Getting Out of My Own Way: A Note About Hubris vs. Perseverance

For the longest time, though I desperately wanted to be a writer, I was convinced that I was incapable. It took me a ridiculously long time to prove to anyone that this wasn’t true.

Many years ago, in Chicago, my first writing gig was reviewing books for a popular weekly. Somehow I had the confidence to land this plum position, which possibly could have led to a career. But I had no sense how to foster my small corner of literary real estate.

I’ll skip ahead here to when my first piece appeared, and I nervously flipped pages through the weekly to find it, and almost as quickly, my heart sank.

I was so angry I couldn’t see straight.

In the tradition for writers everywhere, I faced the great indignation of having my work messed with by an editor.

That same afternoon while at my day job (unrelated to writing), I phoned this editor--I’ll call him Sam--to argue the deconstruction done to my four hundred word review. As my voice got louder, I drew curious daggers from co-workers. I was convinced Sam had it in for me, attacking me through my work--as if he had nothing better to do. Annoyed with me, he explained how out of line I was and hung up.

A few weeks later I was surprised when Sam included me in his e-mail list of prospective reviewers, of which several were well known local authors. This must have been a mistake. Seeing my name in that email made me feel . . . humiliated. Realizing I had oversold my ability, I never followed up. My writing career seemed finished as fast as it had begun.

In the long look back, it’s a wonder that I managed to continue with writing.

This was around the same time I had weekly confrontations with a writing group that bedeviled me about my meager grasp of fundamentals.

Up until that point, I had written little more than some passionate journal scribblings about books I loved, pieces that wouldn’t cohere, and a floundering novel, as well as a handful of fragments that I’d tried to anneal into stories, or had installed like garish set pieces into my lumpy novel; I had published nothing. So when I got the job, I was overjoyed that an editor was willing to take me on--it must have meant I was a writer.

Before that fateful review, I knew nothing of how to organize a piece of writing, how to bring it under control, let alone how to edit. It’s fair to say crafting a piece of writing was an unknowable, alchemical process that I would have to spend years at, before I could appreciate, in retrospect, the triage done to my work. My writing then was in that precious stage where allowing anyone to touch it was an affront to my creative sensibility. I’d prided myself on my iconoclasm, but I was merely driven by naive hubris. I wanted to be published as a sign of legitimacy, so that I could say, “I’m a writer”; clearly, getting published came about twelve steps too soon.

I still find it astounding that I was cavalier in the face of an editor who had tried to give me a break. Mostly I’m humbled at my younger self’s willingness to put himself into a strange trial by fire before he’d even understood the ground rules. It’s hard not to think that this job could have helped me get further along, sooner, had I not retreated so quickly.

What that humiliation did was forced me to overcome all of the voices telling me (including my own) that I couldn’t do it. Perhaps I was afraid I could not improve, and then I’d eventually be rejected by the next editor. Maybe I was convinced that I couldn’t write, and I was letting my earnest attempt--because it was earnest--become a foregone conclusion.

Those years between that first writing assignment, and when I decided to really get serious about writing, was a necessary interregnum.

One point was clear: if I really did want to be a writer, I was going to have to learn the rules if I wanted to break them. No more could I rest on the assumed laurels of my journal writing. I would have to prove myself every time I put my work out for a reader, be it someone in my writing group, an advisor, or an unknown editor.

It was only after I began to listen and understand about what needed to change that I improved, and in that time I gained the confidence to start sending out my fiction to literary journals. Sending work out meant facing inevitable rejection--many many rejections. I once had a goal of getting 100 rejections and then I was going to celebrate. I got so busy sending work out that I forgot to celebrate. But I did, eventually, get published. In the years since, I’ve received encouraging recognition along the way, and publishing has occurred almost as a matter of course. Certainly, getting published offers a frisson of satisfaction that can have a long term positive effects, but I see my earlier expectations differently, now. The reality is, I wasn’t ready when I landed that gig. I needed years of practice before I could understand that you have to put in the time and effort to become a writer.

Writing is about writing. Doing the work: completing a draft of a story, or a novel, so that I can go back and revise it. It’s about perseverance in the face of rejection and indifference.

