If my New Year's resolution was to remain ambivalent about writing, I'm nailing it

For most of my life, when I've considered the ubiquitous question writers get asked about why they write, I've always thought of it as something of an after-the-fact justification of what I was already doing. I wrote all the time, starting almost as soon as I became a serious reader as a teenager. So answering the question was something of a rearguard action, an attempt to justify what I was already doing. I was never going to come up with an answer that made me say, "Oh, you know what? That's a bad reason for writing. I should stop doing it." I couldn't help but write, so seeking to answer a question about why I was doing it was more of a philosophical curiosity than a matter of practical urgency. It wasn't like considering the question of whether I should take a particular job or marry somebody. It was more like finding myself naked in bed with a beautiful woman and for some reason taking a second to ponder the mystery of human sexuality and why we enjoy it so much. There was no doubt about what I was going to do; I was only indulging in a brief reverie before diving in. 

The question now, though, is totally different. After having spent most of my available free time over the last ten years focused as much as time would allow either on writing fiction or writing for this blog, I find myself unwilling to sit down and transfer thoughts into words. I still have the same urge as always, but inevitably, before I put my butt on the back-friendly yoga ball to begin writing, I am waylaid by wondering, "What's the point?"

Most writers will say one reason they write is because they can't stop themselves. I always felt that way, too. So where I am now is like waking up and finding I don't like sex or chocolate anymore. Or maybe it's like still liking chocolate but the last 32 times I've eaten it, it's given me explosive diarrhea, so now I'm reluctant to eat it again. 

I don't like refraining from writing. I don't feel like myself. But there are also some pretty strong reasons why I can't get myself into my seat to write. They're not as strong as explosive diarrhea, maybe, but they're strong enough I don't know if I'll be able to get over them.

1. Maybe I'm not that good

When somebody asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she said, "Because I'm good at it." I don't draw or paint precisely because what I create is ugly, and it gives me no pleasure to look at what I've made when I'm done. With writing, though, there are at least some occasions where I will re-read something I've written and feel joy reading it, the same kind of joy I would feel reading something somebody else had written. 

But for almost three years now, I've just been unable to get anything published. Part of that is on me. For all that time, I've only been sending in work to top-tier journals. After I won New Letters' Robert Day Fiction Contest in 2020, followed soon after by publication in The Bellevue Literary Review, I felt like I had drawn pretty close to my goal of writing fiction good enough to be published in top tier journals. It's not that I'm a journal snob. I was always gratified and grateful when any journal, no matter how small, accepted my work. But I want to be read. When I was sending out to every journal on Earth, it was partly about trying to figure out if I was in the right ballpark. After twenty or so of those acceptances, I had the feedback I needed. If I want to be read, it doesn't do any good to be published in a smaller journal. 

Since 2020, I've written five short stories that I think are better than anything I wrote before. None has broken into a top journal. I've still had plenty of encouraging rejections, including from The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Agni, One Story, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Colorado Review. Some have given me positive feedback more than once. 

Maybe I ought to keep plugging away, feeling like I'm close and I just need to bide my time and wait to get lucky, but I feel now like "almost good enough for a top-tier journal" is my limit. I can't write better than what I've done in the last three years, and it's not good enough. I understand that sometimes, it's a matter of luck. Every journal gets tons of great stories and can only publish a few, and they're looking for a blend of perspectives, so I might just not fit that particular edition. But if I were as good as I want to be, I'd be impossible to reject. I'm not, and I don't think I ever will be.

When somebody tells me I should keep going with writing because I'm almost there, I always think of this gambler's fallacy meme my son showed me.

2. For a variety of reasons, I don't think it's realistic I will get better

I might never have been talented enough. I'm sure there's a certain neural makeup to a great writer that's partly there when they're born, and that also has to be nurtured a certain way early on. It's possible I was doomed from birth, or doomed from early childhood because I missed certain developmental processes necessary to building the right neural network for a creative writer. 

But even if that's not true, even if I still had a chance in adulthood, I don't think I have a chance now. It's true that if you work at something, you tend to get better. I've definitely improved greatly since taking writing seriously in my early 40s. But I'm in my early 50s now, and I feel myself slipping cognitively in a general sense. It's maybe not serious yet--I forget a word here and there while speaking more than I used to, I find long hours at work less easy to endure--but it's enough that I'm probably not really building the new connections in my brain necessary to improve creatively. It's like where I am at the gym now. I'm not really out there to be the strongest I've ever been. I'm just trying to slow down decline. 

Even if I were younger, I've always had a stumbling block to developing as a writer, which is that I can't read prodigiously. I'm a good reader, but I can't read for long stretches most of the time. I get too caught up in my own thoughts about what I'm reading, and I have to take breaks to walk around and think about what I've just read. I've always been this way. It's always been a bit of an embarrassment for me around literary friends, who talk about reading a hundred books a year or more. I do read, of course. I don't do it efficiently, and so I don't read as widely as many serious readers do, but I try to make up for it by reading well when I do read. If I have to take a test, I'm capable of focusing for hours at a time, but I can't maintain that every day.  

Reading well if not much is fine for much of the kind of analysis I do on this blog, but I think you have to read both deeply and broadly to improve as a writer.  A would-be great writer has to fill their mind all the time with the best writing. I can't do that, and even if I could, I'm probably too old for it to have the impact it would have on a younger mind. 

3. I can't get away from the world

I recently read Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" in The Sewanee Review, in which she ponders the "why write" question at great length. It's a great summary of the many explanations people have given to this question, along with many of the doubts a writer faces if she has any sense. Many are the same doubts I've expressed over the years, such as the question of how to justify writing about unreal things in a world with so many real problems. 

One problem Nunez focuses on is how much concentration writing takes. All that concentration and focus and wrangling means time not spent with those around you. It means time not spent fixing the storm door or edging the lawn. It means time not spent on your day job, the one that pays the bills. 

