Renaissance. The goal was to quickly dispatch your interlocutor with the quick jape. It's fine to develop wit. Being clever in brief statements is a useful skill, and people often do remember short statements more than long ones. Unfortunately, this leads--both in courts of the past and on Twitter now--to a culture that really thinks that a good clap-back really has "destroyed" the opposition's argument. 

 I can also see it becoming a huge time waster. The more people you follow, the more the long list of undifferentiated junk to go through gets. I'm sure I could learn to filter to get more of just what I want, but that seems like a lot of work to invest in learning something I'd rather just not use. I also just know myself. I can't be trusted around social media. That's why I only have one social media account, and I don't keep it on my phone. I can only look at it when I'm home. And I limit myself to one scroll through the feed a day. Otherwise, I start wasting way too much time on it.

Twitter isn't the only part of being an author that seems awful to me. These conferences are full of terrible-sounding self-promotion techniques. (Carry around post cards with information about your book on them!) And the thing is that none of them really help sell that many books. If you sell 5,000 books nowadays, you've really killed it. Most of the authors on the panel sold far fewer. But even 5,000 books is not enough to make any real money. You'd still have to have a day job. You wouldn't be any closer to writing for a living.

It would be nice, of course, to have more readers. I write because the things I write about matter to me, and I want others to read them so I can have shared the things that matter to me. Of course I'd rather have more readers. But I feel like in the process of getting those extra readers, I'd lose some ability to write the way I want to write.

So my takeaway from this conference is that I'm fine with never becoming an "author" in any professional sense. The road there involves things I'm just not willing to do. I don't know if that means I won't write. I can't imagine not writing at all. That's something I just can't help doing. But I do feel differently about it now.

One of the most depressing feelings in life is the sense of being redundant. Sitting at conferences with thousands of other people all trying to crowd into the limited available spots the flaccid publishing industry can provide makes me feel extremely redundant. So I'm resolved not to spend any time trying to crowd into the trough for the paltry scraps available. I'll write. I'll send to publishers. If they don't accept me, fine. I'll even ask for reviews (and be turned down or ignored if that's what happens) if I need to. But I'm not going to do something that feels disingenuous in order to improve my odds. If someone reaches out to me to talk to me about something I've written, I'd like to feel they did that because they really felt moved by it, not because they view me as a vector to promote themselves.

None of this is to say that the people at these conferences are all phonies. Jenny, for example, takes time out of what she does to volunteer because she cares about writing. There is a difference between community service to the writing community and using the writing community in a cynical way to serve your own interests. If the road to becoming a name brand author goes through being more cynical, I'm fine never making that journey.

The Devil and Judd Apatow

I have a rather low tolerance for vicarious embarrassment. Vicarious suffering I seem to be somewhat okay with, but if I have to watch a fictional character humiliate himself, I struggle to keep going. Mrs. Heretic hates to watch a lot of shows with me, because I honestly have to pause them every five minutes to gather my strength to continue watching someone be debased.

Right now, I'm watching the series "Love" on Netflix. I have to watch it alone. Mrs. Heretic would never stand for how each 30-minute episode takes me 90 minutes to watch. Judd Apatow and the writers on this show seem to be masters of nothing so much as sticking characters in crucibles built by their own vices. It's wonderful and excruciating.

Writers are often told to make terrible things happen to their characters. I've certainly done that to mine. I'm able to make them suffer. But I have a very hard time humiliating them. I suppose I gave characters in "Brokedick" and "The Strongest I've Ever Been" some humiliation, but it was temporary and they bounced back from it. I can't imagine constantly torturing characters the way Apatow does.

I think there's some of my religious past at work here. If God exists, He apparently has no problem allowing his creations to suffer. It's one of the reasons I don't believe in God anymore. I feel like I owe my creations better than that. I want to use my omnipotence better than He does. So I tend to make sure that if someone endures something, there's a point to it. They live through it and become better somehow. I know this isn't how it usually works out in the real world. What doesn't kill you in the real world doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make you anything. It just happens. I'd like the worlds I create to be different.

Yes, your characters are incredibly life-like and relatable. Please make them less so.

I wonder, when I consider my unwillingness to be a negligent parent to my characters, if writing is really my calling. I have the same weaknesses as a writer I do as a parent. I want to solve things for others instead of letting nature take its course and seeing if they've got the stuff to make it on their own.

Maybe that's the real link between alcohol and writing. It isn't that alcohol unlocks visions for writers, it's that if you become enough of an alcoholic, you can also be enough of an asshole to let terrible things happen to the people you've created.

The post I most regret making last year (and why I'm not sorry)

As I said yesterday, we've been watching a lot of streaming video the last few days to wait out the cold. Yesterday, we finally got sick enough of The Mindy Project in season four that we found something else to watch. The first thing we tried was the latest Dave Chapelle special. I don't know if he's the funniest comedian I've ever heard, but he's damn sure one of the most perceptive.