Because I have persevered, writing, the hard work and years of commitment, have gotten me closer to where I wanted to be when I couldn’t have even imagined it was possible. Small irony--perseverance is one of the lessons I learned from writing. That I stuck with it and eventually did get my work published, can sometimes still seem to me a miracle.

"Anger Management" New Experimental Fiction at (ĕm)

My experimental short fiction, "Anger Management", leads off issue #3 of (ĕm): A Review of Text and Image, which can be downloaded as a free PDF from their library. Thanks to my fellow contributors to this terrific magazine, and to editor Jim Miller.

Submit or Bust

Print is still--and maybe always will be--the coveted realm of publication, so it seems odd that print journals are more and more striving to banish hard copy (aka snail mail) submissions. From a recent attempt to put together some mail submissions, my cursory survey indicates that the tide seems to be going this way.

I’m noticing a lot more online only submissions from journals that used to take mail submissions, and I’m of mixed opinion about this. Since print publication is the coin of the realm, it seems counterintuitive to have the work processed electronically by quality print journals (Willow Springs, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, among many others). Many charge $3 for this service, through the dominant submission site, submittable (which had the unfortunate name submishmash for awhile, which is how I thought they probably felt about the deluge they were asking for with this system). After signing up and using the service for a few journals, I didn’t realize until recently that one password would allow access into a system that offers no indication of which journals it serves, knowledge which could have spared me confusion and inevitable password headaches. When using submittable, you see a list of your submissions in a spreadsheet, the name of the journals you have submitted to with the annotation of either “Received” or “Declined.” Some must also see “Accepted,” of course. Many of the smaller or less profile journals use the system, though without a $3 charge.

The $3 may seem no more than a nominal charge considering how much an actual mail submission costs: postage, anywhere from a dollar to two or more, envelope, return envelope with postage, and printing paper, as well as the time involved. In a sense, these journals are getting the money you would otherwise spend to send a hard copy.

For all the time investment and inefficiency of snail mail, I prefer it because, like the lowly and costly journal in paperback form it aspires to, it puts something substantial and tactile in hand. It won’t evaporate with one key stroke. It is, more and more, put into a recycling bin when it fails to impress--but its chances of being a felt presence on an editor’s desk seem more comforting to me, maybe because it materializes something that came out of my mind.

As for the electronic format, if the work is only published online and not in print, it can have a brief, lowly half-life when someone hacks the journal’s website and destroys hundreds of writers’--and editors’--work. This happened with a journal I had work in, which I’ve never been able to confidently call published because the website is gone. There is often this notion that work committed to the world wide web is public forever, but somehow, it’s never the work that you might want to be available.

I am warming up to the electronic transition. But not much. I don’t particularly like reading on a screen, though I have adapted to it out of necessity. At one time, I absolutely refused to send work by e-mail or through online submission sites, though I now accept that this is the future.

The argument is made that online submissions are greener--which may be true--but I think there’s something more insidious going on against the writer, which highlights the plight of the marginally published.

As there are presumably more writers submitting work in this form, it is also easier now to send work. This can make rejection so much more efficient for journals. Because there is less paper for them to wade through, it is easier to ignore. The slush pile has become the melting polar ice cap. It’s going away and no one will miss it until it’s too late.

Online submission systems might tempt harried and overworked editors to skim over possibly good work. If the work is unknown, what are the chances that it will be that good, anyway? You can almost see the logic to this assessment. Of course, this can just as easily happen with snail mail. When you have toiled and edited your writing to a careful finish, it can feel like nothing to submit and pay your $3; if it’s this expedient to send, just image how much more likely the work could get passed over merely because there’s too much work for editors to read through. The numbers reality: there’s likely more good work out there, too. Maybe now more than ever, it is all about luck, or almost crazed persistence on the part of the writer to land a publication.

If journals don’t banish snail mail, they are making it much more difficult to submit this way, often instituting exacting guidelines to follow. I find them to be an intentional annoyance, and sometimes lose track of them when I’m putting work together to submit. If I miss something when I mail, such as accidentally forgetting to address a piece “Attention: Fiction Editor,” I don’t really fret about it that much. But often, these journals’ requirements can come to sound like the red M & Ms of a diva pop star’s dressing room requirements: “Never address us as ___.” “Under no circumstances, should you ever do X.” How low do you need to bow and scrape? You will because you want them to consider your darlings. Or maybe you’ll give up and hit send when you realize how much more work snail mail requires.

