There’s a Time for Us

Ah, those timeless, fabulous, Stephen Sondheim lyrics. You all know the song, what the Dire Straits referred to as “the Movie Song.” The reason why the West Side Story song “Somewhere” is such a powerful piece of music is because we all know the story of Romeo and Juliet; we all know that Maria and Tony will never find that place, that time. There is no time for “us.”

The same could be said, if you really want to be realistic with yourself, of writing. We all probably have at one point in time entertained fantasies of landing a five book deal that ensures us six figures a year, plus obscene royalties since naturally our books will each land on the bestseller list. Right. But even as we all have allowed, at times, our minds to wander to these totally unrealistic dreams, we all (I hope) are well aware that such dreams will never come true. There will never come a day when we will make a cushy income off of writing and writing alone, when we wake up each morning with nothing else on the schedule but to write. There is not, as it were, a time for us.

What this means is that when we look at our busy lives, when we quantify our busy schedules and try to calculate out how much time we could reasonably spend writing, when we do all this and we see that the answer is very little, the solution to the problem is not to look forward to some indeterminate future in which we will have the time. You’ll write tomorrow, or when things slow down at work, or when your kids start school. You’ll write when you have time.

The truth is that you will never have time. What you’re really doing when you tell yourself you will write “someday” is lulling yourself into a sense of false security. Justifying the fact that you’re not willing to work it out. Denying the fact that you are not a writer, at least, you are not behaving like one right now.

Once you accept that there will never be time, you’re left with only two real options. You can give up and decide that you’re just not going to make it as a writer, or you can realize that most successful writers don’t really have time to write, yet they’ve all found a way to make it work; why can’t you?

I’ve been telling myself for the past few months that one day I’ll land a full time job as a college English instructor – hopefully even as a Creative Writing instructor – and when that day comes I’ll have summers and winters off and plenty of time to write. Oh, it gets me through the bad days, this is true, but there are a couple of problems with this line of thought.

For one thing, in order to really be competitive for such a job I first need to get a book or two published, and in order to do that I need to keep writing as much as I can. I can’t tell myself that it’s okay if I can’t find the time to write right now; if I don’t find the time now then that dream job will always remain out of reach. And then of course there’s the fact that even though I might tell myself now that if/when I get a full time instructor job, time to write will naturally follow, the truth is that I will probably always have other things I could and should be doing with my time. There will always be reasons not to write.

So step one: Accept that there will never be time. Step two: Figure out a way to make the time, already! I’ve been getting up a half hour early every day this month so that I can write a little bit before work. A half hour isn’t enough to get a lot of quality work done, but it’s enough to get me pumped about whatever project I’m working on, and then I’m more likely to figure out a way to squeeze time out later in the day, or to get up even earlier the next day to have more time. (It’s also, by the way, a nice antidepressant. I feel much happier when I’m writing every day, and it really sets the tone for the day if I get some writing done first thing.)

So no, there is no time for us, Tony and Maria, not unless we make the time, but we have to make it right now. Today. This minute. Now.

A Spoonful of Sugar

There are a few ways I’ve found to take the sting off of rejections that I wanted to share. The thing about rejections (as I know I’ve said before) is that they are an important part of being a writer. If you’re not receiving rejections, then you’re probably not really even in the game. It’s important, then, that we try to look at rejections in a sort of positive light, that we try to be happy about receiving rejections because they’re a good sign, really. They mean you’re sending things out there. They mean you’re doing the things a writer has to do. I’ve talked before about using rejections as a motivational tool, but I think it’s also important that we see the rejections themselves as a positive thing. After all, if you were not receiving rejections that would mean you were not submitting.

Recently, my husband Damien and I started using a rewards system, which we put together from a composite of other writers systems that we had heard about and liked. Our system goes like this: for every one hundred points that you earn, you get a $25 Amazon gift card. Every response you ever receive to your work earns at least one point. A journal acceptance is worth ten points, a manuscript or partial manuscript request is worth five, a personal rejection is worth two points, and a form rejection – those puny little half-slips of paper that so effortlessly make our hearts sink – are worth one point. No matter what response you just received, you’re still that much closer to your reward.

