Rejection Letters
A humbling ride through a writer's old rejections + what they mean two decades later
A couple Monday nights ago, some friends came over for dinner. Three of us at the table were writers (one from each of the three couples). At one point, we writers took over the conversation while powering down on the bibimbap. We talked about rejection and writing.
I spouted off a self-deprecating joke about my rejection letters, which I saved, but were stuffed away in a file folder and hadn’t been seen in a decade or so. One was burned into my brain though. In 2004, Knopf had (accidentally or on purpose) attached the reader’s remarks after reading my manuscript from the slush pile.
It was brutal. They didn’t hold back.
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Commentary: This seems to be a misguided attempt to wed Lemony Snicket misery with gross-out humor. It comes across as simply crass. The entire story seems to be that Rue’s life (the kid) is miserable, which you get in the first couple of pages. The characters don’t change and nobody comes off as appealing. The narrator has a very stylized voice….that becomes fairly maddening after a few pages. The author clearly knows how to write - the sentences are well-composed, and before the story got bogged down in Millie Louise’s (the mom) grossness, I thought there might be something there. The prologue actually reminded me of Harry Potter. This is certainly an original story, but mean-spirited and meandering. I’d pass.
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“Mean-spirited and meandering.” Oof. Two qualities that are not so great for children’s books. LOL
I also said, at the table to our friends, that one of the best things I ever did for my career was to take jobs that supported my writing. I worked, for instance, for a couple years writing the communications for a surgeons office. They didn't want me in the office - what I did paled in comparsion to life-saving brain surgery - So I got to work at home when no one was really working at home, which meant I made my own schedule. And they were surgeons, so I took meetings with them once a month at 6am for like 20 minutes. It wasn’t a sexy job when talking to people at cocktail parties, but I had good bones to work with: work/life balance, enough income to live comfortably, if not lavishly, time outside with my Pekingese, Dave, time to go to the gym and also that essential meandering time that writers need to fill up with the words that come out on the page. I wrote a solid 4-5 hours a day on projects I cared about.
I finished three full and complete books during those years. They were awful. Just blisteringly awful.
I am a writer who loves to write with a great deal of specificity. But too much specificity bogs everything down. Just as I had to learn that a little saffron in the paella is good and a lot turns everything soapy, so too I had to learn to sprinkle in specificity so as not to bog down the plot. It took iterations and iterations of those pages, balancing pacing and details, to get me there.
I remember teaching myself to write dialogue by copying Stephen King’s dialogue in Salem’s Lot. I remember pacing up and down my 100th Street studio reading out loud, poems from Raymond Carver, and then whittling my sentences down into blunt little pencils too small for my fingers to hold even, cutting my sentences to their bare essentials. There was no discernible internet, so I would sit in Barnes and Noble on the Upper West side and browse genre to genre to learn how to plot, how to develop characters, how to handle pacing. I read a lot, across genres and sub genres, because I had the time out on park benches to read with my dog. And I wasn’t scrolling. And I didn’t have David and the kids yet.
I will always be glad my advanced degrees are in the social sciences, which helped support my non-fiction writing, but didn’t actually influence my style of writing. I never applied to an MFA writing progam because I didn’t have the confidence. But this worked out for me. At the dinner table, we also talked about the bleached-out sameness of MFA writing, elite writing, the writing industrial complex. Bullet dodged.
That said, those times were critical to developing as a writer, but I was not entirely successful as one. My work was sprawling, piece meal and seemingly all over the place. I was an assistant professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies department at Pace University. I wrote dialogue for soap operas, speeches for CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. I wrote straight-to-video soft core tele-scripts for Playboy. I ghostwrote books for motivational speakers and business people. I wrote a column in a major glossy for years as a ghostwriter for a CEO doling out advice. The magazine editors never even knew. I ghostwrote a book for a major publishing house and the dude’s agent and editors never knew. I wrote two essays a week for years as a parenting/food blogger when that was a thing. I worked as a dramaturg on several Broadway shows, which is how I met David. I wrote a NYC fine dining food column for a tiny California-based restaurant trade magazine. I didn’t get paid, but I attended just about every food event in NYC, including interviewing celebrity chefs, photographing their kitchens, going to Beard house dinners and the JBF’s which were long, boring, chaotic, drunken affairs in the early years. I learned about food, food writing and photography doing this free work and I still use a lot of those lessons in my work today.