Nunez recalls how her mentor, Susan Sontag, encouraged her to let writing be the central focus of her life:

"While it seemed everyone else wanted to know how I intended to earn a living, or when I was going to settle down, Sontag was talking about something else. Put the writing first, she said. Teach if you must, but don't feel that you have to become affiliated with an institution. Don't give up your independence. Forget the safety of tenure. Forget safety, period. Forget everything but the work."

Living in financial uncertainty while devoted only to the work has been a popular choice for writers, perhaps second only to having enough of a fortune, through heredity or marriage, you don't have to think about survival at all. There's nobility to it, the same way there is nobility in those who choose penury and celibacy in the service of God. I was planning at one point on that path, but I fell in love and had a child, and at that point, I realized I HAD to care about safety. 

Almost twenty years later, now with two kids, both of whom are struggling to figure out their own path to financial safety, the demands of the world are as great on me as ever. It has an effect on my writing. Even when I try to conserve some energy for writing, the effort and time I put into my job robs me of those same resources I need for arduous creative work. It fills my head with the wrong kind of energy.

Of course, other writers have managed to succeed while working for a living, but I think most succeeded at a younger age than I am now. I have writer friends who work and raise kids and write, mostly at teacher or editor jobs that don't pay as well as my job does, which means they have extra financial concerns I don't. But the thing is that none of those friends are doing any better at succeeding--based on my definition of the term--than I am. That's in spite of the fact that their teacher/editor jobs give them a better network to publicize their work with than I have. Writing is hard to do well even if you mortgage everything to focus on it, and anyone who's trying to both raise a family and cut open their spiritual veins to bleed onto the page is going to have an even harder time of it.

In my case, because my day job I've ended up in could be thought to be important in a cold and calculated "real world" sort of way, I often wonder if the morally right choice isn't to shutter writing altogether and focus on my day job. There's a good chance that an improvement in my ability to do my job could have more of a positive impact on the world than anything I'll write at home. The only reason I've continued to write is because my own mental health couldn't stand not doing it. I wouldn't have been able to do my day job at all if I didn't write, I reasoned, because I'd have killed myself or ended up in a loony bin. Sometimes, though, I think that my indulging of my writing habit is just my own selfishness or ego. 

4. I'm exactly the wrong level of educated as a critic now

Since fiction writing wasn't working out how I'd hoped in the near term, I felt like I'd found a nice niche writing analysis of literary fiction on this blog. This was mostly of short story anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and, if I had time and energy for it, Pushcart or O. Henry as well. It felt useful to me, because I thought that as a veteran of graduate-level studies in literature, I could be something of a bridge to ordinary people looking to investigate literary fiction. I've certainly been grateful for podcasts from philosophy Ph.D.s or other experts who seek to open up their disciplines to curious outsiders. I hoped to do the same for literature. 

I realized I wasn't quite a full expert. I didn't go on for a Ph.D. myself, and there are gaps in my understanding of literary theory as well as the history of literature and literary criticism. Still, since as one of my favorite professors as an undergrad said, you can never go wrong with a sensitive close reading, I felt like performing my close readings for all would help them to do their own. 

I was happy with my approach of close reading with occasional supplements from theory or literary history until last year. The mistake I made was trying to take criticism more seriously. I'd decided that since I was unlikely to ever make the breakthrough as a fiction writer I hoped to make, I should focus instead on doing the best job of writing the blog I could. I tried to go back and fill in gaps in theory and history.

All I succeeded in doing was to become more aware of how great a gap I have between the knowledge I actually have and what I'd like to have. To fill that gap, I'd have to quit my job and spend years pursuing the expertise I lack. All so I could write a blog that maybe a few hundred people occasionally look at. If I wasn't going to abandon my life for fiction, I certainly wasn't going to do it for writing about fiction. 

So I've ended up in a place where I can't go back to just doing close readings, and I'm nowhere near being able to write what I'd like to be able to write, so I don't want to write anything. My shoot-from-the-hip close readings no longer seem to be enough, and what I'd like to do--a still-accessible but more informed flavor of criticism--is beyond me. I feel like the incarnation of Pope's a little learning being a dangerous thing, only I'm aware of how dangerous I am. 

My cycle

So that's where I am. I'm miserable not writing, because it doesn't feel like me, but I'm also miserable writing, because it feels pointless. Yes, I know that many, many writers offer the therapeutic advice that you should write for yourself and whether it gets published or wins awards or earns praise isn't the point. But I do not want to write just to amuse myself. If nobody is ever going to read what I write, I don't want to write. That's not human connection, which, I think, ought to be at least part of why someone would write. 

My day job values being succinct above all other writing virtues, and they love it when you can draw a picture for something instead of making people read words, which everyone hates. So I've summarized all the above verbosity into the following flow chart:

Enough for now

I've sworn I was finished with writing and blogging about writing and so on enough times now that nobody will take me seriously if I swear I'm done again, but I am taking a break. The last story was a good place to end, what with its relevance to current world events and the fact that almost the last words in it were "I am sorry, Jacob." Kind of like the universe was talking directly to me in response to my complete failure to accomplish what I wanted to as a writer. I'm not in any kind of place to give myself over to the stories in BASS this year. 

This fall is the twentieth anniversary of the end of my time in graduate school, and it's been ten years since I picked up my notebook again and actually gave writing a sustained try. Right now, I feel like all of that was a huge waste of time. I don't really have anything great to replace it with, but I don't want to keep going enough that I'd rather deal with a big empty place in my life than with continuing to fail. 

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to keep doing this. That's why I gave BASS another try this year. But the few people who comment on here aren't really enough for me to say this is a good use of my time and effort. 

Every story, everywhere, all the time: "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin

I should love "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin, right? It's got time travel of sorts and a TV cartoon version of one of the four Chinese classics and science and it's about confronting death. It's a slightly less frenetic version of "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," a comparison I'm going to bet I'm not along in making. So why didn't I like it?

While trying to answer that question for this post, I've realized how frustrating it is to do literary criticism as a part-time affair with a day job that's totally unrelated to literature. I spent some time in between my last blog-through of Best American Short Stories and now trying to shore up some of the gaps I have as a lay person, but that has only served to make me more cognizant of all I don't know. Even to do this as a hobby, I don't feel skilled enough or learned enough. 

