On Process: Rejection

In my mini-series on process I decided to skip the "submission" step since I've blogged about that often enough of late and skip right on over to rejection.

For the longest time I've been collecting my rejection letters and pinning them to my bulletin board. At first I did this because my bulletin board was blank and I was hanging them up as a sign of progress and effort. A look! see, I am doing something! I'm working and trying and this is proof, damn it! sort of thing. Then I continued to do it because I read the thing from Stephen King that he pinned all his rejection letters to his wall until the thumb tack fell out and then he put a spike in the wall and kept adding letters until the spike fell out and then he got published. I wasn't big on the idea of pounding a spike into the wall but a fuzzy-happy part of my brain thought I wouldn't have to wait that long.

The push pin ain't cuttin it any more; I'm at the spike stage.

And I really don't want to invest in a spike, so all my letters and half-sheet and quarter-sheet notes are sitting in a pile beside the trash can. It was a tidy pile but the cats knocked it over. These are just the paper ones. I don't keep the email rejections because it's beyond pointless to waste trees like that.

Now I'm wondering if it's even worth keeping the stack on the floor. I don't need to keep them to prove I'm working toward my goal, I think the whole grad school thing is proof enough for the moment.

The bulletin board looks so much better without this wad of paper cluttering it up. Up there now are my two rejections with handwritten notes from the editors. (Hayden's Ferry Review and Hunger Mountain you are my favorites!) Attached above the board is my one and only acceptance letter -- I think getting the letter was better than getting the magazine with the poem in it. If those are positive energy pieces, are the rejection notes negative energy pieces? Shouldn't I be sweeping negative energy out of my life? Or have I just read way too much Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron?

So the real question I have for you comes down to what do you do with rejection? Since rejection comes to all writers sooner or later (most sooner) I assume that you know how to deal with it mentally; what do you do with it physically?

I have a friend who wallpapers her half-bath with her rejection letters. She's arranging them in a rather intriguing pattern. It's very much a bathroom that a writer can appreciate. Or perhaps it's commentary.

Faith, Literature and the Box Set

Day 9 total: [18,262 / 50,000]

I went to Barnes & Noble last night and walked through the shelves and found the places where my novels will live once I write them. For the most part, the places are in good spots. I looked at the boxed sets the store has placed at the end of isles in anticipation of Christmas gift buying and thought what my series novels will look like in a box set, particularly what their packaging will be. I'd like spines with just a little bit of shine; something more metallic than matte.

When I did the Artist's Way this summer one of the realization/visualization tasks was to figure out what success means to you and not use anyone else's standards. My standards involve walking into a bookstore and picking up a book with my name on it. After my grumpy, angsty, anxious feelings of the past few days, getting back in touch with that realization/visualization was good for me.

I realized that yesterday's "grass is greener" ranting was more symptom than malady. Whenever my tolerance for pretentiousness (in relation to writing) is reached I lash out snidely about my intent to write commercial fiction and having nothing to do with things literary once I'm done with school. It really has nothing to do with commercial vs. literary fiction; it has only to do with my tolerance for BS being surpassed.

I am a writer. I do not see myself as an Artist, or (god help us) an Artiste. I am a storyteller. And I am in an MFA program to learn how to be a better writer and a clearer, more dramatic storyteller. The storytelling bug is something I've had for a long time and the writing inclination is only slightly younger as I didn't have my alphabet down when I first started making up stories that I very much believed.

That said, I get worked up (and weary) when distinctions are made between the audience you want and the typical reader. These discussions usually end up going down the gutter of no one reads today and that's just fucking depressing and untrue. Someone is still reading or there would be no Barnes&Noble and no more books. I see B&N and I see books. I even see lovely little independent bookstores (although their economics are perilous at best and I really should support them more it's just they don't have very convenient hours for me). Someone is obviously still reading something. I get even more weary when people start bad mouthing one institution or another, (a press, a school, a school of thought, a journal, a paperback writer, etc.)