One Million Words

I’ve kept journals for years. In a roughly twenty year production, I estimate that I’ve written a million words in these journals. That’s fifty thousand words per year, or the length of one modest book per year. Compared to some well-known journal writers, mine might be considered a meager output. But the big question is, just what have I been writing about?

Writing, as much as it is about discipline, is perhaps more so about habit. Keeping a journal provides a ready source within which to get the ink flowing. I suspect this is why journal keeping smacks of self-regard, that such navel gazing is considered useless...that there is something both anachronistic and self-indulgent about keeping a journal. No matter, isn’t this what any writing essentially is--the projection of one’s ego?

Keeping a journal implies you are trying to be completely honest with yourself, as it provides a place to explore difficult ideas in an exposed form. I can find documentation on almost any major event in my life from the last eighteen or so years, depending on how frank or involved in documenting it I was at the time (or how legibly I wrote--it often requires a cryptologist to read these things). The lion’s share of a journal’s function is reflective, the inquiry into motives, actions and results. The writing aspires to a lack of self-consciousness. If the preconceived idea that these journals were to be published was a possibility, some of that honesty would be compromised perhaps, or couched, and it would cease to serve it’s introspective, ultimately (personal) archeological function.

I consider this journal writing meditative time that more often than not leads to my “real” writing. Maybe journaling functions like foreplay to the actual writing, what becomes fiction.

In recent years, I’ve gotten away from confession that dominate long periods of my earliest journals. Now I primarily use a journal as a documentation of my writing, to prod myself on the fiction. That and the occasional philosophical or psychological insight. In a journal I can work through problems in writing and imagine I am somewhat more clear about them. This also offers me the benefit of learning from the past when I re-read them later--a testing of hypotheses. My writing is my brutal pact with creativity, and journal writing offers a suggestion that I can get down to bedrock, that I can come away with self-knowledge.

I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War 1939-1940 with the voyeuristic notion that I am reading Sartre’s innermost, honest thoughts. Sartre, at various points, is so bold in his voice and his observations, that it is clear that he expected greatness. This voice impresses me, probably because it is projecting a kind of confidence and authority that I want to emulate.

This also highlights the line between the private writer and the public one. Sartre, while reading Andre Gide’s journals, writes a critique of them that revolves around Gide’s unwillingness to bear up his personal life. “His diary is essentially a tool for recovering possession of himself. Consequently, more the witness and instrument of tensions than of relaxations.” In other words, Gide avoids discussing his day to day life, from which Sartre sees in Gide’s journals, a kind of denial: “To allow Gide to write any old thing, when he doesn’t feel in the mood for work [...]” As Sartre says of his own writing, “this journal is a calling into question of myself.”

But even Sartre is circumspect enough to avoid delving too deeply into personal matters (other than occasional references to “the Beaver,” aka Simone DeBeauvoir, and their circle)--he does it only in the most superficial manner. And, as Gide’s journals were published, so too, eventually, were Sartre’s. He claims, “I’m not an important person nor do I meet important people[...]”. Yet Sartre, for all his dissembling, strikes me as fully aware, at the age of 34, of where he was going.

I suspect this literary journal-keeping self-consciousness in the French says reams about their value of the self-created mind and why their philosophical and literary traditions are much more expansive (it could be argued) than our own. Theirs seems a passion for digging about in the intellect and culling with impunity. I would guess most American writers are much more clearly directed, or dedicated to writing beyond ourselves (the confessional memoir--which is more about exposing others in the aims of self-revelation), because our publishing model is nakedly consumer oriented. The life of the mind is not populist; it is rather considered, if anything, elitist.

With the expediency of on-line publishing, the journal as a written form may become a thing of the past. The blog can give any writer of any obscurity the instant possibility of voyeuristic fame; confession or chest-thumping seems to outweigh genuine insight in this venue. Not for me -- what comes up here rarely resembles anything that’s in my dog-eared journals.