I feel that lack the most with stories I don't like, and I really disliked "Treasure Island Alley." I will try below to explain why, because I think it's owed, but I am admitting that this attempt at a critique is poor. I just don't have the skills to do more than weakly point to what I want to say. 

What's wrong with it

"Treasure Island Alley" is what people mean when they say that all the stories in lit journals sound alike. They don't, but there are certain types of stories that give that impression. 

There's a formula to this brand of story. We like to think of literary fiction as the kind of fiction that doesn't have follow conventions, but it's got plenty of its own. They might be conventions they teach at Iowa, but they're still conventions. The formula for this type of story goes something as follows:

1) Find some fact about the universe, quirky cultural icon, or profession not many people do. Make sure it's one your audience isn't likely to know much about, so they're sufficiently awed when your character waxes rhapsodic about it for the rest of the story. Science is a good choice, because most literary journal editors don't know much about science, nor do their audiences. If a whole generation of writers could get away with trying to convince non-scientists that physics teaches us the truth of Buddhism or Taoism, you can certainly get away with having a main character who thinks the mitosis he studies in the lab teaches valuable human truths that help him cope with the loss of his daughters in a boating accident. If you're familiar with the history, culture, or language of any part of the world outside the two coasts of the United States, you can also use literally anything you want that's just lying around. Extra points if it will seem exotic to editors, as nearly everything will. 

2) Got your object or icon or unusual profession? Good. Now add some kind of tragedy, and have the main character go on and on for about twenty pages trying to make use of the thing you've picked to help him or her figure out the tragedy and other mysteries of life. No amount of improbable clinging to the thing is too much. It's not overkill; it's narrative unity.  

3) Add a bunch of really specific and esoteric-seeming details. If you can (you always can), render them in staccato sentences. "The metal and oil scent of the armory." "Pungent amines seeping into the wood chairs in the lab." Everyone will call this "lyrical" and they'll say you're making whatever thing you chose to shoehorn into every part of your story beautiful, even though you'll probably be thinking to yourself the whole time that your character's determination to read every phenomena in life through the same lens isn't beautiful; it's Quixotic. Our culture decided long ago to admire Quixote, against the express wishes of text. So go with it.

4) Finally, go on TwitterX and sell it as a funny, whacky blend. When you get interviewed about it and they ask a "fun" question, like how would you describe your story in six words, say, "Vampires, Formula One, and stinky cheese," and then laugh and try to mean it. Literary fiction is so fun! Why don't more people read it? 

Other stories that do this? This is where I know I'm weak as a critic. There was this story several years ago, but one writer who leaps more immediately to mind is Andrea Barrett. Like Da-Lin, Barrett went fairly far down a graduate school path in the sciences before turning to writing, and she's used that background to turn out a series of these kinds of stories. Barret and Da-Lin both know enough science to know more than their audience, which is all they have to know. Da-Lin can add her past in Taiwan to her pool of knowledge most people don't have. A typical Barrett story features a famous scientist making their discoveries and then turning their discoveries in the lab into meditations on life. It will develop a mantra-like summary of a scientific truth and re-use it throughout the narrative. 

That's the formula used in this story. The story takes the Monkey King, Chinese funeral practices among wealthy people in Taiwan circa 1980(?), and some random science-y facts, throws them all in a blender, and comes up with something that is, I guess, supposed to be "a deep search for nothing less than the meaning of death," according to the New England Review, which originally published it. But it's not that. It only appears to examine the meaning of death; in the end, it doesn't take death on. It disappears into its cultural tokens and kind-of-science-y stuff, and it lets those icons try to make the story seem to say something that it doesn't actually say. Since most readers don't really know what the hell the Monkey King is or anything about the science of immortality, it's guaranteed that they'll think  it's deep. 

If I were a better critic, there'd be a section here tying in Karen Russell, who I think does something similar. 

The end result is a story that mimics a real spiritual and emotional journey, but doesn't ultimately lead anywhere. It's Western yoga. 

I very nearly quit over this one

Something came undone in me reading this story. I don't know what I'm doing with these blog-throughs any more. I have too much education in literature to do fun reviews, but not enough to do the serious analysis I want to do. We'll see how the next one goes. I might not do this again. 

Admitting to yourself it's never going to happen without sounding morose

Is hope a good thing? Saint Paul listed it, along with love and faith, among the three heavenly things that abide here among us. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has been one of the biggest influences in my life, seems to hold in low regard those who abandon hope, even when despair seems reasonable, as in the case of Denethor. That doesn't mean we must maintain an unrealistic view of our own hopes, only that we have to keep trying until the last possible ember of hope is extinguished. Gandalf is the architect of the plan that ultimately defeats the greatest evil of his day, in spite of his own admission that "there never was much hope....just a fool's hope." 

On a practical level, it's hard to imagine our society surviving long without it. While the engine of capitalism can run even if few people have a truly realistic chance at achieving their dreams, it can and will run as long as most people have just enough hope to believe they might achieve them if they only keep going a little further. Hope is so strongly grounded in Western culture and so necessary to maintaining our way of life, questioning its value might seem sometimes like questioning whether murder is bad. 

There is another tradition, though, one that views hope as ego getting in the way of our own growth. This is the tradition embraced by Canadian author Steven Heighton in his article "Hope is Good. Disappointment is Better."Heighton recalls how his own buoyant faith in his bright literary future retarded the very growth as a writer necessary to achieve that future. Heighton discusses the two terms "disillusion" and "disabuse," suggesting that the second is better, both because it lacks the confusing double-negative equaling a negative of "disillusion," and also because it suggests that sticking to hope involves abuse the way an addiction does. 

Heighton cites Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, who teaches that hope is harmful because it's based on an illusion. Although hope has a biological basis that is essential to survival, this biological urge can, over time, train us to avoid any type of discomfort. Most elite athletes, Heighton writes, learn to stop thinking in terms of hope, because hope is a distraction: 

As every athlete finds out, action contaminated by hope (If only I can nail this next serve . . . I’ll win if I nail this next serve!) usually fails. Hope is a fatal distraction. It creates a kind of skip, jitter, or satellite delay in the nerves. Where there’s hope, there’s fear, their relationship an alternating current. On the other hand, a play or movement executed in a fully present, fearless frame of mind—without hope—often succeeds.