I read the introduction to How to Be Alone and half of "Why Bother?" a reworked essay by Johnathan Franzen that most people know as the 1996 "Harper's Essay," I came to the realization (greatly influenced by Franzen's notions) that there is a reason for the fanaticism of the no one is reading! panic, and the I must write the Great American Novel!, or save the short story from death! and there's a disconnect between American culture and the desperately good work of novels who try to capture, engage and comment on American culture! The reason is simple: whether they know it or not, these people are practicing the religion of Literature.

Logic does not breed that kind of passion and fanaticism: faith does.

I'm not trying to make a judgment on the practice of the religion of Literature or it's simultaneous co-existence with other religions, I'm just saying that it all gets easier to understand when I look at the rhetoric on Literature as faith not necessarily part of the academic discipline (nuts and bolts and practical stuff) of write.

Literature (note my repeated use of the capital L) does seem to be the predominant faith in academia. I don't think it's a bad thing, I just don't practice it. Just like I don't practice Christianity or Judaism but I don't think they're bad things, they're just not my things. If I could survive deep in rural Indiana as a non-church goer among Bible-thumpers then I can learn to let this rehtoric roll off my back as well.

I am a writer and I want to see my name on the books in the store; I don't need an NYTimes book review. I need a box set of paperbacks with a slight shimmer and my name on every one of them. :)

Deprived

So I'm supposed to be doing reading deprivation this week to show myself what I do when I am given a significant chunk of time back.

What have I learned that I do with that "extra" time? Watch movies and read.

Yes. That's it. When I deprive myself of reading I binge read. I didn't even make it a whole week before I sat down on my couch and tried to start reading every book on the side table at once. I kid you not. I opened one book then thought of the book beneath it in the stack -- I'll read one chapter from that! I thought. It's non-fiction and sectioned, so once I'm done with the section I can pick up this novel again. All the while I had a book lying open but face down on my lap to mark my page in that text.

My binge burned me out pretty quickly and I didn't finish a section from any of those books but I did read at least a few pages of all of them -- some more than others. My lesson learned: reading deprivation makes me kinda kooky and spastic.

Still chugging along on the summer novel. Progress has been stop and go this past week as I'm still trying to recover from a trip home to visit family which broke my writing routine. Now the novel is in difficult territory. I have to find a way to transition and raise the stakes again while letting my heroine grow. She's been fairly traumatized so far and I need to give her a little bit of time to breathe and start to feel secure before I traumatize her again ... but at the same time I don't want to let the story flat line. Perhaps this would be a good time to "grow" the characters surrounding her.

Reading Deprivation

Week four of The Artist's Way: Reading Deprivation.

Reading! Deprivation -- WTF? RU Serious!? I'm not supposed to read for the next week. Hmphf. This is the first aspect of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way that I've balked at. Morning pages, sounds good. Artist's date, yeah I can do that. Reading Deprivation .... that's just not natural!

Cameron claims that excuses like "but I'm a student" or "what about work" have no hold on her. She points to those times when we've wiggled out of a weeks worth of reading just because we didn't want to or had something else going on. Damn. Those are really good instances to point to.

I'll give her the pleasure reading, the leisure reading, the blog reading (yes that means your blog), the news reading, the novel reading, the forum reading, the anything else reading ... but I will not give up the for-class reading. It's just too damn close to the end of my semester and I need to start my project ASAP and that includes relevant scholarly research.

The point of this ungodly deprivation is to show us what we do when we have that extra time. I'm supposed to be particular in my notation of what I do with my non-reading time. I'm uncertain to what end this all goes, but I guess I'll have to continue to trust in the program.

I suppose I should actually write a post this week.

I've spent much of the past four days working on the first ten thousand words of a new novel and successfully avoiding my linguistics class projects. Today I presented on that linguistics project. Don't worry: it went well. I only procrastinate until the last possible minute, not beyond.

