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“I’m worried that I’m not worried,” I said.
The first time I uttered that sentence was in 2016. I was sitting underneath the blue awning of Wheatfields Restaurant & Bar in Saratoga Springs, New York, with the writer Claire Messud. I had just graduated with my MFA in fiction and was attending a summer writing conference at Skidmore College. It was my second time in workshop with Claire, and my birthday happened to fall during the first week of the conference. Claire had kindly suggested we celebrate over lunch.
At some point during our conversation, I said, “I’m not worried,” referring to my prospects as a writer. “But I’m worried that I’m not worried,” I told her.
Claire asked me to explain what I meant.
In response, I detailed my history of rejections.
The first time I applied to graduate school was in 2012. I applied to fourteen MFA programs that year and was rejected by all of them. The following year, I applied to sixteen programs and was accepted at three. Ultimately, I decided to attend the program at the University of Arizona, but I arrived in Tucson with a chip on my shoulder: one) because I had initially been waitlisted by the program, which in some ways felt rejection-adjacent, and two) because I had really wanted to go to Syracuse University to study with George Saunders or to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to study with Marilynne Robinson.
I understood the evidence in support of my future success as a writer was not at all in my favor. And yet, I wasn’t worried
In the end, I could not have asked for a better graduate school experience. I adored my cohort; I was enchanted with the desert. I felt supported and encouraged by my professors. I read and wrote more than I ever had. And I got better. I became a stronger writer because of my time in the program. But I also could not help but note that I had been passed over for every department award, and that while many of my peers had published regularly and well during our MFA years, I could not publish a story to save my life. I was also rejected from every post-graduate fellowship I applied to the year I graduated. From a strictly intellectual perspective, I understood the evidence in support of my future success as a writer was not at all in my favor. And yet, I wasn’t worried.
“But I’m worried that I’m not worried,” I said again.
Claire regarded me from across the table. “Listen,” she said. “You’re brilliant. And you’re a great writer. So there’s no doubt it will come.”
It will come, Claire said.
What she meant was: Keep writing.
A few years ago, the writer Matt Bell posted a series of tweets about a phenomenon he had observed among emerging writers, which he referred to as the “despair of almost there.” “I often see people quit right on the precipice of some goal,” Bell wrote, “after being a finalist for a few dream jobs, or getting full requests from agents but no yes, or being waitlisted for residencies/MFAs, etc. Those are signs you’re on the path, not that you should step off. And yet.” By then I had been around the literary scene long enough to have witnessed this trend myself. I had watched writers in the early stages of their careers, writers with far more talent and promise than me, flame out and quit prematurely. I began to wonder why this happened. Why did some writers quit writing before their careers had even begun? At what juncture did writers yield to the despair of almost there? Over time I concluded that, more often than not, the answer is a relatively simple one: We quit when we lose our tolerance for rejection. How we arrive at that precipice, however, I believe is a bit more complicated.
Four days after my conversation with Claire, I received an acceptance from a reputable online literary magazine for a short story I had submitted to their slush pile. It was my first Big Yes, and it felt like a gift. It will come, Claire had said. And it came! I thought. I understood that the story’s publication had the potential to accelerate the trajectory of my career, and in anticipation of that, I returned with renewed focus to the manuscript the story was a part of. I spent the next nine months polishing that manuscript to a fine luster, and I applied to post-grad fellowships a second time. I worked those applications to the bone.
Eventually the story was published in the spring of the following year, and was featured by another popular online literary venue. Almost immediately, I began receiving emails from agents asking if I had a full-length manuscript they could read. By then, I was prepared. Yes, I told them, I had completed a short story collection. I made a list of other agents I thought might be interested in my work, and I queried those agents at the same time I sent the collection to the agents who had solicited me. Altogether, I received thirteen full manuscript requests. Over the course of that summer, their responses trickled in.
No one was interested in representing it.