Worst of all, hopefulness—that “if only!” state of mind—becomes a mental habit that does not just go away once things improve a little or a lot. The relief of every hope realized creates a new hope, new fears. So we go on, slinging ourselves ahead of ourselves toward death—in fact hastening its approach, our actual lives left uninhabited.

Easy for you to say

Heighton was discussing hope in terms of his own development as a writer, tracing how his early novel lacked necessary focus and refinement, because to have kept working on it then would have felt like admitting his own shortcomings, something that would have conflicted with his internal narrative of himself as a rising literary star. He argues that failure is often the only thing that will teach us, because we are so resistant to admitting we need to improve we will deny and deny our weaknesses until undeniable failure makes us unable to continue to live with our own illusions. 

My own experience from a life not quite as long as Heighton's is that he's right. My life has been a series of waves of unearned confidence that I would transfer my reasonable but not unprecedented talent into easy and unprecedented success. Those waves of confidence have been successively broken, which forced me to reevaluate. The greatest developments I've made, both personally and skill-development-wise, have almost invariably come at my moments of greatest humility. 

Yet there's a difference between what Heighton is writing about and what I'm facing as a writer. Heighton is looking at it from the perspective of someone who's published eighteen books. He may have had to grow as a writer, but that's just it--he's growing as a writer. People identify him as a writer, whereas most people--the few who are even aware of my existence--would identify me as something else. Writing is something I do on the side, but it isn't who I am. The difference between Heighton and me is that he's had enough signs in his life that writing is the thing he ought to be concerned about getting better at in order to know he's probably in the right place. When he's thinking of the balance between hope and disappointment, he at least has a reasonable certainty that writing is the place where he should be seeking that balance. 

I have no such reassurance. I've had about fifteen stories published, along with one book. I've won two awards. All of what I've done has been on a pretty small stage, within a field that is among the most glutted on Earth. When Heighton writes, hope is a threat that, left unchecked, could keep him from passing through the uncomfortable refinement needed to reach greater excellence. For me, hope is something without which I couldn't write a single word, because I have no reason to believe the odds are in my favor that more than a small handful of people will ever read anything I write. 

To return to the image of the athlete, if I discipline myself to focus on the present and not to lose myself in fantasy, but all it helps me accomplish is that I go from eighth place to fourth place in my local rec tennis league, does it even matter? Isn't this level of mental focus, this ruthless plucking out of hope, only for pros? For the rest of us, isn't it kind of harmless, or even necessary to get us through the day-to-day humdrum of our otherwise unremarkable lives? 

I don't want to play rec tennis

I write because I believe I have things to say worth saying that aren't being said by others. I write because I think those things I have to say are important. If I'm wrong--if all I am is really nothing more than one of the better players in my local league of writers, then I'd rather not be spending time on it at all. 

A lot of people tell me that's the wrong approach, that I should write because I love it and only focus on being the best writer I can be and enjoying it and if I happen to also have success getting published and winning awards and being discussed seriously by serious people, to take that all as a bonus. They tell me I should write the same way some people play guitar or paint miniatures or participate in a tennis league or sing in the church choir--for the pure love of the thing. 

That's probably a healthy attitude if the goal is happiness. It's also something I'm unable to settle for. Anything other than "going pro"--being able to support myself as a writer, being known widely as a writer, having what I've written become part of public discourse--seems so unsatisfying to me, I'd rather not write at all. 

But it looks like I really am a rec player

Of course, the world doesn't care about what I wish were true. At this point, it looks like the level I'm at is the level I'm going to stay at. There have been a few thrilling moments when it looked like I might be able to break through, at least enough to be in the show if not to be one of the stars, but those never panned out. Assessing my prospects as a cold and impartial third-party observer, I'd say my chances of achieving what I want to achieve are maybe better than winning the lottery, but still so unrealistic that continuing to hope for it is almost a pathology. Reality is that I either need to become okay with writing at the rec league level or quit writing and find something else to do, maybe something I don't mind doing as a mere hobby. 

Of course, writing and tennis aren't perfect analogies

In tennis, the best players tend to win the most, because the winner of a tennis match is almost a perfectly objective matter. There can be some influence from judges (although instant replay has reduced that influence), and certainly bad luck can be involved. In any particular match, the lesser player might prevail. Over time, though, the best players tend to show themselves. Federer and Djokovic really are some of the best to ever play. 

Writing is much stranger. It isn't completely subjective, as some people rather recklessly claim, but it's not close to objective in the way that tennis is, either. Those considered our best writers today probably are in a meaningful sense worth reading more than many others who don't make it. There's a meaningful difference between a good writer and a bad one. That doesn't mean, though, that there is a meaningful distinction between one good writer and another. I know this not just as a writer, but as someone who's spent time as an editor whose job it was to pick the best writing to publish out of a huge pile of possibilities. I had some sense of what I considered good, and I could explain the contours of that aesthetic sensibility somewhat, but in the end, picking a winner always had a little bit of a darts-at-a-board feeling to it. Which means there is always some luck involved.

In an article about how Sally Rooney's success is a symbol of a new aesthetic of the "pose" over the "voice," Stephen March discussed how much the potential for success in writing has shrunk in the last fifty years. He compared it to a children's party game called "shark," similar to musical chairs, in which the space to land on keeps shrinking, until only one child can fit on the final spot. The only problem with that analogy as it relates to writing is that while the space available for writers to succeed in finding an audience, fame, relevance, and fortune is shrinking as print culture dies, the number of writers trying to cram into the few remaining spaces is actually increasing greatly. It's like if the PGA tour had cut its number of possible spots for golfers in every tournament by eighty percent since 1960, at the same time as the sport was undergoing a change from being primarily something wealthy white Western people did to something people of all kinds of backgrounds from all over the world do. 