I like this system because it reminds us that even the most basic form rejection is still worth something in the grand scheme of the writing life. Yes, I’d rather get a personal rejection (two points) and of course I’d rather get an acceptance (ten points!), but notice that the divide between points is not that astronomical. An acceptance is worth ten times more than a rejection, but you’d still need to get ten acceptances before you made it to your reward. Really, the way to get to that reward is to have a steady stream of responses coming in– it doesn’t really matter that much what the responses are, as long as you’re sending your work out there and getting something back.

There are two other things that I’ve found make rejections not feel so bad. One is to be perpetually engaged in other writing projects. If you’re anything like me, you tend to feel like whatever current new piece you’re writing is the best thing you’ve ever written. This is a good feeling, and it makes rejections for the older stuff, the stuff you had already finished and started sending around, feel less significant. No big deal, you think. Just wait until I finish this story/poem/book and start sending it out!

The other thing that helps is to send out sim subs to multiple different venues. When I first started submitting, I was kind of nervous about sim subs. More and more places these days accept (even encourage!) simultaneous submissions, but I was worried that if I did get an acceptance, it might be time consuming to track down the contact info for the other journals I had sent that story to. The truth is that yes, it’s kind of time consuming (and sometimes a journal or two will apparently not receive the withdrawal when you send it in), but when you get an acceptance you don’t really care. You’re so excited that X journal will be publishing X piece, you’re more than willing to slog through the withdrawal process.

And the thing is, if you get a rejection for a piece that, let’s say, you’d sent out to twenty different journals, that one rejection doesn’t really bother you because one of those other nineteen might still accept it. In my experience, the same exact piece can receive a “Dear Author” form rejection from one journal and an enthusiastic acceptance from another. If you only send out to one place at a time, if/when that place rejects it, that rejection is going to feel much heavier than if there were several places who were still considering that piece.

So there you have it. Not only are rejections not such a bad thing, really they’re a good thing, in my opinion. Send your work out there, and be happy when you get those little half-slips back. A half-slip, “Dear Author, Thanks but no thanks,” response is still something. Everything you ever do as a writer is always worth something.

The Minors and the Big Leagues

Okay, I’m stealing the baseball analogy from the current issue of Poets and Writers, but I’d like to think that I would have come up with it on my own, what with the start of the baseball season in the near future and my husband, a big-time baseball fanatic, getting increasingly excited as spring training games get closer. I’m talking, of course, about the minor and major leagues in the literary world: small journals with low circulations verses larger, more prestigious journals.

The question I’ve been pondering lately is this: how do you know when you’re ready for the big game?

I’ve heard many different writers offer a range of opinions on the subject of small journals. Some writers argue that an acceptance in a small journal is meaningless and that you shouldn’t even waste your time submitting to these places. This attitude, in my opinion, doesn’t really make sense. Of course getting published in the major journals is a bigger deal than the small ones, but that doesn’t mean that an acceptance from a small journal means nothing. Based on my experiences working on two very small journals, I can tell you that even the small guys get a ton of really great submissions, and most of the submissions have to get rejected. An acceptance still means that your work rose to the top of the slush pile, that someone, or more likely several someones, read and liked and wanted to publish what you wrote.

I’ve also heard the argument that, while of course writers have to begin in the minors, it looks bad for you to linger down there for too long. Once you have a few small scale publications under your belt, you need to move up and start playing for the big leagues. I haven’t quite been able to make up my mind on this one yet. In some ways it does make sense that if you just keep publishing for years and years and years in the small presses, agents and publishing houses might wonder why you’ve been in the game for so long but haven’t made it up to the next level. But then, what about the idea of exposure? I recently had a lit agency contact me about querying them, and the story of mine that they had read was published in an extremely tiny journal. I have a much larger journal in my publication past, but that wasn’t the one the agency noticed.

Part of the reason I’m thinking about this right now is because I’ve noticed lately that the stories that I feel are my better ones have been getting mostly form rejections, but the ones I don’t feel are as strong have been getting extremely enthusiastic personal rejections, and sometimes, acceptances. At first I wondered if this meant that I’m not gauging the quality of my work properly, but then it occurred to me that I’ve been sending my better stories to bigger journals, and I’ve been sending the less strong ones to really small journals.