I had watched writers in the early stages of their careers, writers with far more talent and promise than me, flame out and quit prematurely
By and large, I could sort the rejections I received from agents into two categories. Half of them had enjoyed some of the stories but felt the collection as a whole was uneven. This feedback would have been helpful, except for the fact that no two agents agreed on which were the stronger stories and which were the weaker. The lack of consensus was, quite frankly, maddening, but not as maddening as the second category of responses I received. Those agents had enjoyed the collection overall but said short story collections were a difficult sell. Every one of them asked me the same question: “Do you have a novel?”
No, I told them, I did not have a novel.
By the fall of 2017, I had received the last of the agent rejections, and the momentum I’d felt in the wake of the story’s publication had largely dissipated. I found myself in a curiously familiar situation, repeating the same sentence I had spoken more than a year before.
“I’m not worried,” I said, “but I’m worried that I’m not worried.”
This time, I was back in Tucson visiting friends. I had arranged to meet up with my graduate mentor, Aurelie Sheehan. We sat at a table at Time Market, a kind of hipster deli and café I had frequented during my MFA days. Like Claire, Aurelie asked me to explain what I meant. Again, I listed off my resume of rejections: the rejected graduate school applications, the failure to win any department awards, all the rejected short stories I had submitted, the rejections from post-graduate fellowships I had now received for the second year in a row, and the thirteen rejections from agents who were not interested in representing my work—at least not until I’d written a novel.
Aurelie listened, and when I had finished, she offered me a piece of advice that would forever change my understanding about the relationship between writing and rejection. She said, “When it comes to the career of a writer, there is the creative mindset and the business mindset, and it is nearly impossible to inhabit both mindsets at the same time. So my advice is to spend as much time as possible in the creative mindset and as little time as possible in the business mindset.”
For some people, this might have been an obvious observation.
For me, it was a revelation.
Or it was and it was not.
Spend as much time as possible in the creative mindset, Aurelie said.
What she meant was: Keep writing.
In my experience, rejection is a well-trod topic among writers. We don’t need much encouragement to talk about it. And for the record, I believe this is a good thing. Rejection can be an isolating experience in the professional career of a writer—or, I should say, of life in general. To not talk about rejection is to risk internalizing narratives about ourselves and the value of our work that are steeped in shame, self-deficiency, and doubt. That insidious refrain that tells us we are not enough. But I hear it all too often, people say, Rejection defines the life of a writer. Or they say, If you want to write, get used to rejection. Or perhaps, For a writer, rejection is inevitable, and a lot of other bullshit like that. It is not the usefulness of talking about rejection that I question, but rather this particular framing of the subject. To suggest that rejection defines the writing life—and not, say, writing—is to yield to a lack of precision in our use of language or else a lack of discernment in our thinking. And though I cannot say for certain when or by whom I was first sold the idea that to write was to ensure rejection, at some point I had bought into that belief and had internalized it so thoroughly as to never question its accuracy. Not until Aurelie said what she said. Only then could I see that rejection had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with the business of writing.
A week after my conversation with Aurelie, I returned home to upstate New York and was sitting in a twelve-step meeting when I heard someone say, “You can never get enough of something you do not need.” At that point I had been sober for eight years, and yet the statement still struck me in a visceral way. I recalled one night in particular from the years when I was still drinking. I was standing at the kitchen counter of my home, pouring whiskey from a bottle into a sixteen-ounce water tumbler. I filled the glass to the brim. (Because if it fits in one glass, it only counts as one drink.) As I watched the whiskey rise over the ice, I thought to myself, “There will never be enough. There is not enough booze in the world to do what I need it to do.”
Then I put down the bottle and picked up the drink.
I had pursued the acquisition of material comforts as if I needed them.
It would be another two years before I finally quit drinking, but eight years later that insight was returned to me. You can never get enough of something you do not need. I had long ago concluded that during the years of my active alcoholism, I had used alcohol to take me out of what was, at the time, an intensely painful experience of life. And for a while it worked. But the relief drinking provided was always temporary. The next morning I would wake up and the pain would still be there, waiting for me. So I drank more. Always I needed more relief. Then I reached the point where I could no longer control my drinking, and that lack of control brought with it its own pain and its own consequences. What I actually needed was to get sober and work a program of recovery and seek professional treatment for the trauma I had endured in my early twenties. And eventually I did. I sobered up and received the help I needed, and that help proved to be enough. It afforded me a form of sustained relief that has allowed me to live sanely and serenely in reality.