Which means I'm in a game of musical chairs where there are eight chairs every time I play and six thousand people playing. To make it worse, the people who get the chairs aren't simply those who got there first, but those who got there with the most style, according to a style manual the judges can only partly explain. And for some reason, I'm not just playing for the love of musical chairs; I'm playing because getting a chair has somehow taken on life-or-death significance for me. 

Hope block

I've never struggled with writer's block. There's never a day when I woke up and didn't have things I wanted to say. It's been months, though, since I've really sat down to write those things, not because they aren't still queued up in my brain waiting to come out, but because every time I start to write something, I am overcome by a feeling that there's no point. Either I'm mistaken about the worth of what I want to say, or I'm just not one of the lucky elect. Either way, writing for me is, unless I'm holding dearly onto hope, an exercise in onanism. 

It's too much trouble to go back and count, but I've probably intimated on this blog a dozen times that I intended to quit writing, only to get back to it after a break. This is easily the longest break I've taken, so long that it no longer feels like a break. It feels like I'm really done, and in the end, I didn't even really decide to be done. The necessary impulse to write just sort of left me. 

It's possible to look upon this as a necessary, if painful, shattering of hope, of being, at last, disabused of my fantasy. It could be a good chance to go focus on something else. There are a couple of reasons, though, that I find it hard to just move on.

First, yes, it is possible I could live with the realization I'm not the writer I want to be. I'm also not the chess player I want to be, nor is my Korean as good as I'd like it to be, nor can I lift as much weight as I wish I could. None of those failures keeps me up at night or keeps me from doing the activity, so I should similarly learn to live with writing as another thing in which I wasn't born with the talent to match my ambitions. The only problem with that is that while I could live with being a less-than-stellar writer, I have absolute faith in my ability as a reader. If I'm wrong about my perceptiveness as a reader, then I literally know nothing. And the whole reason I've kept writing is because when I looked at my own writing as objectively as I could, it seemed to me to have worth. Failure as a writer, then, isn't just failure as a writer, but failure as a reader, which is a far more fundamental hit to my identity. 

Secondly, there's the question of what I do with the work I've done that never got published. I'm especially thinking here of the novel I wrote about the work I did for seventeen years, the novel I thought would help make sense of the otherwise senseless direction my life has taken. The novel I can't believe I couldn't find a publisher for, the novel whose failure to get published calls into question my soundness as a reader more than any other failure. Do I suffer the indignity of self-publishing, or do I keep my two unpublished novels and dozen unpublished short stories that comprise what I consider to be my best work in a drawer, to be brought out ceremonially to remind me of the perils of unmerited hope? 

Third, if I'm not a writer, what animates me? What gets me through the endless hours of my day job, a job which, while better than I deserve in life, is, as it is for almost everyone, not really what I set out to do in life? I've talked with more than one writer in similar circumstances to myself who has said he writes because if he didn't, he doesn't know what he'd do with himself and would probably just end it all. 

I know the title of this post has to do with confronting the end of your dreams without sounding morose, but it wouldn't be honest if I didn't at least admit that suicide is part of the equation for a lot of people when they hold onto the illusion of hope. The end of that illusion can be fatal, which is why many people continue holding onto the increasingly false hope their dreams will come true, or they keep themselves distracted with the endless noise and narrative that a connected age makes possible. 

Of all the illusions I've found it difficult to shake, the one I've had the hardest time overcoming is that I'd like for life to have a purpose. It would be best if it had a purpose generally, but failing that, I'd at least like for my life to have a purpose. I'd like for my own life to make sense in the way a satisfying narrative makes sense. Writing has always seemed like the way to make that happen, perhaps in too obvious a sense, which is maybe why it's such an illusion. 

Since I first abandoned religion about twenty-five years ago, I've always been struck by how much braver life without God requires one to be than even that required of a saint. When I read Sartre's Nausea, for example, I felt like nausea wasn't just a literary trope. It's how I really felt thinking about living a life without a higher power making sense of it for me. I felt rudderless and lost and a little bit terrified. I never really got over that feeling, even though it hasn't made me recant the "disabusing" of the notion of God. That feeling of being lost is a lot of what I've always wanted to express, the thing I thought made what I had to say worth reading. Not that it's a new concept, but that it's an idea that always needs to be made new, and I wanted to try.  

As brave as I've tried to be, I've never really gotten over thinking, without admitting it, that maybe life had some meaning I just couldn't see. I kept that feeling hidden away in a part of my brain somewhere, because I honestly needed the hope. If I'm now to finally be disabused of this last illusion, making me  fully live like a Sartrean Saint without hope, do I have it in me to do that? Do I have the strength to be definitively disillusioned? 

Pulled in too many directions

I've probably posted the "I'm done with writing" thing a half dozen times in the last few years, and so far, it's never stuck. This isn't that post, because I don't think it's going to stick now, either. This is just to let folks know why I'm not posting much nor will be posting much. 

About six years ago, when I wrote the first of a few "I quit" posts, I referred to a monumental decision I thought I'd made in my twenties, one I later repented of. I vowed then that I'd care more about making great art than about having a family, because anyone can have a family but only a rare few can make great art. Or something like that. I don't really know what I said, because the text in question no longer exists, which is probably for the good. I wrote a lot of strange things in the years after I got out of the Marine Corps. The Marines scrambled my brain a bit, and it took me a few years to get it scrambled back. 

Anyhow, what I'd decided by my thirties was that the "art first, family second" philosophy was morally bankrupt. I'm not totally sure what changed my mind. Maybe it was several things. For one, yes, the people who produce art are rarer than the people who produce human beings, but there's still plenty of art to go around. There's not a shortage of supply relative to demand. Or maybe it's just that I didn't want to be like William Faulkner, drinking on my daughter's birthday when she'd asked me not to because, "Nobody remembers Shakespeare's daughter." Or maybe I just thought that I have a limited time on Earth, and being good to the people around me is a more guaranteed way to use that time well than writing a novel is. Whatever the reason, while I have occasionally had to fudge family responsibilities in order to write, I've never forgotten that family is more important. If I write a novel people are still talking about in a thousand years but fail as a father, then I've wasted my time.

