The Story of a Writer

The online writing community is amazing. Lately there has been a whole new crop of writers that want to know the ins and the outs of the business, who want validation, and who want to know how to break through without letting a rejection or two (or ten) break their spirit. So here's my contribution to the conversation—rejections, acceptances, and everything in between. 

 

The first time a piece of mine was published, I was eight years old. I was published again in the same publication at ten. This set the bar high for me from the beginning.  It was a publication that didn't really exist outside of elementary school libraries, but it did have a wide distribution to proud parents (and a bad habit of publishing plagiarized poems that kids somehow were able to get past the editorial staff). 

My next acceptance didn't come until my senior year of college when two of my short scripts were accepted into a collaborative project. Unfortunately, less scripts were needed than originally thought, so one was dropped, but the second one was used for the project. This happened at the same time multiple poems and short stories of mine were being rejected by the school's undergraduate literary magazine. A short story was accepted into a senior-level literary class project with a small number of print copies distributed, but so was everyone else's work from that class. It was a requirement to pass the class. 

One of my first pieces to be accepted outside of a school setting was “Life Obscured” for the Poetry of Yoga collection. It was rejected twice before that. It was a great moment, but I needed more once I got a taste of the idea that others could find my work as interesting as I did.

As with any part of life, there are those moments that seem unreal. I submitted “Second Shadow” to only one literary journal, and it was accepted. I don't know if this will ever happen again, but it's always a shocker to get a hole in one. 

 

Time went by and the rejections kept rolling in. But I had a way to feed my need for publication without all the rejection. I started using some now-defunct websites to publish all of my lesser works, those ones I wrote in high school or the ones that simply weren't right for high-caliber literary snobbery you can run into in this business. This was easy, getting by without being rejected, but there are many pieces I've lost because I thought they would exist on the world wide web forever.

“Tuesday Morning Hangover” was rejected twice. “Our Conversation in the Garden” was rejected six times before it found a home. These may seem like small numbers, but I have a handful of works that have been submitted and rejected a dozen times each and still haven't found the right match for publication, but I love them, so I think the effort is still worth it. 

 

I admit that at the beginning, independent publishing was just another way of getting by that inevitable rejection. Haiku is not something people seek out at a bookstore often, so I could justify putting Unfolding Life out there on my own. So why did I continue on the independent route for Seeing What Develops? I don't know if it was ego or simply the fact that I couldn't wait the potential years it could have taken to query agents, find one that believed in my work, then wait to see if any publisher gave it a second glance. And if no agent was interested? I don't know if I would have been able to write anything else for a long while.

I thought I was getting back on track, finding a way in that wasn't purely independent with my Kindle Worlds novellas. After all, these works had to be accepted before being published, and they were being published by the all-mighty Amazon. Reality set in when the first novella was initially rejected—the only reason it didn't make the cut was because the specific word “Callaway” was not included in the book's description. After that, I could see through the program, knowing that acceptance really just meant meeting word counts and having required keywords for the synopsis. Acceptance didn't guarantee that a real person had read it or thought that it was of a specific caliber. It wasn't a deal breaker though, because I did write and publish two more after that.

The latest poetry collection probably could have been selected for publication by a small poetry press. Although I'm the completely biased writer of said collection, I think it was good enough. There's just something about having total control of your own work that appeals to me. I know there are areas of the publishing process that I could be doing much better or be handing off to experts. What I don't like doing the most is giving myself the time to really take a look at my options. Out of everything I could have done differently for this collection, the only regret was not giving myself enough time to submit individual pieces to literary journals before I put it out there.

That leaves me with the here and now. I'm writing more consistently, with new pieces at least on a weekly basis. I'm riding the waves of the submission cycles, hoping that some of my oldest pieces will eventually be published, maybe even alongside the newer ones. I'm finally happy with the way I react to rejections—at the beginning of all this a rejection took me out for a week. I wouldn't write, edit, or submit because I was too defeated by the whole process. Eventually the gap closed. Five years ago a rejection would ruin the day. After the writing nightmare that was 2017 where nothing seemed to go right, a rejection may get as far as ruining my morning coffee or my afternoon writing session, but it takes only a little time now to recover from what is just a part of the process. A stinging one, but only a part.

Writing, especially the vein of creative writing, is not a straight line. Nor should it be. It is every cliché you can think of: roller coasters, off those beaten paths, hills and valleys, ups and downs, vicissitudes —you get the point. It takes a suit of armor that in every other aspect of my life I simply do not have, but when it comes to pouring myself onto the paper, I can stand up to anyone who's bold enough to say it's not for them and take it elsewhere. This is what it is like to be a writer. No journey looks the same, but we all get there eventually, wherever our “there” happens to be.