I worry that GenZ will miss out on the benefits of free work. Because there are some.
Many times, it felt - certainly to my parents - that my career had no linear growth and they were not shy about reminding me. They were certain my college degrees had failed me. It all felt so pieced together, so ambling, but really, I use all of these experiences in my writing today. Even as I write this, I am shocked at how it all came together to make a kind of sense. LOL
I never had the career propulsion of the culture writers at New York Magazine or the Village Voice. I envied them. I wanted to break down that door. I wanted to be them. If I could just get that job, I’d be happy, the thought goes. Who wouldn’t have wanted to have the careers of Emily Nussbaum or Helen Rosner? But I couldn’t crack my way in. And I wasn’t ready anyway. I wanted to jump right to readiness, to accolades, to adorations, to readers and fans, to making waves. I wanted to get to the finish line while not having to run the race. I wanted acceptance before putting my whole self out there.
The book I wrote that got the bulk of the rejections, from both agents and publishers, was called Rue Balou and it was a middle grade (readers aged 8-12) about a little girl named Rue who lived her life as the adopted child of a mom who was a famous Hollywood actress, Millie Louise Corsica Balou Wrigley Ampersand Swigley. Rue was trotted out for photos so her mother could look like the adoring parent for her many admirers. But she was truly uninterested in anything about her daughter, and actively disliked her and the role of mother. But she needed her to soften her image and her failing Hollywood career. Rue lived in the basement, had only a cockroach, Jimmy, for a friend and books, from the mansion’s library, to keep her company. And it turns out, Millie Louise had actually stolen her from the quiet night of her perfect little home in a small town back east. Millie Louise’s backwater hometown that she despised and ran from, as I did from my small backwater hometown. The book was supposed to be about Rue finding herself, her freedom, her strength and her family while taking on the superficial tropes and lies and mirages of the Hollywood publicity machine.
But I wrote this before The Big Break Down (which I elude to here sometimes, and am edging closer to writing about) after a broken engagement, before therapy, during the deep deep depressive-claustrophobic, anxious brain-atrophy that pummeled me, and forced me to come to terms with my own adoption, my acute abandonment issues, my own resentments toward my mothers, both adopted and biological, my explosive anger and self-sabotage, my lying and secret-keeping, I had so much shame. I was drawn to write about these feelings without knowing they were bubbling at the surface. I hadn’t named them yet and so they kept pushing into everything I wrote. A kind of nastiness, a sarcasm that was unkind. My stories dripped with people experiencing intense shame, as I did, and villains who throttled people without mercy, reason or accountability.
My writing, like my insides, was ugly.
The book, no matter how clever the premise, didn’t work because I hadn't worked through my own demons. So even though readers of the books saw potential, a spark of solid writing, the mean-spirited part dominated. The Millie Louise character was interesting, but she was meant to be a device to create action for the child to do her thing. But I couldn’t not write her over and over again. I was obsessed with playing out the mother’s cruel antics on her daughter. I wallowed in the pain she caused on the page because it mirrored my own feelings. I was punishing myself through the writing. There was no levity, no come-to-Jesus, no great fall, no comeuppance, no relief for the child. No relief for me.
The book was handling me. I was not handling the book.
The bad news here is that if you are getting many rejections in any walk of your life, there is probably a reason and unfortunately, I’m sorry, it’s probably you. (There are exceptions, don’t @ me.) This is a good (albeit soul-crushing) thing, I think. The rejections, the walls you hit, might not be about your writing or your talent. It might be that you haven’t worked through the thing that is bleeding out all over your work and infecting it. Or that you aren’t disciplined and practiced enough yet as a writer to harness it all.
The rejections feel bleak, but they can also be the GPS to lead you out of the murk. Although I self-published a couple non-fiction books here and here and a middle-grade horror novel and have essays in a few more, I was in my 50’s when I got the deal with St. Martin’s Press to write The Meth Lunches. That’s right - My first legacy publishing deal was in my early 50’s. And honestly, it only happened because I lucked out and was nommed twice for a James Beard Award and won once. The opportunity came late, but I was ready. Not just as a writer, but as a functioning human who understood her own bullshit, vulernerabilties and what she needed to make it through the writing and marketing process.