I’m the sort of person who likes to closely examine and analyze everything that ever happens so that I might take something away from it for next time, but I have to admit that I’m stumped about where to go from here. The fact that the small journals have been extremely encouraging of my work might lead me to believe that I should be starting my submission runs with larger journals (another argument I’ve heard from writers is that you should have a sort of hierarchy worked out for which journals you’d most like to get published in, and you should submit your work first to the top journals and work your way down the list, only submitting to the smaller journals when your work has already been rejected by the bigger ones).

The problem with that, though, is that the stories that I believe are my best have been getting a great big yawn from the larger journals I’ve been submitting them to. I’ve been getting mostly form rejections from those places, sometimes with a handwritten, “Thanks, Ashley. Submit again,” or something to that effect, but rarely real responses: “We really enjoyed X and Y about this story but ultimately had to reject it for Z reason.” I worry that if I take my recent realization to mean that I should aim higher, the result will be that I will stop receiving acceptances altogether, and I will receive far fewer encouraging rejections, too. And let’s face it, encouraging rejections are what the new writer lives off of.

So how do you know when you’re ready for the big game? When is it time to start demanding something more of yourself and when is it smarter to stick with what’s been working? And should you be satisfied with the minor leagues? Should small scale publications continue to mean something or do you reach a point where you have to move up or accept that you never will?

Why We Write

Think back – far, far back and farther still. Think back to the time before the time you knew you wanted to be a writer. Yes, I realize this may feel like asking you to think back to life inside the womb, but humor me for a second, will you?, and try.

Do you remember where this desire came from? Do you remember where it all began? Do you remember that feeling of excitement, that thrill, that would overcome your senses when you would sit down and scribble your stories or poems or plays? Do you remember, specifically, the difference between that time – the time when you wrote with no expectation for reward, no thought that this thing might some day get published or that you might some day be recognized for the exceptional talent that you are – and this time – a time when everything seems to hinge on acceptances and rejections?

I’ve often said that I believe if you’re writing solely for the purpose of publication or because you hope that one day you might make a living off of this, you are doing it for the wrong reasons. This, of course, is unfair. Everybody has the right to their own secret purposes in life. My point, however, when I make a broad statement like that, is that you’re probably setting yourself up for failure if this is why you write. It seems like a waste, to me, to spend so much time and energy and effort, if you’re only doing it because you think it will bring you things that may never come. Publication, whether small scale or large, seems like an achievable goal for anybody who keeps at it, but the chances that you will one day make a living off of writing are extremely slim, no matter how good you are, and they seem to be getting slimmer with the changing technologies and DIY trends in today’s publication industry.

In addition, I believe that your chances of reaching any measurable level of success as a writer are greatly diminished if success alone is your driving force. Here’s why: rejections will always be more plentiful than acceptances. Period. You may have to live through years of rejections before you even get an acceptance at all, and that first acceptance will probably be for a very small journal that is mostly (or perhaps even only) read by other contributors. (I don’t mean to suggest that such an acceptance should be taken lightly. I’m a firm advocate for small journals, as an editor of an online journal myself, and I believe that getting anything accepted anywhere is a big deal. However, a small journal acceptance certainly is a smaller triumph than, say, if you were to get something published in the Paris Review or Granta.)

If success alone is what’s driving you, it seems unlikely that you will be able to bear through the years and years of scratching your way up to finally reach a level of success that someone other than you might be impressed by. That is to say, I believe that writers who write to get published will, most of them, eventually give up. It just isn’t worth it.

But if you write because you love to write – if you write because it gives you pleasure, because it adds meaning to your life, because it helps you to understand and interpret the world around you – if, in other words, you write now for the same reasons you wrote back then, in that forgotten time so long ago, then none of the rest of it matters at all: not the acceptances or the rejections, not the money or the recognition (neither of which are ever likely to amount to much, anyway). The only thing that matters is the feeling you get when you write. The only thing that matters is the writing, itself.