One of his bits was him recalling the words he'd said in the 72 hours after Trump was elected, and how those words were perceived and reported on by the media. He repeated a few jokes that he'd done in New York the day Trump was elected, then talked about how a reporter had interpreted what he'd said to mean he supported Trump. He then talked about his appearance on Saturday Night Live right after the election and how he'd come up with something rather spur of the moment, something like "we'll give him a chance if he gives us a chance." Chapelle said he wished he hadn't said that. He credited his comments to the elephant effect, the way it's difficult to talk accurately about something until you've had enough distance from it.

I'm familiar with saying the wrong thing

We've all experienced this, of course. Anyone with the capacity to be the least bit honest and introspective will occasionally look back on the things he's said and feel sheepish about them. In 2017, I wrote a fair bit about race. That's because I feel like that urban blight, which affects black Americans disproportionately, is the most pressing issue America has to face. It's also because I feel that as much as conservatives miss the boat by promoting a bootstraps philosophy too much, at the same time, a lot of liberal rhetoric on race is also inaccurate and not helpful. And the whole conversation we're having about race isn't leading to improvement; being properly woke isn't going to fix the heat in Baltimore City Schools. That requires boring, long-term work to improve a system of acquisitions and accounting. The way we are talking about race now in America lacks the seriousness necessary to accomplish goals like these. 

I still believe that, and I think it's necessary for thoughtful people to be bold in shattering the icons held dear by those who seem to be dominating a lot of the conversation. But that doesn't mean I feel like I got everything right that I've said.

What I messed up last year

I now wish I'd either not posted this piece on football players not standing for the National Anthem or written it differently. At the time I was thinking something like this: Although I agree that it's shameful how not everyone is able to share in the full bounty of America's wealth, I am also worried that we are fracturing enough as a country that if we aren't careful, we will soon have a lot less wealth to figure out how to distribute. Democracies can be fragile, and if we lose all signifiers that bind us together, the whole thing can fall apart. 

However, looking back on it, even a moderate call to suggest players might want to rethink kneeling overlooked something far more important. Colin Kaepernick is not a perfect person. It was stupid of him to wear those pig socks. But he's a brave person and I admire him. The easy, cowardly, approach would have been to just stand for the anthem without meaning it. He gave up a ton of money to take a stand for something he believed in. 

The fact that enough people--mostly white--were incensed enough by his very mild kneeling protests that they terrified NFL owners into not hiring a capable quarterback says an awful lot about America. Mostly, it says Kaepernick was not wrong to call out systemic racism. 

It is really difficult to stand on a stage--or in front of a computer--and say something that is creative, audacious, and also true. But that's what any artist or thinker has to do. To do that, you have to be fearless. Chapelle noted in his special that he doesn't ever feel bad for anything he says on stage. I'm not by nature the kind of person who can really say I don't give a damn what others think and mean it, but I am resolved to try to become more of that kind of person. The best way to become more fearless is to keep trying to speak the truth as I see it. As I do that, I'll make mistakes. I will try to learn from them and do better, but I'm really going to try not to feel bad about them.

You can't please everyone, so you might as well please yourself (if only you weren't an asshole who's never satisfied)

Even if you do say everything right, someone can always take it the wrong way. Truth shares a property line with falsehood, and the minute you start trying to talk about the part of truth's domain that isn't dead in the center, others will start telling you that you're headed over the line. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes from a perspective of wanting young black people to not feel that the deplorable condition of many of their peers is their own fault, so he writes about systemic injustice, both historic and present. Some of his critics immediately counter that this narrative removes agency from young black people, that by focusing on the obstacles before them, Coates makes it impossible for them to overcome those obstacles. Because Coates is trying to put up a gazeebo on the part of the lawn where few people go, some are saying he must have gone over the property line. But he hasn't, for the most part. He wants to use the full value of truth's property, which means going up to the edge. That doesn't mean he's a bad neighbor. 

And just because I am willing to criticize liberal racial rhetoric doesn't mean I am siding with bootstraps-type conservatives. The Dudley Randall poem we all learned in school, the one pitting Booker T.'s pragmatism against W.E.B. Dubois's idealism, is sort of a false dichotomy. We need both. We need the academy and the trade school. We need political activism and economic activism. That's the point I am usually trying to make when I write about race. 

I am resolving to continue to be as bold as I can be as a writer. But I also have to continue to look at the elephant, to see if anything has changed as I've (hopefully) gained perspective in life. For me, I think I'll always face a temptation to try for the overly clever interpretation. It's a pitfall for a lot of academics, artists, and public intellectuals. That's what I'll resolve to try to guard in myself. 

But I'm not sorry for what I've said. I'm just going to keep trying to do better. 