Given that those are the rules I've set up for myself, it's been really hard to find time to write. Not just write, really. Anyone can probably carve out a few hours a week to slap down some kind of prose. Finding time to write seriously is what's hard, meaning to not just write but read good writing, think about good writing, write about good writing, make drafts of my own writing that I strive to make as good as the best of what I'm reading. Maybe even participate in the literary community a bit and also pay attention to some advice on the best way to find places to publish what I've written. It's a lot. Professors are always grousing about not having time to write, which I understand, but it's family, not work, that is the real strain on a writer. 

I've avoided putting this out there for the public to see, but now that COVID-19 has all children in America home-schooling, I don't worry so much about it now. We pulled our son from school at the end of the 2018-2019 school year, and we've been home schooling him since. He was massively under-performing relative to what standardized tests said he should be able to do. A lot of it had to do with him being bored, and therefore not paying attention to what he was supposed to do, then when I emailed teachers to find out what he was supposed to be doing, not getting answers so I didn't know how to make sure he stayed on task. I figured however hard it would be to do it myself, at least I'd know what he his work was.

So for a year and half, when I get home from work, I spend a few hours working with him. He still doesn't do the greatest work for me, but occasionally, he does something that lets me know the lights are still on up there for him. I'm relatively certain he'll be able to pass a GED in a few months when he turns sixteen, and then he can be free to find his own path a little bit. At least, that's the dream. 

Until then, I'm still really straining to keep up. We can't work a full 5-6 hour day every day, so I have to settle for 2-3 hours days that we also do on weekends and holidays (and the summer). We just do a little bit every day, and in that manner, we've kept up with more or less a high school workload. 

Add to my family responsibilities that I have begun to feel lately that I haven't focused enough on my skill as a translator, meaning I've been reading Korean texts instead of fiction in English, and you can see why I don't feel like I'm really working as hard as I need to with writing to get anywhere. Yes, reading Korean literature is probably helpful to me as a writer, because it makes me think outside my own linguistic box, but it takes me a long time to get through Korean literature. My reading time is more than double in Korean what it is in English, and I'm not a fast reader in English. 

Which is why this is just to say I'm not really quitting, but since half-assing it isn't any better than quitting, I don't know what I'm doing with writing, either. I've had to stop my analyses of Pushcart stories. When Best American Short Stories come out in a few months, I don't know if I'll do those, either. 

That's a shame, because I really like doing it. I think it's an important contribution to the literary world, because there's a paucity of online resources for people to go to for help when they feel a little lost by the stories they read in the top anthologies. More than that, I know it's been good for my own fiction writing to focus so deeply on some of the best writing that's out there. Even when I don't like a story, that helps me refine my own ideas of what it is I do like and what I want to do as a writer. 

That's all just a long way of explaining why I haven't been around much and might not be for a while. Maybe it'll get better when the boy passes his GED. Or maybe I'm so into Korean things now, I never get back into writing. I don't know. I'll at least help the world to a gratuitous political rant now and again in the next few months, no doubt. 

It's been great how many people have tuned in for stuff I've written about short stories, especially BASS. Even if those folks just help themselves to an explanation or two and then run off without saying high, it's always great to me to see that a hundred or so folks stop by every day, mostly for short story explanations. Something I wrote became a part of the day of people I don't know. That makes me happy, and probably will never stop making me happy.  

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.

What I've learned about editing and reviewing makes me wonder how good literature ever gets published

I spent a year as an editor/reader for the Baltimore Review, mostly to thank them for being the first journal to publish one of my stories. I've also been the lead fiction reader/editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House, the co-op publisher that put out my only book a few years ago, for the last two years. As a reader who gets hundreds of entries for a very small number of openings, I often rejected stories after one page. I felt bad about this at first, but it's really unavoidable. We don't have enough readers to get through everything if we're going to read it all carefully from beginning to end. And besides, readers are going to be even more fickle than editors: if I don't want to keep reading after a page, what reader, who has no obligation to keep going, is going to keep going? So we limit ourselves to work that compels reading from page to page.

Of course, you want writing to be compelling, so maybe this is just a quick way of getting to the good stuff. But as I've been doing more serious review/critiques for the last year, it's required an entirely different kind of reading from me. I read every story twice. Often, my opinion of the story completely changes between reading one and reading two. I've frequently been ready to rip apart a story, then something about it opened up upon further reflection, and I ended up writing a very positive review.

In theory, that's how you should read every story. A story written seriously deserves a serious reader. No journal should expect they will fill their pages with stories worth reading seriously if they don't take the time to read seriously. But nobody can really do this.

So how do stories like the ones in Best American Short Stories, stories that don't reveal their secrets until you've poked and prodded at them a bit, get published? I think the answer, for the most part, is that they're written by people who already wrote enough of the kinds of stories you need to write to get past editors, and now are given enough rope that they can write a different kind of story. Yes, there are new writers in BASS every year, but it's mostly filled with established commodities, people who probably got a different kind of reading when they sent work in than others did, a more sympathetic kind of reading.

It's an old realization that readers approach a known commodity differently from an unknown one. If you put a story in front of college literature students and told them it was written by Joyce Carol Oates, you'd get a completely different reading than you would if you told them it was a story by another student submitted for a workshop.

After getting several stories published and then the book, I tried to transition to a different kind of story, one that was a little more at the core of the things I care about. Some of the stories ended up being longer. All are a lot more uncomfortable. I've had some positive feedback from editors, but the things they've pointed out about why they didn't ultimately accept the work seemed to me to be the kinds of things you'd say if you hadn't read very carefully. Two have opined on a story in a way that made me think they didn't read the key passage in the story, the one that (I hope) tied together all the questions about the main character.

This is really at the heart of why I've been in a place for a few months where I just can't even write. I'm never at a loss for words or stories or ideas. It's not that I have writer's block. It's that I don't trust myself as a writer. That's largely because I no longer trust myself as a reader. If I can write a story and put it aside long enough to look at it from the outside, and I see something in it that no editor sees, the problem isn't me as a writer, it's me as a reader. That's kind of an identity crisis for me, because if there's one thing I've always felt pretty confident about, it was that I was a fairly insightful reader.

