The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (28 page)

Who is doing the rejecting.
If, after a mother grounds her teenager, he shouts, “You’re stupid—I hate you!” she might be annoyed, but she probably wouldn’t be hurt too much. That’s because she knows he is acting out of anger and immaturity.

If, on the other hand, her partner or a friend or coworker conveys that same message, she’s likely to be really hurt.

Rejection hurts more when we respect the judgment of the person rejecting us, which is a big part of the reason why so many traumatic rejections are perpetrated by teachers or mentors.

Family members and friends are the other big category of traumatic rejecters. We may or may not respect our loved ones, but we trust them—or crave to—and when they violate that trust it hurts.

Respect and trust for certain individuals also often leads us to be blindsided when they harshly reject us—another huge factor in traumatic rejection (see below).

Where it happens
.
If a rejection happens in public—say, in a classroom or workshop—it is likely to be extra shaming. If it happens via email or text message it’s also extra shaming, in part because it implies you weren’t important enough to merit a phone call or meeting. (Email, voicemail, and texting shouldn’t be used to deliver emotionally difficult messages of any sort—see the section on callousness, below.)

When it happens
.
Obviously, we’re more vulnerable at some times than others. If you’re struggling with problems in other areas of your life, you’ll likely have less ability to cope with a writing rejection.

Another sensitive time is when you are experiencing situational perfectionism (Section 2.9), a temporary spike in perfectionism that is often the aftermath of a writing success or investment. And, of course, rejection itself can cause such a spike, making you more sensitive to further rejection.
This is probably the mechanism by which many blocks occur: you start with a baseline level of perfectionism and then experience several harsh rejections that are never healed and thus add their own additional layers of perfectionist terror until you are blocked.

What is being criticized
.
If someone criticizes a grocery list you wrote, it’s probably not going to matter. But if they criticize a book or thesis chapter you’ve labored over, that’s another story. Ditto if you’re being criticized over an aspect of your writing you’ve always prided yourself on, be it analytical rigor, psychological acumen, or the ability to write dialogue.

A common problem is when criticism crosses the line into personal attack: from “there’s a problem with this piece” to “there’s a problem with your worldview” or even “there’s a problem with your character.” (“Character” in the sense of your personality and values, not someone you’re inventing.) This kind of personal criticism can be highly painful and is inappropriate coming from anyone, but especially a teacher, mentor, or publishing professional.

An even more vicious type of criticism is that which attacks your personal or professional identity, i.e., “You can’t be much of a _________ if you do _____.” Once, a writer I know who writes on interpersonal dynamics discovered that her agent wasn’t returning her publisher’s phone calls. When she drew the problem politely to the agent’s attention, the agent responded by saying, “Wow, that’s not very professional behavior from someone who’s supposed to be a relationship expert.” Besides its intrinsic meanness and unfairness, the agent’s comment is a sterling example of the types of control tactics that publishing professionals (Section 8.1), thesis advisors (Section A.3), and others use to control writers.

Callousness
.
Callousness represents a negation of our very humanity. Here’s Tom Grimes, in
Mentor
, reporting on an incredibly callous rejection from a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program:

Syracuse turned me down next. But rather than simply sending a letter, the program’s staff returned my application manuscript, upon which someone had scrawled and then partially erased the words
B-, boring
. This may have been due to laziness. After all, someone could have used Wite-Out to mask the handwriting, made a copy of the original page, and replaced it with an innocent replica ... Classic rejection letters lie to minimize an author’s pain: “We regret.” “We wish we could.” “We’re sorry but due to space limitations.” But editors never regret, wish, or feel sorry: they simply avoid being cruel, and the staff at Syracuse hadn’t. At best, its response was careless, at worst, mocking and sadistic.

Grimes’s anger is justified, and his detailed recollection of a decades-old traumatic rejection is typical: traumatic rejections, as noted in Section 7.1, do tend to imprint themselves with great clarity.

While anyone, including a teacher, can be callous by mistake,
consistently callous rejections are a hallmark of disempowering systems
(Section 8.5). Callous rejections also tend to be blindsiding (see below) because they violate the norms of civil discourse.

One of my students recalled getting a paper back from a teacher that didn’t have a single comment on it until the very end, where the teacher had written, “This is where you should have started.” (Everyone in class groaned when she told this story.) The teacher might have been rushed or stressed, or he might have felt lazy or uncommitted (which, as you now know, would have been symptomatic of his own disempowerment), but none of those conditions excuses his callousness.

Rejection via voicemail or text message is callous because it sends a message that the rejected person is unimportant enough to merit a conversation. Ditto for form letters, especially if, as is common in publishing, they come unexpectedly in the wake of more personal communications. Emails can be better, but are still inadequate for emotional conversations or those requiring nuance. While we writers may naturally pride ourselves on our wordsmithing, psychologists say it’s often the nonverbal elements of a communication that have the most impact.
1

Compassionate people strive never to reject anyone, in any situation, callously.

Capriciousness
also negates our humanity—we become a mere canvas for the perpetrator’s mood swings—but with an extra fillip: we’re always in a state of nervous anxiety, never knowing when the axe will fall. Interact long enough with a capricious person, and the entire experience can be traumatizing.

Unfairness
is akin to capriciousness. Exploiters often deride fairness as an immature preoccupation in a hard-knocks world, but ethical people do care about fairness, and the opposite of fairness is irrational bias, which most thinking people reject as an intellectual and moral flaw. In any case, if you believe a rejection was unfair, that could well add to your hurt.

Unfairness is common in MFA programs and other educational settings, where a small number of students are often anointed “stars” and showered with attention and support while everyone else is left to languish. (Note the dichotomizing.)