But on the heels of my trip to Tucson, I understood the implications of what the person was saying beyond the scope of my alcoholism. This is why even now, more than seven years later, I still attend recovery meetings regularly: I go to meetings to hear the things I don’t know I need to hear. Because when that person said, “You can never get enough of something you do not need,” Aurelie’s advice was still fresh in my head. I could see then that this principle applied not only to my past relationship with alcohol but to a number of other things I had pursued in sobriety, mostly in the material and romantic areas of my life. I had pursued the acquisition of material comforts as if I needed them; I had pursued the attention and approval of other people as if my well-being depended on it. And not once was it enough. There was always more stuff to acquire; there was always another person to please. And then I had gone and done the same thing in my pursuit of success in the business of writing.
I want to be clear: I don’t believe there is anything wrong with pursuing commercial success or critical recognition as a writer. Just like I don’t believe there is anything wrong with enjoying a playful flirtation or buying a new car or a new leather jacket. I’m not an ascetic. I’ve simply learned that I am in trouble when I pursue something I do not need as if I need it. When that happens, my experience has shown me that I’m usually asking whatever I am pursuing to do one of two things: to make me feel good (which I might call gratification) or to make me feel good about me (which I might call validation). The problem with pursuing external gratification and validation as if they were needs is that, as a human having a human experience, my appetite for gratification and validation knows no boundaries. This is what distinguishes something I need from something I do not: a need has a discernible limit. A need can be satisfied, sated. A need recognizes enough.
Not once in my life have I ever been confused about whether or not I’m receiving enough oxygen. I need to breathe, so I take a breath, and my body tells me if the need is met. As long as I am operating at a state of emotional regulation and relative mental and physical health, most of my needs function this way, including my needs for hydration, nourishment, and rest, as well as my needs for physical and psychological safety, emotional fulfillment, and financial security. I am able to determine the parameters of these needs and whether or not they are being fulfilled. I am able to discern when enough is enough.
I’d experience the familiar rush of external gratification and validation. But eventually that rush always faded.
But my relationship to success as a writer has never functioned this way. I might place a story with a dream publication, or win a scholarship to a prestigious writing conference, and I’d experience the familiar rush of external gratification and validation. But eventually that rush always faded, and when it did, I’d update my resume and turn my attention, full-throttle, to the next opportunity on the horizon. The more I pursued success in this fashion, the less I was able to integrate any real sense of accomplishment. The time between achieving some milestone and the point at which I moved on from it became shorter and shorter. There was always more success to achieve.
And therein lies the rub when it comes to rejection. Because yes, rejection is inevitable in the business of writing, but only because the pursuit of success is inexhaustible, which makes pursuing success as a need—as a constant source of gratification and validation—an exercise in unsustainability.
I am aware that there are writers who have professionalized their writing who will argue that I’m splitting hairs with this distinction between writing and the business of writing and my insistence that rejection is squarely the territory of the latter. Rejection defines the writing life, they might say, because writing is their job. They need their writing to succeed because writing is how they make money. I am more than happy to leave these people to this belief if the belief is working for them. All I can say is that my experience has taught me there are far more efficient and less emotionally taxing ways to make money than making art, and every time I have placed the burden of financing my life on my writing, my relationship to writing has suffered—and, eventually, so has the writing itself.
Because here is the thing I did not tell Aurelie that day as we sat in Time Market eating greasy pizza: In the eighteen months since I had graduated from the program at Arizona—during all my fastidious tinkering with the short story collection and submitting fellowship applications and querying agents—I had not written anything new. I had allowed the business of advancing my career as a writer to distract me from the real work of writing. Which perhaps explains why I found myself repeating the same sentence I had said to Claire eighteen months later to Aurelie. The words were exactly the same, but the locus of my anxiety had changed.