So what do I do? Write "in the manner of a story that is likely to be published," or write my stories, even though experience should have taught me by now that's not a way to succeed? For the last few months, the answer for me has been to just not write.

Most writing advice websites emphasize how important it is to keep going through rejection. I wonder how many will tell you that at some point, rejection isn't an obstacle to push through, but a sign to be heeded? 

This has now gotten ridiculous

From the Georgia Review, received today:

"Although your manuscript engaged our attention through several screenings, it was not ultimately selected for publication."

This is the Georgia motherhumpin' Review. One of the best journals on the planet. It now joins these other fine journals in having told me they were very close to accepting this particular story, but not quite there:

• Carve
• The Iowa Reivew
• The Common
• Shenandoah
• Nashville Review

That's six journals, any of which would have been a tremendous breakthrough for me, all of whom said they found a lot to like in it, but it wasn't quite there.

I just don't know what to do anymore. As a reader, I look at this story and feel like I just nailed it. I think it's the best thing I've ever written. It's much better than the stories I've published before. It's on a topic that's in the news, and I quite likely have more insight into this topic than any writer out there. If there's a story I really have to tell the world that's worth a damn, this is it. But it's a long story, which means there are a limited number of places to send it to, and I've sent it to almost all of them by now. I have a few more to try, but why would I expect anything different?

I gave it another look this week. I see I had two sections early on where I messed up sentences during a prior edit. That might have hurt its chances, although anyone who got past those enough to read the whole thing probably didn't say no because of those. My judgment as a reader is that the thing is pretty much right as it stands. There doesn't seem to me to be anything more to do with it.

I talk a lot about giving up, but I really don't want to. I love this story. It deserves readers. But if I can't get this one published, what chance do I have of ever having any kind of real audience as a writer? If I'm wrong about this story, I literally have no idea what's worth reading.

I can't believe a story can be considered good by so many journals of sound judgement, but not good enough by any.

Jesus, if I ever have some kind of definitive breakthrough and am looking back through this blog for moments of despair where it didn't look like it was ever going to happen, this is about as dark a one of those moments as I've felt.

I...might need a break

Late last summer and early fall, I put everything I had into writing six stories I thought were good enough to get published in one of the stronger literary journals. As I've said before, I'm honored when any journal, however small, chooses something I wrote and gives it a home, but I've been at this for five years now, and if I'm every going to get anywhere with this other than it just being a hobby, then I need to get something published in one of the larger journals soon.

I've had a number of positive responses since then, which is way better than I'd ever done before. But none have quite made it. This morning, I got the most expansive response to a rejection I've gotten yet:

We'd like you to know that overall, your piece was well-received by our reading committee. They have some comments and notes listed below. We hope you find them helpful as you continue to revise or resubmit your piece elsewhere.

--COMMENTS--
“This is a moving, engaging story. I cared about the main character, her story, and her well-being right away. The pacing was appropriate: doesn't drag but it's not a race either. Secondary characters are introduced at the right times and their purpose felt meaningful each time. The dialogue read very natural. Despite my lack of cultural context, I understood exactly what the writer meant. The writer chose great moments to explain details to outsiders but to leave enough mystery to place you directly in the cultural setting. It felt like a story that really cared about its characters.

“The ending might need a rethink - the revelation at the end is a bit forced I felt. But I like the sense of dislocation.”

That's really, really kind feedback. It's way more than you get from most publishers. And most of it is quite thoughtful and also answers a lot of the questions I myself had about how the story might be read: mostly, is it too slow? 

I wasn't quite sure what "the revelation at the end is a bit forced" meant, because I didn't think there was a revelation at the end, really. The main character thinks she might have learned something about another character, but she isn't sure, so rather than take action, she decides to keep watching in a state of hyper-vigilance. That seemed to me to be the natural outcome of a story in which the main theme probably had something to do with surveillance, and the similarities and differences between state surveillance and neighborly looking out for one another. 

But if the readers who obviously paid close attention to the story saw something differently, then I must have failed to communicate it correctly. Which means going back and ripping at this story yet again, and I am so deflated and tired, I can't even think of doing it. 

So here I am, for the umpteenth time, thinking that maybe the hard fact is that no matter how good I do it, it will never be good enough, and I'm just going to go on being unhappy until I accept that and do something else with my life. At the very least, I think I need a break, and that includes this blog and reviewing Pushcart. So it may be a while before I'm back. 

I hate to think that posts like these come off as whining. I don't mean them that way. Anguished, I'm okay with. It's okay to communicate that this stuff is incredibly frustrating, so much that it might not really be worth doing. But I don't hold the world responsible for it. The game I'm playing is very hard to play, and if it's too much, I need to stop playing. I mean only to communicate that the value of playing the game is not always so self-evident to me that I think I must keep playing it at all costs. 

More of the discouraging kind of encouragement

I've been submitting to Glimmer Train longer than any other journal. I even submitted to them a few times before I got serious about giving writing a go in late 2013. They're one of the few journals I've ever subscribed to. I love that they're just a thing two sisters dreamed up and then made happen. I haven't loved every story they've put out over the years, but I've liked many of them, and I really love that they pay writers and that they always publish a list of not just the winners but also the top 25 for every contest. It's nice to get that little clue that even if you didn't make it, you're on the right track. To make the top 25 is to make the top 2-3% of about 1,000 people, which is about what they usually get, give or take some depending on the contest.

I submitted maybe ten times without ever cracking either top list. Then a few months ago, I made top 25. Just last week, I got a notice that I'd somehow managed to make the top 25 a second time. The editors told me they got over 1,000 for that one, so I was in the top 2% of a ton of people.

I ought to be happy. Maybe I sort of am. But also not. Mostly not. I had a project I really wanted to dive into a week ago. I wrote for a day and then just stopped, not because I was stuck but because I just couldn't see the point. I feel like I took my best shot with this last round of stories, and I'm coming up just short all over the place. This last near-miss with Glimmer Train feels like it has some finality to it.