Just Keep Swimming, Er, I Mean, Writing

I talked a little bit last time about accepting the likelihood that my graduate thesis, which I’ve been shopping around to agents for the past few months, will probably not get published, or at least, not as my first book. This is something that I think most writers have to accept when they are in the middle of the early stages of their careers.

There’s a common story: the writer who can’t get his or her first novel published, writes a second (or third one, or fourth), finally gets something accepted and then goes back and dusts off that earlier manuscript, now that he or she’s broken into the publishing world. We’ve also all heard the stories of people who write a first book, a second, a third, and finally on their fourth or fifth they get a book published, but they don’t try to publish those earlier manuscripts because they know now that those early ones weren’t good enough.

Whatever the case, it’s important to remember that real writers – the ones who actually write and publish and slowly but surely make progress in their writing careers – just keep writing, no matter what. What distinguishes the ones who make it from the ones who don’t, as far as I can tell, is the ability to accept the inevitable rejections and the fact that you’re not perfect (and neither is your work), without getting discouraged and without ever, ever, EVER giving up.

Yes, this seems to involve a certain contradiction at the very core of your being. You’re willing to take criticism and you haven’t deluded yourself into thinking that you’re a genius (maybe once upon a time you had those delusions, but you’ve grown out of them by now, I hope, and now you know that you weren’t born to become the next Hemingway, that, in fact, Hemingway wasn’t, either; he just worked hard and got lucky, both). And yet at the same time, you believe in yourself, in your skills as a writer and your ability to keep getting better, and perhaps most incongruous of all, you truly believe that other people will want to read these things that you write.

It’s that balance you always hear about: hubris checked by modesty. Believing in yourself and your work just far enough, but not too far. Not so far that you become one of those a-holes who argue with anyone willing to give them feedback and who believe that every editor and agent who has ever rejected their work is an idiot.

But I believe that anybody can reach that balance. It just takes emotional maturity and perhaps being around other writers long enough that you realize that you’re not special but that doesn’t mean that you don’t still have something worthwhile to say. So the real deciding factor, then, is whether you’re willing to keep at it indefinitely. To receive rejection after rejection but still continue sending stuff out. To write every day, even when you’re positive that nobody will ever publish what you’re working on, even when you’re afraid that nobody will ever publish anything that you write, ever. To write a second novel, even if your first one never got published. And to revel in the small triumphs: journal acceptances, encouraging rejections, and those flashes of inspiration that send you breathlessly rushing to your computer, carried away by your own excitement to get this written down.

Rejections: The Greatest All Time Motivational Tool?

I asked a couple of people recently what I should write my next blog about and they said rejections as a motivational tool. OK, and in what way are rejections motivating? They make you want to get out there and try again. They make you feel like a real writer because a “No” response is still better than no response. Yeah, these things are true . . . but rejections are still kind of discouraging, aren’t they?

The topic has been stewing in my mind since then, and I’ve been trying to decide what rejections are better at: encouraging you to try, try again, or making you feel like you’ve been fooling yourself all along. All writers, if they’re going to stick with it long enough to actually reach any kind of steady stream of acceptances, have to develop a thick skin about rejections. We all get rejected. All of us. A lot. Your favorite writer has been rejected. Your favorite writer, come to think of it, probably still has people who don’t like his or her work. This is a subjective business.

My current agent search has shed a bit of light on the topic of rejections for me. So far I’ve sent out about twenty five queries. I’ve gotten a few form rejections, about an equal number of personal rejections, about an equal number of no response (yet?)s, and two requests for partials, which eventually ended in rejections. Of the personal rejections and the rejections from the agents who requested partials, the response has remained pretty similar across the board: This is interesting. This is well written. This sort of book is very hard to sell (or sometimes, “But I’m just not the right agent for this book”).

While I would be lying if I said these rejections haven’t been discouraging, there has been a very motivating element to them. For one thing, I’ve been encouraged by the fact that I’ve gotten a fair amount of personal responses, and those responses have been very positive about my writing. The writing itself.