Blindsiding
.
Blindsiding happens all the time and is a huge cause of traumatic rejection and writer’s block. If I tell you I’m going to submit your work to the meanest editor in the world, you have a chance to prepare yourself emotionally for the inevitable harsh critique or rejection. (And you shouldn’t let me do that, anyway.) If, however, you get a harsh rejection from someone you don’t expect it from—i.e., are blindsided—then you’ll probably be unprepared and undefended, and the rejection will hit very hard.

Here are factors that lead to blindsiding:

(1)
Pervasive societal perfectionism.
Many people don’t know how to give constructive criticism, or even that they should. They will blithely mouth the most hurtful criticisms, and then, after you protest, blame
you
for being wounded.

(2)
Malpractice.
If a doctor, through ineptness, negligence, or some other gross violation of professional standards, leaves the patient worse off, we call that malpractice. I believe we should use the same term for teachers, mentors, and publishing professionals who, through their own ineptness, negligence, or lack of professionalism, leave writers worse off. When S.J. Culver received a rejection letter
838 days
after submitting a story, that was malpractice and she was blindsided:

I was outraged, really
outraged
, when it popped up in my inbox—not because I really thought my story had stood much of a chance at the magazine in question, but because it was the first rejection in some time to catch me off guard. Usually I expect the rejection slips; they turn up like clockwork four months, six months, eight months after I mail off a submission ... My mind is steeled against their inevitable arrival, knowing the odds, knowing I’m no genius. This one was a nasty surprise, though, and for a day or two I was just disgusted.
2

(More on S.J. Culver’s rejection in Section 8.2.)

(3)
Unreasonable expectations.
If you are sure your work will be published by the next editor you send it to, or praised to the heavens at your next workshop, then you are setting yourself up for blindsiding. Often our expectations are grandiose, but sometimes we are disarmed by even reasonable hopes and optimism. Here’s Tom Grimes, again:

Three days later the Houghton Mifflin editor who had recommended my first novel for publication wrote to say I’d “gone off track.” Nothing he liked about my first novel existed in my new novel, the rest of which he didn’t ask to see. Instead, he advised me to “follow the often-lonely road to literary achievement.” Earlier that day, I’d stopped work on page two hundred and seven, midsentence ... I opened the blue box, placed the new novel inside it, and didn’t touch it again for a decade.

Although it would seem reasonable for Grimes to assume that the editor who liked his first book would like his second, it’s never a good idea, when dealing with traditional publishers, to get your hopes up. “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” is a useful strategy, if you don’t let it shade into negativity. (And, as discussed in the next chapter, successful people always try to have a “Plan B.”)

The editor rejected Grimes callously, though. He should have called, and he should have also resisted the impulse to offer such silly and patronizing advice.

1
The Wikipedia entry on “nonverbal communication” has a good overview. The phrase “verbal communication,” by the way, is often used by specialists to include both spoken and written communication.

2
S.J. Culver, “On Expectations (And A Writer’s Lack Of Same),” The Awl (blog), March 17, 2011 (www.theawl.com/2011/03/on-expectations-and-a-writers-lack-of-same).

Y
ou won’t be able to avoid rejection entirely, but you should do everything you can to minimize the chance of traumatic rejection. There are three main techniques for doing so:

(1)
Work to minimize your perfectionism and internalized oppression.
This is key to resiliency, and if you keep at it you’ll eventually not care about, or even notice, many rejections. Also, work on setting nonperfectionistic, reasonable goals and having nonperfectionistic, reasonable expectations so you won’t be blindsided.

Always remember that there are many reasons your work can be rejected that have nothing to do with its quality, including that the editor was busy, distracted, or biased, or that the market you submitted it to was in financial trouble. (Or the editor might have just purchased something similar to your work.) Of course, a lot of work gets rejected because it is unprofessional—badly crafted, or submitted to the wrong market, or submitted at the wrong time—but there’s a lot of randomness in publishing that even the most professional writers are subject to, which is a key reason I advocate self-publishing (Section 8.5).

(2)
Always strive to deal with ethical, compassionate, and competent people.
I can’t stress this enough, nor can I stress enough the importance of walking away from oppressors and exploiters regardless of the short-term benefit you think you might derive from the association. Not only are ethical relationships far more likely to achieve the desired outcomes, they are also far more likely to evolve into long-term productive partnerships. But the most important reason to avoid oppressors is because relationships with them tend to be disempowering and often culminate in traumatic rejection.

Always
trust your gut
, and quickly exit situations where you don’t feel comfortable or safe, where you feel you’re being manipulated, or where your investment seems much larger than the other person’s. (As a friend of mine says in a different context, “Don’t make someone a priority when they’ve only made you an option.”) It’s important to leave worrisome relationships even if doing so is difficult, inconvenient, or costly—and to do it fast, before too much damage is done.

It’s also important to work with competent people who are capable of seeing a project through. As you now know, there are many reasons why an intelligent and well-intentioned person would be unable to follow through on her plans, including perfectionism, an inability or unwillingness to prioritize, and internalized oppression. To base your success around working with such a person is taking on a huge burden, and a huge risk.

All this raises yet another key difference between underproductive people and the prolific:
underproductive people tend to remain way too long in unproductive situations or relationships, while the prolific, in contrast, are quick to exit them
. The prolific also understand that once in a while they’ll leave a situation they should have stayed in; they’re okay with that because they know no one makes perfect decisions. They also know that opportunities are abundant, and so another one will eventually come along—in contrast to perfectionists, who tend to think opportunities are scarce and therefore cling to even unproductive situations.