Putting It Out There

We talked last time about the practice of creating art. Today, we get to the related but distinct practice of putting it out there, offering it to the world, letting the world reject it. Getting into the world of fiction last year, I discovered impersonal the world had become since I was in high school. I think it was poetry that I was sending out in those days, not sure about that, but I do remember my rejection slips, frequently personal, often handwritten. They may still be in a folder upstairs. I was planning on wallpapering a bathroom in rejection slips someday. I was not all that bummed out by the rejections.

I am bothered more this time around, bothered most by the fact that almost no one wrote back. Handwritten was out of the question. Mostly, its “if you haven’t heard from us in three months, assume we’re not interested.” Even my novel proposals which I sent to a dozen agents – one asked for 50 pages to be included with my letter, most asked for only 10 – got no response. Only one bothered an email rejection.

I was discouraged. Not sure why. I’d had such a different reaction submitting papers to professional journals, “juried journals” which meant that my articles were read by anonymous colleagues. Rejections usually came with pages of comments from the three disapproving readers. There was one memorably vitriolic rejection which started off, “You’ve got a lot of nerve submitting trash like this.” I made one edit, added a footnote, and submitted the article to a competing journal. That editor wrote back, “We never accept articles without revisions, but yours we will publish as is.”

This experience recalled the encouragement I’d received from one of the professors on my dissertation committee. I was going through an ordeal. Although I’d passed my defense, “major revisions” were required. I’d been caught in an intradepartmental crossfire. “This is the last time you won’t get to choose your audience,” he advised. It took me a while to grok that truth. If I wanted my doctorate from NYU, I had to satisfy this committee. Ever after, if someone didn’t like my offering, I could take it elsewhere. Just send it out again.

This time around, the rejections are hitting harder. How do I keep going? Maybe I’m too old for this. I don’t need a third career as a fiction writer. Bernie told me to detach from outcomes. His teaching was critical to the successes we had in building our charter school network. I can’t control what happens to my fiction after it's written. One of my creativity gurus, Rick Rubin, offers the same advice. We can only do our best work. We can only tell our truth. What happens after that is up to the Universe.

So why worry about publishing at all? Why not just write for myself and the few friends who care to read my stuff? It’s the bearing witness thing, at least as I understand it. To bear witness, I have to speak my truth out loud. That requires courage, gumption, something.

A Zen master famously asked, “How do you step from a 100-foot pole?” You send your story or your novel proposal out again. You bear witness to the truth of what you’ve created. Does it matter that it’s hard? Does it matter that it hurts? That I feel discouraged? Just step from the pole. Over and over again.