The topic of this particular novel, on the other hand . . . well I knew this book might be hard to market. It’s literary fiction, which is difficult to sell to begin with, and it’s about a somewhat controversial issue. It’s frustrating to have worked on a book for three years and finally realize that it might be inherently unmarketable, but these responses really have pushed me to get back to work, serious work, on my next novel.

I wrote the first draft of my next novel in a feverish writing spree when I was inbetween drafts of my thesis (the novel I’m currently shopping around). I got back to work on it after I decided that my thesis was ready to start sending to agents, but I wasn’t able to quite get back into the groove of it. I rewrote the first twenty five pages or so, then spent a bunch of time mapping out the events that would follow them, then decided that this first twenty five pages that I had just rewritten wouldn’t work and so went back to page one and started over . . .

But these recent agent rejections have made me realize two linked things. One is that my first novel (this was actually not the first novel I ever wrote, by the way, but it’s the first one I actually thought might be publishable) will probably not get published, at least, not as my first novel. That is to say that I think it’s a good book and I still believe that it’s publishable, but I don’t think that anybody’s going to take a chance on it when I don’t have any other book credits to my name. This sort of book, as some of these agents have told me, is, by its very nature, simply hard to sell. If I had a stronger track record I think I’d stand a better chance, but as of right now, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

The other realization that came quickly on that one’s heels was that I needed to get back to work on that next novel. I needed to take it seriously and actually get that next draft written. My thesis probably won’t be “the one,” which means if I want to make it, I need to get another one finished, and perhaps another after that. I need to keep trudging onward and writing new and better books if I ever expect one of them to make it past the slushpile, past the partial request, past the full manuscript request, and finally – finally! – sold to a publishing house.

The Business Side of Writing

Many of us tend to think of writing as this purely creative field, this artsy endeavor that we’re drawn to, at least in part, because we’re not drawn to the things you have to do in an office job. But the truth is that a big part of being a writer involves a lot of the same stuff that you do at a desk job.

Consider submissions. You have to keep track of what pieces you’ve submitted to which journals, and preferably on which dates. I keep a spreadsheet where I log all this information (in addition to what particular projects I have going, what my goals are, and whether or not I’ve met my goals). In what sometimes feels like a past life, I used to work in the billing department of a healthcare clinic. This job epitomized the classic image of a desk job, in my opinion. I spent most of my day moving paper from one stack on my desk to the other, and a large part of my job was logging information into spreadsheets, not unlike what I have to do now as a writer.

But the submissions process is like an office job in more ways than that. Correspondence was another big part of my job: sending out correspondence to various labs, hospitals, and neighboring clinics, not to mention patients and insurance companies. I remember thinking how tedious it was when we would have to send out a run of patient bills, for example. Printing all the invoices, stuffing the envelopes, and then mailing them. Preparing a batch of submissions is sometimes even more tedious. It involves all those same components but you also have to research each journal to find out what, exactly, they are looking for. Then you have to find out how they accept submissions; do they want you to format it in standard manuscript format or following their own quirky specific rules? Do they want you to mail it to them, or e-mail it, or use their online submission form? The whole process is so dull that many starting out writers can’t even seem to bring themselves to do it.

And other parts of writing feel like work sometimes, too. What about when you’ve reached a point as a writer where you’ve made a commitment to it – you’ve decided that you’re going to write every day, or X number of hours every week, or X number of words every month – but you’re just not feeling it that day? You still sit yourself down in front of that computer and do the best you can to be engaged. On good days you’re able to trick yourself into getting sucked into the work, on bad days you force it until your time or word limit is reached and then feel relieved when quitting time rolls around.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that being a creative writer isn’t the romantic, artistic dream we may have once assumed it to be. It isn’t a pure escape from the office/desk job/business world. Not if you actually want to get published, anyway. The truth is there’s the artistic side of writing and the business side of it, and you have to be willing to do both if you want to really make it. But the truth is, also, that this is part of what separates the ones who will make it from the ones who won’t. Those people who don’t submit, the people who don’t buckle down and write even when they’re not “feeling it,” those people are not going to be much competition for those of us who do. And for those of us who really, really love writing, the way we all say that we do, we don’t really mind the business side of it so much. It’s worth it to us. Somewhere along the line we realize that it’s worth it.