Maybe that's because Glimmer Train is shutting down after 20 years. This was my last chance to get into it. I realize there are hundreds of other journals out there, but for some reason, I feel like missing out on my last chance to make it in Glimmer Train is somehow my last chance to make it, period.

I am, of course, enormously grateful to Glimmer Train for letting me know I was close. I wish every journal gave you some idea whether you were close. I have a scheme I would use if I ever ran a journal.

Side note: this is all random

That same story that just placed me in the top 25 got a form rejection after a week from a much lower-prestige journal.  You might think that if a really strong journal was close to taking it, a lower-prestige one would snap it up. But it doesn't work like that. Sometimes, it takes the stronger editors at a bigger journal to even realize what they have. I can personally testify that at lower-prestige journals, the editors are so overworked, they really can miss good stuff. I did.

The other story that made Glimmer Train's top 25 has also had a couple of other "we almost published this" notes, but plenty of total ignores as well. So there's being good, and there's luck. Luck submitting a story at the right time relative to the other stories a journal gets, and luck just finding an editor who gets you.

Some people get lucky early in their careers, and some never get lucky. I'm feeling right now like I'm nearer to latter end of the spectrum.

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.

The benefits of occasionally rage-quitting writing

By all accounts, when you get a personalized rejection letter from an editor, it's supposed to be encouraging. They don't send those to everyone. They don't have the time to tell you they liked it if they didn't. They publish a few stories and send out a few more notes to those who almost made it. If you got a personal note, you were in the top one to three percent. So you should feel good about it.

Video games and me

I tend to get pissed off kind of easily while playing video games. I was like that playing tennis as a kid, too. I broke a fair number of rackets. Nowadays, if I keep playing a tough level in a video game over and over and can't beat it, I have a tendency to chuck the controller on the ground, swear a lot, and quit playing. The kids call this "rage quitting." They generally mock rage quitters, especially in a multi-player game where you leave your teammates down a player, but I can't even pretend that's not me.*

The benefits of the rage quit

As disconcerting as it might be to watch a grown man have a fit over playing a stupid game, there are some benefits to the player. It's sort of a giant reset button. You get away from the problem for a while, maybe go take care of the things you ought to have been doing for the last four hours while you failed at your game. You know, because you're a grown man and all. You remember there are other things in your life besides the game. You could live quite happily without ever beating the game. You don't need to beat that level. And suddenly, you've got it. You realize the way to beat the stupid thing. Sometimes, the best you'll ever play is immediately after coming back from a rage quit.

The getting published part of writing is a lot like a boss level of a video game to me

I usually like writing stories. I usually like editing them. But getting them published is a pain. I have little control over it. Luck is involved. I think I've written the story I always wanted to read, but editors have their own ideas of what they've felt was missing in their lives. You can keep putting a story up over and over again, only to have it fail repeatedly to get past the final level.

This would be an interesting form rejection letter for an editor to use

This is especially frustrating if it's a story you're personally invested in. Last year, I started puttering around with a story and I realized while writing it that I was writing about my adopted daughter and how she'd changed my life. It's been a bit of an obsession to me to get this story published. I feel like I owe it to her. 

I recently got my third encouraging rejection letter, a.k.a. the "almost" letter, on this story. I ought to be encouraged, but really, I feel more like I've now gotten to within seconds of beating the final boss only to have it all fall apart. It's more than just disappointing; it's infuriating. 

So I'm rage quitting for a bit. I don't believe in waking up each day and answering to some higher calling to be a writer. If it's not making me happy, I don't want to do it. But the very act of acknowledging that I can live without it is often just the thing to get me past the hurdle. Either I'll think of some way to change the story that will put it over the top or I'll come up with something new. But I'd never have gotten either without first clearing my head through a little purifying rage. 

*I don't really play video games that much. I haven't for most of my life. But for a while, I was playing a lot when my son's interest in the games exceeded his manual dexterity, and he kept asking me to get him past the hard parts. That phase is long gone, now. But there were definitely some times when I was trying to beat levels for him that I threw controllers across the room. 

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.

Time for something new

There is a South Park episode where Randy Marsh gets obsessed with cooking shows and decides to dedicate his life to becoming a great chef. He quits his job and dedicates himself to the task. This drives his wife crazy, but she is unable to change his attitude until finally, to make a long story short, she gives him an "old fashioned" (hand job), and he concludes that "cooking is dumb" and goes back to life as before.

That's how I feel right now about writing literary fiction. I've given most of the last four years to it, not to mention all that time in grad school, and now, I just don't see what I saw in it. I've read every short story in the Pushcart and Best American Short Stories Anthologies for the last five years. I've read the Pulitzer-winning novels from that time, too. None of them has really changed my life the way I thought great literature should. Meanwhile, I continue to write stories that I think are getting better, but I'm having more trouble getting them published than I did a few years ago. Clearly, my ideas about what makes something worth reading do not match what the industry thinks makes something worth reading.

I was going to try to keep going for a full five years, but that just seems like a decision based entirely on the number of fingers on the human hand. I already know this isn't for me. I've done well enough I don't have to feel like I'm quitting because I just suck. But I also know I don't want to keep going forward. It's a good time to quit.

So what's next for me? I'm going to focus more on my day job as a translator. I'm going to try some different kinds of literature, probably science fiction to start with. I'm also going to read more non-fiction. I may take some courses in topics I feel stupid in, mostly information technology stuff. I don't know how to code in a single computer language. I've never taken calculus. These seem like things I ought to remedy.

I'll never stop writing. It's too much a part of how I figure things out for myself. But I think I'd like to write more about politics, religion, and other big-idea type stuff than just about writing. That's why I was interested in fiction in the first place. I don't know if I ought to start another blog, since the new one wouldn't be about writing, or just keep going on here and change the focus. Or maybe not write a blog at all, since blogs are so ten years ago that hardly anyone reads them.

I have found that blogging has been useful to me, personally, even if it's been of no use to anyone else. I see now why people used to keep journals. Writing this journal in public has been good enough for me that I will probably keep doing it in one form or another.