I am so discouraged with my writing right now that I’ve been wondering if it isn’t a form of aversion therapy.
“Aversion therapy is a form of behavior therapy in which an aversive–causing a strong feeling of dislike or disgust–stimulus is paired with an undesirable behavior in order to reduce or eliminate that behavior.”
Sorry if this all sounds a bit dark. But I have recently become aware that I misunderstood, yet once more, the submission quidelines of a publication to which I submitted an essay. ( A publication that I have read for many years, hold in high esteem, and admire. An essay that I thought was an excellent match for it, thoughtful, different, and well-written.)
Sure, I got the word count right, to whom and how to submit the essay, the tone and type of essay they were seeking, and all that.
No, what I missed–again–was picking up the implied message in the submission guidelines as to how the publication was going to inform me of their decision whether to use the essay. How, as in, you will NOT hear back from us, unless we decide to use your work. In other words, I screwed up again and thought that the submission guidelines stated that I would hear back from the editor(s) within two weeks.
How did I miss the meaning of this? What in the world is wrong with me??
It’s not like I’ve done so many paper submissions over the years that I can’t get the hang of this cyber non-response routine (and let’s be honest, in the world of paper submissions, many publications do not respond if they are rejecting you, SASE in hand or not.
It seems like my persistent density in this area must come from one of two sources.
First, because electronic devices allow almost comically easy and quick responses to inquiries of all types, I ASSUME–stupidly–that if I submit work electronically, I will hear a response, yea or nay.
This just ain’t gonna be, and I need to learn it. (Indeed, learn it in the personal arena as well. With regard to friends and relatives, if recent track records predict the future , it’s going to be a trail of communiques moving slower than the Pony Express.)
A way to explain this paradox is to keep in mind that the ease of electronic communication, while making responding to each other easier and quicker, has dramatically increased demands that we be responsive in the first place, and that we are all–professionally and personally–well beyond our capacities to relate to one another.
But, more to the point, I think my confusion on these matters arises from how my experience of writing, and being a writer, keeps changing. Is it possible that as my work as a writer continues to become more complex, I’m simply maxing out, reaching my point of incompetence, sort of an artistic Peter Principle at work?
After all, when we begin writing, the task is all about exploration, learning, having the courage (or blindness) to think that we can do this. We often feel child-like again, creative, at play, and risk-taking.
Then, comes (and never stops) the long months, years, and decades of developing skill, craft, and artistry. We become craftswo/men, even–dare I say it–artists.
Eventually, often sooner than is right, we want to submit our work. We decide, consciously or not, that we are not journal writing; we want to share our work, we want to be read. We join–or rejoin–workshops and classes. We email our friends interminably, write letters to the editor, blog, try out new genres. And we–drumroll–begin to submit our work. We do this hastily, without doing our homework first, and we also do it with patience and care. But, however we go about it, we submit our work, and we become communicators, spokespersons, public in a way that might shock us about our work, our thoughts, feelings, and passions.
Published or not, our identity changes.
But along with this altered identity, something new is demanded of us, and that is we must–if we are to be read at all–market ourselves and our writing–our product, if you will. We must become businesspersons. What a long way from those early days of immersion in creative work! And what a completely different set of skills is required to make this transition successfully.
And running through this stage, silently present in ALL stages of writing, is rejection. Rejection, or the threat of it, sits on our shoulder, overlooking our first ambitions, each inspiration, snickering at our earliest attempts to put together a thoughtful line, an insightful paragraph. It slithers about our ankles at every class and workshop, hissing audibly. It hovers behind every blog post, email or letter, making us question every keystroke.
But here in the world of submissions, rejection is crowned. It becomes our daily companion, someone we grow to know intimately, every scent, wrinkle, and belch, challenging us endlessly to wrestle, taking us to the mat, warding off our every feint and blow, and always, always winning.
We learn–some of us sooner than later–that we can’t win the battle with rejection, we can’t banish it, can’t avoid it, can’t ignore it, it never loses its ability to sting, and deeply. We can only accept it, and by accepting it, tame it, contain it, make peace with it. We can only…learn from it, and by learning from it, become, if just for a moment, Buddha writer.
And that is why we write. We write not to be published, not to win ‘recognition’, not even to be read, as lovely as all these things might be.
We write to learn. About ourselves, another, a place or time, about our craft itself, and, yes, about rejection. We can’t ‘max out’ with our writing, or our artistry, can’t fulfill the Peter Principle. We can only give up, and in that way fail. Writing is aversion therapy, I suppose, in the same way that living is. It is so damn painful that the only answer, as the philosopher George Santayana famously said, is to, between birth and death, enjoy the interval.