When I told Claire I wasn’t worried about my future as a writer but was worried that I wasn’t worried, my loyalty still remained with writing. I wanted to write, so I was going to write. All I wanted from Claire was some confirmation that I shouldn’t be more concerned about my lack of concern regarding the lackluster reception of my work. But in the eighteen months between that conversation and the one I had with Aurelie, I had begun to internalize the belief that all the rejections I had received indicated something about the value of my writing. I had begun to seriously wonder: Should I be worried? I didn’t know it at the time I said it, but I was no longer looking for confirmation. I was looking for reassurance.
And in hindsight, the answer was yes. I should have been worried. But not because the rejections I had received said anything about the value of my writing. I should have been worried because my allegiance had shifted. I had conflated the two mindsets, and as a result, my investment in the success of my writing had begun to supersede my investment in writing.
This, I’ve come to believe, is how we lose our tolerance for rejection.
I cannot say for certain how close I was to the precipice of quitting, or whether or not I would have yielded to the despair of almost there had I reached that impasse. But looking back, I believe I was losing my tolerance for rejection and that operating in that state would have been tenable for only so long. What I can say for certain is that by the time I left that meeting where I heard someone say, “You can never get enough of something you don’t need,” I had made a decision: I would divest as much as I could from the business of writing. I would stop pursuing success as if I needed it. That decision, of course, presented its own quandary: How does a writer divest from the business of writing while simultaneously pursuing a writer’s career? For me, it involved developing certain strategies to ensure that my investment remained first and foremost with the writing, which required me to take stock of my most valuable resources and begin to deploy them more mindfully.
After I graduated from the University of Arizona, I stumbled my way into a job teaching mindfulness practice. I did that work for three years, and if there is one lesson I learned during that time that has served me most in my writing career, it is that the two most valuable resources I have at my disposal are my time and my attention, and that these resources are both finite and nonrenewable. Which perhaps is another reason Aurelie’s advice resonated with me so profoundly. Yes, she was encouraging me to keep writing, but when Aurelie pointed out the difficulty of inhabiting the creative mindset and the business mindset at the same time, she was prompting me to consider where and to what degree I was allocating my most valuable resources. With this in mind, I began utilizing a tool that’s so rudimentary it’s easy to underestimate its potency.
I began using templates.
My loyalty still remained with writing. I wanted to write, so I was going to write.
That winter I set aside a weekend and drafted templates of every component I could conceivably need to apply to professional opportunities: a cover letter for short story and essay submissions; a cover letter that included project descriptions for fellowship, grant, and residency applications; an artist statement; a teaching statement; a statement about the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion; a letter to query agents; a letter requesting letters of reference; writing samples of varying lengths; and a streamlined writing resume. Then I made myself a promise: I would spend one weekend a year updating these templates. Otherwise, I would submit the materials as they had been written.
A lot of advice out there lauds the benefits of tailoring applications and submissions to specific opportunities and institutions, and while I don’t disagree that this practice has its advantages, I am not at all convinced it is worth its expenditures in terms of resource management. I never realized how much time I used to spend on the business of writing until I started using templates: time drafting and revising and reviewing documents, time researching programs and publications, time tracking deadlines and making spreadsheets, time arranging and confirming letters of reference. It’s true that it might only take me an hour or two to personalize an application or submission, but multiply that number by ten—or twenty, or thirty—and those hours add up. I also underestimated the degree to which the business mindset had siphoned my attention. Even when I wasn’t actively attempting to secure success, I was often actively thinking about it. I would sit down to write and my mind would be slightly elsewhere, occupied with to-dos and entertaining what-ifs. Which is to say nothing about the emotional investment. The more time and attention I invested in applications and submissions, the more attached I became to the outcomes and the harder I took the rejections.
Using templates helped me circumnavigate these tendencies.