Writing this blog post is another means of procrastinating on the written part of the project. Though, by the time this "runs" on Thursday morning I will have finished writing so no need to leave me scornful, mother-like comments about getting back to work. I know, I'm sucking all the fun out of it ;)

Working on the novel has been delightful. It's a "commercial" (i.e. not literary) project but it's happy. I've developed a pattern that has worked extremely well over the past few days. In the afternoon I print out the last half page of the text, then that evening I continue the scene or start the next one by writing it out long hand on the print out page. This gives me a quick edit of the typed text and it also means that the next morning when I go to type it up I have a "running start" for finishing my daily goal of 1000 words.

Someone recently reminded me that Stephen King in his memoir On Writing (which I really need to finish one of these days), says that the first draft of a novel should not take more than three months to write, otherwise the story gets stale in the mind of the author and that staleness translates into the writing. Editing that draft may take forever, but the first one should make it's debut in a heated rush. [I'll leave you to create your own similes and double entendres to follow that statement.]

This week's writing in The Artist's Way deals primarily with shame and anger. Shame that others inflict on us for being creative and "outside the box" of their perceptions and noting the anger we feel as indicative of what is really the matter. No, we don't act on our anger in society (most of the time) but we shouldn't dismiss that anger as irrational or unimportant because there had to be something that triggered it. Just because a hay bale seems to spontaneously combust does not mean that there was not a legitimate reason for the bale to go up in flames.

(Oxidization of wet hay in the center of a tightly bound bale spikes the internal temperature. I did a report on it in eighth grade science.)

I've been thinking about it but, as anger is not socially appropriate to air no matter how wonderfully introspective it is. And I'm really itching to just blab it all. Damn politeness.

Crazymakers

In the second "week" of The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron spends quite a bit of time discussing CRAZYMAKERS, how to identify them, why we have them in our lives, and firmly planting the idea in our minds that we need to rid ourselves of them.

Simply put, CRAZYMAKERS are drama kings and queens. Although that definition may be too simple. They're drama queens combined with school yard bullies; people who cause drama to elevate themselves and keep you subservient and uncreative.

I'm happy to say that I got rid of the last few CRAZYMAKERS in my life near the end of 2007 and that I've let no more back in. That feels pretty damn good.

Morning Pages

Every so often you hear writers, artists, and people in general talk about "morning pages" like it's a term everyone should know like "metaphor" or "poem." To me, the use of the phrase "morning pages" in conversation was a verbal signifier of subscription to a granola zen-like writing-type-thing.

Well, bring out the granola 'cause I'm on the zen boat.

I've been reading Writing Down the Bones for the past ten months. It's snippets of advice and suggestion and anecdote are never longer than a few pages long but I find I can't sit and read through more than two before putting the book down. I needed to up the ante. I needed a new writing regime and I needed it to ask a lot of me. I knew, vaguely, of The Artist's Way because I'd read/skimmed The Writer's Diet while spending long hours in a bookstore last year. The author frequently referred to her first book The Artist's Way and basically said that many of the people who successfully completed her twelve week workshops not only "unblocked" their creative selves, they found what was wrong in their lives -- what was "blocking" their happiness. And, happiness found, they lost a shit-ton of weight.

Whatever! I said and left the store. Wrote a blog about it. And never forgot.

So I've was searching bookstores -- unsuccessfully -- for a copy when it dawned on me to check the university library (there are three copies). And it so happens that the university let me check this book out for three months (no idea why) and it's a 12 week program. Sounds fated, doesn't it?

So here I am one week in. I'm doing it. Writing my morning pages ... not quite as stream of consciousness as they should be. They tend to take me an hour when they should take only 30 minutes, but they still feel good.

I'm hoping that this poor man's therapy will help because I find myself not writing these past few months. No new ideas. No work on old ideas. No editing of half-baked ideas. Sure, I'll open a word document, change a couple of phrasings, get frustrated and close the thing, but that's not helpful, nor is it forward progress.