"Do Whatever You Have to Do...But if You Stop Writing and Stop Sending Your Work Into the World, That is Not Okay."

By Robin Black

Now that I have some publications to my name, I’ve developed this strong, maybe strange, impulse to make a cautionary tale of myself. I’ve made so many mistakes along the way, and for whatever reasons I feel better about those mistakes if I believe they may benefit someone else. Maybe we all feel that way. Maybe the impulse isn’t so strange.

This week, several people I know mentioned departing next month for the Sewanee Writers Conference. I hear that it’s amazing. I believe it must be. For many years, I have observed the literary friendships it has inspired, the joys of insights gained, the happily drunken memories shared.

I applied there myself, in the early 2000’s, twice. This was before I had any publications, and I was applying as a paying customer, not requesting anything other than admission, for which I would have been thrilled to cough up a healthy sum. Both years, however, I was placed on a waitlist from which I was never then plucked.

Fair enough. They either didn’t much like my work, or didn’t like my application essay – as I recall, there was one – or didn’t cotton to my recommenders if those were required, none of whom would have been well-known writers, since I knew none at the time. Any of that is surely reasonable. Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.

But here is the dumbass don’t-let-this-happen-to-you part: I have never applied to another writing conference since. I have never applied as a paying customer; and I have made excuses not to apply even when either nominated for a fellowship or asked if I would like to be nominated. “It’s not a good summer to leave the family,” I would say. Or, “I should spend any time that I’m away working on my book.”

But those excuses were, if not flat-out lies, at least hemi-demi-semi lies. I could have gotten around any of the above had I set my mind to the task. But I was afraid to apply. Even though I have long had a horrible case of Conference Envy. (Those friendships forged! Those insights gained! The parties! The fun!) But no. I have never even tried.

The easy explanation is that I suffer from a minor, comedic version of PTSD, having been demolished by those earlier rejections – particularly the second one. Oh, did I not mention that part? The weeping that ensued? The resultant certainty that no ambition I held dear would be fulfilled? The self-loathing? The longer than usual suffering of my long-suffering husband who withstood the onslaught of my misery with stoic, unconditional love? Even when I yelled at him for trying to reassure me. (Hint to partners of writers who are in self-hating devastation mode: don’t try to reassure them. Just weather the storm and maybe bake something chocolate or restock the liquor cabinet, depending on the vice of choice.)

Meanwhile, in the ensuing dozen or so years, while avoiding ever letting a conference reject me again (“As God is my witness. . .I will never. . .”) I have, of course, put myself up for and received all manner of other rejections. Stories are sent back with perfunctory comments scrawled thereon. Essays are turned down, without a word. Editors are “underwhelmed” by a book. Prizes are allocated elsewhere; grant applications, refused. All in the course of a day’s work, or perhaps I mean a life’s work.  You put yourself out there; you take your lumps. You do it again. You do it. I do it. Again and again and again.

Except when it comes to conferences. No way, no how. Not me.

So why the difference? I think there’s an obvious answer – and then, I think there may be another answer, too. The first, the most logical, is that those tolerable (if unpleasant)rejections listed above are very clearly rejections of my work. They mean that I won’t see a piece of mine in print, or won’t have the pleasure of reading my name on a list, or won’t receive money of which I believe I’d make good use.

But they do not mean that people don’t want to spend ten days with me. They aren’t rejections of my company, not rejections likely to reverberate with memories of social exclusion, with lifelong fears of being disliked. With being the weird kid at school who wasn’t invited to the cool kid birthday parties. And, though the Sewanee rejections were no doubt also rejections of my work, at the time they felt like rejections ofme.

We’re having a gathering, and we don’t want you there.

It was the rejection of my company, my exclusion from the included group, to which I never wanted to subject myself again. So I have never applied to a conference again, potentially missing out on all kinds of valuable experiences and meaningful relationships.

And of course this leads to a lesson, a simple lesson for one and for all: Don’t let yourself take any rejection so personally that it limits your attempts to participate fully in your profession. Just don’t.

Makes sense to me.

And I could stop here, I know, and call this a post. But in writing this, I have detected something else, something that calls into question my earlier use of the word ‘dumbass’ – as well as the lesson gleaned. I wonder, as I think this through once again, if there wasn’t a kind of twisted wisdom to my scapegoating those Sewanee rejections, my casting them as just beyond the limit of what I could tolerate.

