First submission and rejection postmortem

[ljwrites]

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
- John W. Campbell

Life was a blur of job and family activities the past few weeks, and while traveling to these activities I've been reading a lot on my phone. Reviews may be forthcoming. Still, I found the time for some creative stuff. I wrote a setting for a gamebook I'm publishing with my husband, and I submitted a short story to On the Premises as I previously threatened to do. Unfortunately I kept changing my mind about what I wanted to write until I was beyond all hope of editorial help or even self-editing. I submitted literally at the last moment knowing the story sucked, and the result was a kind, swift rejection slip.

Both submission and rejection were new experiences for me. The thing about writing fanfiction is that I've never had gatekeepers to deal with, and no markers for quality apart from whatever comments I received. I've seldom dealt with creative writing deadlines since I know I do poorly with them. I never did a lot of prompts or exchanges (though I did some, and learned something in the process). I also haven't seen anyone I know have a really positive experience with deadlined fic challenges such as Big Bangs, which for whatever reason resulted in burnout and self-doubt in all three cases I know about. I've always done best when I write what I'm excited about on my own schedule without the fear of outright rejection. The same is true of every writer I know personally, which I suspect is why we gravitate to fanfic. On the Premise's combination of gatekeepers, deadlines, and prompts was new ground, and possibly a toxic one for me.

So in hindsight it's not surprising that I did badly, but it was the way I failed that was enlightening. The biggest mistake I made was trying to come up with an Awesome Story on order and then come up with characters to fit that. Experience should have told me this is not at all how I operate. I get pumped about characters who get themselves into situations that I am compelled to write stories about. ("Character" and "situation" are not mutually exclusive, of course. Often they come to me at the same time.) I made other, smaller mistakes such as not making time to write, but I now see this was because I wasn't excited about my characters and wasn't motivated to write. I sabotaged myself because I didn't like what I was doing.

I'm still glad I submitted the story, though. In a way the submission of the story was also submission in the religious/social sense, a recognition of gatekeepers' authority and a surrender of power to them to accept or reject, and for that matter the power to see my embarrassing-as-hell draft. Like many other experiences of opening up it was both uncomfortable and thought-provoking. For one thing, my worst-case literary scenario--that something I write will suck and will be rejected--has become reality, but I'm still standing. It stings, but I know why it happened and how to keep it from happening again.

Obviously I can't keep rejection from happening again, since that's not in my power. I can, however, keep from writing a manuscript I'd be ashamed to show. It's a very Alcoholics Anonymous-type moment: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, / The courage to change the things I can, / And wisdom to know the difference." This won't be my first rejection, and that's not something I can change. I can, however, accept how I work as a writer and do better in my craft. Who knows, maybe it will be worse if my story doesn't suck and it's still rejected, and maybe that fear was part of my reason for the self-sabotage. But I no longer want to live in the realm of "could have" and "would have" when it comes to my writing. I want to say "did" and "am going to do," and what I did is I submitted an unfocused, incoherent, barely-edited draft of a story that didn't make the cut. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to write better and make more submissions.

And since future endeavors are meaningless without dates, I'm submitting to the next On the Premise contest if only as an indirect apology for making the staff suffer through my first submission. I'm also doing National Novel Writing Month in August to finally pound out the crappy first draft of the long-dreamed-of novel. I'm nowhere near done with the research but I'm starting to realize I will never be done, and in fact I might not know what to research for until I have even the shakiest framework of a story. The only way to do this thing is to do it.

All this, while I'm working, researching, and doing the reading my dissertation. I am so dead.