The first thing I did was to get myself back into therapy. (A privilege for those who can afford it, for sure. This is not lost on me.) It was David’s idea and my therapist, Megan, basically walked me through every weird moment of launching a book, the highs, the lows, the middlings. The exposure was harder for me, than being ignored or not read by people. I mean, I was prepared to fail - I’m good at that and am no stranger - but the idea of people looking over at me, seeing me, celebrating me, reading my work, knowing me in ways maybe I hadn’t intended or foresaw, and adhering to it in some way that I couldn’t control, was terrifying. Nearly paralyzing.
I have another YA novel in the hopper now. It’s called Alter-Edie. Think: the rich, spooky multiverse vibes of Coraline meets the dark and tragic agonies of The Tethered in Jordan Peel’s Us.
The story is about a teenager in foster care, living with her foster sisters. She finds a portal, through the bathroom mirror, to her mother who abandoned her. She believes this could be the way to the life she always wanted, the life she longs for. But it goes badly and she finds the thing she is chasing is not what she wanted after all, that memory is not always correct, and that she already has her family and mostly everything she needs. She just never knew it.
In many ways, Alter-Edie is the culmination of not just my fiction writing practice, but my mental work. I am writing about missing mothers again, a theme for me. I am writing about difficult mothers again, also a theme. But the focus is on the child now. I have been thinking about posting the chapters here in another section as a serial. Not sure. Is that something you would read?
I kind of like the idea of crowd-sourcing it here, and getting reader feedback. Could make it a stronger read? Be a kind of community writing project?
In the meantime, I give you some of my rejection letters in photos. They were completely right, by the way.
I wasn’t ready when I wanted to be ready or when I thought I should’ve been ready. If I had to do it all over again, I would worry about the destination a lot less and enjoy more the act of coming into my own as a human and as a writer. But this is easy to do in hindsight because I’ve legacy published a book. I’ve been well-reviewed. I’ve won some national awards, have been noticed and externally validated and gratefully, I have all of you tuning in weekly, which is truly the best thing to happen to me as a writer in years. When you are in it, you want what you want when you want it. You yearn for it and believe if you aren’t fighting, hustling, scraping, climbing your way through the world, it might never happen. It feels like everything, including your happiness, relies on it. There is that suffocating fear that it might never happen. That you will get old and from your lonely, musty over-hoarded studio apartment, and look back on your life with a kind of pathetic, impotent, regret.
It’s funny how the writing from my 20’s takes on this fear. All of my older characters had lives filled with regret. I knew, because of writing, that this scared me before I actually knew it scared me.
Recently on Substack, a writer talked about writing an essay that someone used to defend their own views, but in the completely opposite way than she intended. She wanted to figure out how to get this dude to take down her essay. I didn’t read either take, but what rang true to me is this: If someone can use your essay to make the opposite point, the problem is probably the essay not the guy. Rejection is guidance. Get back to your table, to your keyboard, to your notes and write it better. Fuck that guy. Let that guy do whatever that guy does.
The work is bigger than the reward and the rejection. But the rejection is as important as the reward. Maybe more so. It sucks to affirm this. LOL
We get guardrails and guidance from the universe’s rejections all the time. They are what they are. We should notice them, take note, and then set them aside in a folder, so that years from now, after a raucous dinner party with friends, you can pull them out, mull them over, laugh at your own ineptness, and see how wonderfully far you’ve come and how for once, the trajectory of your life makes perfect sense.
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END NOTES:
Edie is home from Malaga, Spain. She misses her friends from her Spanish language immersion school. She now has friends in Sweden and Ireland. She is off to au pair in Munich in August. I am happy to have everyone home for a bit before they take off again, this time for good.
It’s 120 degrees in the Mojave. If you live here, climate change is unmissable. 120 (49 C) is a record. 5 days over 115F is a record. We are in new territory now.
Hope it is cool where you are. A reminder for us all to be generous with water, ice and your cool areas. Help animals. Carry others when you can.
Thank you, as always, for reading. xo
I would absolutely read bits of Alter-Edie here before purchasing the book. Love following your journey.