Suppose I had never applied to Sewanee. Suppose my only experiences of rejection were of the kind I describe above, the ones that while painful don’t have the same devastating impact on me. Would I really have gone through this career setting no limits on my ability to make myself vulnerable? Would there truly have been no category of intolerable rejection from which I had to protect myself, no pain so bad that I would refuse to endure it again?

I wonder. I wonder if in a way, I didn’t actually do something a tiny bit smart –  if only by accident. It’s entirely plausible to me, looking back, that I needed to designate a variety of vulnerability that I couldn’t tolerate – in order to tolerate any vulnerability at all. And conferences. I mean, yes, they sound pretty damn good from where I’m sitting, never having been to one. But they aren’t absolutely necessary to a career. They aren’t in the same category as submitting to magazines, querying agents, aren’t the defining risks of a writer’s career without which there is no career. So maybe I was exercising a kind of inadvertent intelligence when I syphoned off  and cordoned off so much of my anxiety, telling myself that no matter what happened, whatever other rejections I faced, I would never have to go through that again.

I surely needed coping mechanisms at the time. Stepping into the world in my forties with what felt to me like the outpourings of my most private secret self was unimaginably difficult for me. I had kept myself more or less limited to a life inside my home for two decades, for many reasons – including a shattering anxiety about rejection of all sorts, a certainty that I would fail at anything I tried, and a conviction that failing would then push me right back home.

But somehow, even though I have had my share of failures along the way, I have withstood them and pushed on, at times to my own surprise.

Regret is a funny thing. On one level, I do regret the dozen or more summers when I stayed out of the competition, and therefore, maybe, also out of an important aspect of “the game.” But the problem with that regret, is that I did manage to emerge from the tiny private world in which I kept myself – and speaking of surprise, no one who knew me then was confident that I could. I managed to put together a career as a writer. I weathered a lot of rejection and disappointment without being demolished or retreating from the larger goal. And so. . . And so I do wonder if this small, nearly symbolic act of self-protection wasn’t a necessary concession for me to the anxious and fearful part of myself.

I started by saying that I feel an increasing urge these days to make a cautionary tale of myself, to have my mistakes be of some benefit to others. But of course, in life as in literature, causality is complex and it isn’t always so clear what is and isn’t a mistake. If it helps someone reading this to take away the message that they shouldn’t let their anxieties preclude them from participating in all aspects of this profession, then I’m glad to spread that message. But if a different person takes away instead the message that what seems like a mistake when viewed one way, may look more like a necessary coping strategy when viewed another, and that regret is essentially a waste of time, I welcome that interpretation as well.

Because here’s the most important part of this tale of fear and retreat: I let my rejections from Sewanee keep me from ever applying to a literary conference again, but I did NOT let them stop from me from pursuing a career as a writer. And as I realize this, I’m tempted for that realization to be recast as advice along the lines of: Do whatever you have to do, avoid whatever you need to avoid, protect yourself however you need to protect yourself in order to stay on course, write, send the work out, write more, send out more work. Because as wonderful as the rest of it may be, conferences, twitter, writing groups, and so on, if they are more than you can handle, that’s okay. But if you stop writing and stop sending your work into the world, that is not okay. That is giving up.

In my heart of hearts, I believe this is the real message here.

Meanwhile, another summer goes by. With a book coming out, I am facing any number of possible rejections and disappointments. Who knows how it will be received? The range of possibility is mind-boggling. But at least I have once again protected myself from the one vulnerability I have designated intolerable – perhaps neurotically, perhaps wisely, but for so long now that both the envy and the relief are just another writing ritual.

Robin Black's new novel LIFE DRAWING is forthcoming from Random House, July, 2014, and Picador UK, April 2014. It has been called "a magnificent literary achievement," by Karen Russell, and "a riveting story about the corrosive effects of betrayal," by Alice Sebold. Her story collection IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS, was published by Random House in 2010 to international acclaim by publications such as O. Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Irish Times and more. Robin lives in the Philadelphia area with her family. Her website is www.RobinBlack.net. This article appeared previously on Beyond the Margins.

Photo credit: Sean MacEntee / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)