I discovered that when I limited the amount of time I spent on the business of writing, I limited the degree to which the business mindset subsumed my attention. I had more time to write, and I was more present while writing. I wrote with clearer focus and purer intention because I wasn’t preoccupied with what would come of it. My emotional investment shifted to doing the work, and I began to fully inhabit the creative mindset. As I did, my tolerance for rejection increased. Now if I failed to procure some professional achievement, the resources I invested in trying to make it happen were so minimal I found I was less inclined to take rejections personally. That doesn’t mean I don’t still experience disappointment when I receive a rejection—I do—and I’ve had to learn to honor those disappointments. But using tools like templates has helped right-size my relationship to rejection by prioritizing the thing that really matters to me: writing.
I have been pursuing the career of a writer for more than a decade now, and though I am far from the most successful writer I know, I have managed a modest and consistent degree of success as an emerging writer. That said, it has only been in the last five or so years that I’ve experienced the majority of that success. During that time, I’ve published fiction and nonfiction with several well-regarded literary outlets; I’ve been awarded scholarships to two writing conferences and fellowships to four residency programs; and I received a major grant from a literary arts organization. I applied to every one of these opportunities using templates.
I’ve also sustained hundreds of rejections.
I survived those, too, using templates.
Every editor who has ever published my work sent me an encouraging rejection for a previous submission first.
In addition to getting clear about the difference between writing and the business of writing, and learning to use tools like templates to allocate my time and attention according to my priorities, it has been necessary to reframe my understanding regarding the nature of rejection in order to maintain a tolerance for it. Like Brevity editor Allison K Williams, I’ve come to believe that rejection is not a valuable source of feedback. In fact, as Williams points out, rejection is not feedback at all. Rejection may be accompanied by feedback—which may or may not be useful (another important distinction)—but in and of itself, rejection is more akin to the absence of feedback. Understanding the difference between the two has helped me discern when a rejection is, as Matt Bell suggested, a sign that I am on the path, rather than a sign I should step off it. To that end, I often return to a piece of advice my undergraduate advisor, Susan Fox Rogers, imparted to me years ago during my first attempts to professionalize my writing.
When I received the three offers from MFA programs back in 2014, after having been rejected from every program I applied to the year before, I emailed Susan to ask for her advice. Susan herself had completed her MFA at the University of Arizona, and of the three offers I had received, the offer from Arizona was the only one I was seriously considering. But, I told Susan, I was also considering declining all three offers in favor of applying to programs a third time. I still wanted so badly to attend the programs at Syracuse or Iowa.
In her reply, Susan wrote, “One thing my advisor said to me in my MFA program was: Go where it’s warm. It was a funny thing to hear, because we were in Arizona, but I got it.” Then she added, “If you don’t go, I’ll disown you.”
I read her response and laughed because I also got it.
Go where it’s warm, Susan said.
What she meant was, Go where they want you.
And I did. I went where it was warm, and that decision served me well. In the years since then, Susan’s advice has proved a helpful strategy for maintaining a tolerance for rejection in a business in which rejection is the rule rather than the exception.
The application and submission economies are by nature unpredictable. Editors and readers come and go; mastheads change. Juries and selection committees rotate. But every editor who has ever published my work sent me an encouraging rejection for a previous submission first. “Not this one,” they said, “but please send us something else.” So I did. One submission at a time, I sent them everything I had. At some point I learned it was appropriate to ask if I could submit directly to these editors instead of submitting to the slush pile. I also learned to submit new work to editors with whom I had previously published because their past support was an indication of warmth. These strategies eventually led to a history of acceptances. Similarly, one residency program sent me a form rejection the first time I applied. The second time, I was waitlisted. That waitlist indicated warmth, so I applied a third time and received a fellowship to the program.I still regularly submit to places that have only sent me form rejections—because if I’m using templates, why the hell not? But now when I receive an encouraging rejection from an editor or program, I make a conscious decision to believe them. I separate the encouragement from the rejection because I understand the encouragement is feedback and the rejection is not. When I do, the way forward becomes clear. I stay on the path, like Matt Bell suggests. I continue to go where it’s warm.
