On Rejection
Holy shit, it has been a while.
Is this thing on?
Okay.
Deep breath.
Here we go.
Hello everybody. It has been…quite a while, hasn’t it? When I started this newsletter in the Fall, I had vowed to do my best to stick to somewhat of a plan and really dedicate myself to it. I didn’t want to give up on it like so many other of my failed projects.
Well it seems I’ve failed again.
Even though I was doing something fun with this new venture (Dave’s Gonna Fist Fight The Kraken is never too far from my mind)I let it go stale. It sat in the back of my mind and through my neglect, it hardened and lost its freshness, and thus lost even more of my attention, until I just stopped coming back. I let it sit and rot in the back of the overstuffed and underutilized pantry that is my mind.
Of course, this shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise, right? I mean, I’m a writer for fuck’s sake, we practically invented giving-up-halfway-through. Talk to any writer, published or not, and ask them how many pieces and projects they have started and left unfinished and you will be met with the blankest of stares before an onslaught of uncontrollable laughter.
That’s our jam, baby. Our portfolios are printed on the flesh of rotting stories.
But no matter how common of a practice that is, it always stings. Maybe you notice while typing that the story just isn’t interesting, or maybe you miss a session and fall out of routine for a few days and find yourself returning to an unfamiliar manuscript written by a stranger, or maybe you’ve reached the final act and fall out of love before your characters do; no matter when it is or where you are when you lose your grip on a piece, no matter how many times you’ve been here and done that, it hurts like a bitch when your story, your poem, your baby slips from your fingers and falls down, down, down, to wherever it is the dead stories go. You’ve sang this funeral song before, but yet you still shed new tears because sometimes loss is necessary but that doesn’t mean our hearts are ready to let go.
These are the thoughts running through my head today as I read the latest in a series of rejection letters that I’ve received lately. As I sit and deal with the familiar emotions coursing through me, as stoically as I am capable of, I reflect on what it is really is I’m reading. A finished story (or as close to finished as it can be, which is always the way, isn’t it?) of mine is deamed unfit for an anthology I was truly excited for, yes, that is quite literally what I am reading, but I realize it is also a lesson. And that lesson is:
At least I know this one isn’t good enough. I have my answer to the anxiety I was feeling. Maybe I clean it up, sell it somewhere else. Maybe I can’t. But at least now I know, right? I raised this baby up as best as I could and if it fails after it leaves the nest, at least I have peace. Closure, even.
But what about the others? What about the years of incomplete stories, of adventures untold, of loves ungiven, of lives unlived, that litter my desk and hard drive that will never get the chance to fly for themselves.
At one point before starting each and every one of the dozens (or, let’s be honest, probably hundreds) of unrealized projects, I had been excited enough about the initial idea to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. I fell momentarily in love with them, as fleeting as it was. And yet, I let them die. I let them sit behind and collect dust like some ugly, forgotten things. With those stories, even the ones I once and presently loved, I’ll never know if they worked or not. I’ll never know if they were good. Or if they resonated with anyone. Or if maybe one of them could have helped someone during a hard time in their lives, or maybe they could have helped kill a few hours for someone.
But I’ll never know.
They’ll just stay forgotten. Less than forgotten actually, as you have to actually live to be capable of being forgotten. These stories didn’t even get to take a breath, let alone take flight. And that’s sad right? I think that’s sad.
So I took inventory. And I don’t mean of my incomplete projects. I mean I took inventory on how I was approaching failure. In my mind, the rejection on my screen was the definition of failure. That something I wrote just wasn’t good enough. But how is that failure? That is a finished thing that served its duty. Its watch is over, its job is done. No, my real failures are the stories I’ve never told due to circumstance, inspiration, or just plain old laziness.
Every time I give up on a story, when I give up on myself, I fail. I fail in the true sense of the word.
I’m not saying every story should be finished — sometimes we just have to let go and as I said above, it is a necessary evil. But I am saying that giving up the good ones is so much more a failure then getting a rejection on a complete one, and the thing is, the real stinger, you never even know which ones are worthy until you actually write the damn things.
So I’m going to try and finish more things. I’ll still have to let some of their little hands go along the way, that is always going to be a part of the job, but I can try and do better with my ethic.
My ideas, your ideas, they deserve that much.
They are us.
They are pieces of our individual eternities and as with everything in this life, they are finite things. Eventually the good ones stop coming to us all, or we stop coming to them, and I bet when that day comes for us, and it will come, we will regret the stories we never told so much more so than the ones we did.
That is an awfully serious way to describe how I felt abandoning this project. With it said, expect a new chapter of Dave in the coming days and expect to see more of me in your inbox with random musings and such.
Also, SubStack Notes seems fantastic so expect more of me there as Elmo Muskrat continues to destroy Twitter as a viable option.
I’m also planning on releasing a few stand alone short stories here if there is any interest. Time will tell — but if you’re reading this and would like some more free fiction in your life, let me know.
Until next time.
- Mason