For those of you considering a New Year's resolution to write more...

...I decided a few weeks ago to put writing for on hold for a while. Since that decision, I haven't been able to stop writing. Seriously. I had been stuck for over a month, unable to write anything and chiding myself for not writing. The moment I decided to give up, words came.

I've said before I'm not a big believer in writing every day. I think if you write every day, if you treat writing like it's your job, you end up with writing that sounds like it's your job. That is, it risks coming off as perfunctory. Write when you can't stop from writing, not when you feel obligated.

In my four-year run of seriously trying to write, the two most fertile writing periods I've had were immediately after making a decision to quit.

There must be something to the psychology of this. Straining to write, you feel the whole time like you're failing, like you're under pressure to do this thing you've set out to do. But if you already accept that you're done, if you tell yourself you shouldn't even be writing, that you have better things to do, writing feels like a stolen pleasure.

When I found out I was getting a book published early in 2017, I felt a lot of pressure to start acting like a writer. That sort of made writing a lot less enjoyable. It took six months of failure at the end of 2017 to get me to realize again that this is not my day job, it's something I do for the joy it brings me. When it doesn't bring me joy, I shouldn't do it.

I hope you write a lot in 2018. Unless you hate it, in which case I hope you don't write at all. But then I hope not writing makes you learn to love writing again at some point.

Merry Christmas, readers and writers.

Can you actually desensitize yourself to rejection?

Following my latest trend of reading whatever the algorithm gods have suggested I read, I recently perused a parenting advice article on getting your kids to become "rejection proof." It had to do with getting your kids inured to hearing no, so they aren't afraid of asking for what they want. The premise was that the more you ask for something, the more you get used to being told no, so the more courageous you become.

I wondered, "Does this work for wrirting?" Am I becoming more desensitized to rejection, and therefore more able to work through it?

I don't think so. The last few months, I've been almost completely unable to write fiction. I stopped in the middle of a rough draft of a story in October. Prior to that, I'd been on a roll. Feeling pretty good about myself, I submitted all of my recent work since the book, six stories in all, to many of the top 50 literary journals in September. In October, the rejections started coming in, and they haven't let up. One day, my creative mind just stopped firing, tired of producing work that is just going to sit on my hard drive.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now. I've had over 130 rejections to only six yesses as a writer, one of those yesses being the book. But apparently, I'm not used to it. Neither has my work for a literary journal, where I see how long the odds are and how haphazard the process of selection sometimes is, helped me to be philosophical about rejection. It feels personal every time. 

I think there are a few reasons rejection in writing is a more difficult thing to get used to than the kinds of rejection this article on raising kids was talking about.

1) Although "never settle for a no" is a rule in sales, if a customer doesn't want to buy your widget, that's not a slam on you as a person. But rejection of your writing is in a class with being turned down for a date or a job. It feels like someone is saying no not just to your work, but to you.

2) No matter how many times I get rejected, I can't keep myself from getting excited every time I see a notice come in. Every no, two seconds before opening it, has the potential to be the definitive yes that could make getting your work out there easier from now on. It could be the yes that means you're taken seriously. I cannot make myself stop doing this. So every rejection hurts a little bit, because it represents a little flicker of hope snuffed out as soon as it starts to burn.

3) Rejections have a strange way of coming in at a bad time, like right after you get the bill that says that your insurance isn't paying for that trip to the emergency room, or right after you find out you didn't get a promotion at work. They are often a fuck-you cherry on top of an already shitty day.

4) Would you want to date someone who machine-gunned through dating rejections until he got a yes? Probably not. Neither, I think, would you want to read the work of someone who didn't put enough thought into his work and who he was sending it to that every no stung at least a little.

5) Courage isn't an obstacle, like it is in sales. I don't talk to the people who read the story and reject it. It's a very impersonal interaction. It feels like nothing. It's not like asking a girl to the dance. It's like applying for a loan. 


Overall, I'm probably a little able to withstand rejection than I was five years ago, but I'm more like rejection-resistant than rejection proof. I can withstand a little splash of rejection, but don't drop me in a pool of it, or I won't keep functioning. I'm pretty sure I'll get through this current patch and get back to writing stories before too long. I'm drying out, so to speak. But I don't think rejection in writing is something you can harden yourself to the way a salesperson can learn to ignore it. That's like saying the best way to protect yourself against getting hit in the ribs with a baseball bat is to do it repeatedly until it doesn't hurt anymore. 

On taking it easy on yourself

It occurred to me today that there was a period of a few years when I was younger where nearly everyday of my life, I would listen to a commercial with these words:

Honeycomb's big
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not small,
No, no, no.

So if I sometimes struggle during a key moment in a story to come up with a passage that seems sufficiently lyrical, I ought not to blame myself too much. Our society is meant to produce consumers, not artists.