The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (29 page)

3)
Be proactive and plan.
Proactiveness means doing the work in this book in an ambitious way, so that when you do get rejected you’ve got the emotional, community, and other resources to cope.

It also means having a Plan B and maybe even a Plan C—so that, for instance, if you don’t get into the workshop of your choice, you’ve got other options.

Proactiveness also means considering in advance how your published work will affect others. If your writing is likely to annoy or upset or inconvenience someone you care about, it’s best to give him notice—after all, he doesn’t deserve to be blindsided either. (Often, however, when my students finally “have the discussion” they find that the person they were concerned about not only doesn’t mind what they’re writing, but actively supports it. So, it’s best not to start out with strong assumptions.)

Do you show someone the actual writing that might upset them? I think so—it’s the specifics that determine how the piece will affect them. In some cases, I do believe others have a legitimate say over when and how you publish a work—although
never
over what you actually write. These are tricky situations to navigate, though, so consult your mentors, maintain a clear sense of your boundaries, and use cooperative problem-solving (Section 4.12) to let the other person know you care and are willing to work to arrive at the most mutually satisfactory outcome possible.

Don’t delay this conversation till the last minute, by the way. For one thing, I’ve found that the fear that your family (or others) will object to your writing can be a huge barrier to productivity. Also, people’s feelings and concerns are legitimate, even if they conflict with your need to publish. If you’re afraid you won’t stand fast under pressure, I would work on that problem instead of cheating the other person of a cooperative process.

Finally, proactiveness also means you are selective in the information—and, especially, judgments—you take in. Many prolific writers, for instance, only read a few critics whose judgment they trust. Others have trusted family members, agents, or others filter their reviews so that they only see the worthwhile ones.

There is no point in exposing yourself to ignorant or vicious criticism.

R
ejection hurts most when it is shaming and causes us to feel diminished as a person. Diminishment is a close cousin to disempowerment, which you now know lies at the heart of underproductivity (Section 1.1). Here are two terrific examples of writers taking back their power after rejections.

Carolyn See’s boomerang strategy
from her book,
Making a Literary Life
:

In that first hour of rejection, when your liver is exploding and your spleen is on fire, you grope your way through the house to where you keep your “charming note” stationery. You look up the name of that periodical’s editor’s on the masthead and you write him or her a charming note.

You don’t, under any circumstances, write: “Dear Sir or Madam, Eat shit and die.” ...

Try writing something like “Thanks for the bracing experience of your rejection slip! It made me rethink my story once again. I’ll be sending you another one in three weeks or so. Because my greatest dream is to see my work in your pages. Maybe next time I’ll get a genuine signature on that slip! Or maybe you’ll say yes. Wouldn’t that be cool? Yours sincerely.”

Write it, fold it, address it, stamp it, send it right back
on the same day you get the rejection
.

She continues:

I can’t tell you how important this is, how utterly unfrivolous in intent. This simple
thank you
for the rejection is one of the highest forms of spiritual aikido I can think of. ... Maybe [the editors will] read the note and drop it instantly into the wastebasket. Maybe they’ll shove it to the back of their desks. It doesn’t matter too much what
they
do.

The main thing is that
your 
ions will fall back into place, your internal organs will stop exploding, and you might find yourself absently smiling.

See’s boomerang works both for alleviating the hurt of the rejection and also for building the kind of author-editor relationship that can lead to publication. (She reports that this process eventually got her published in
The Atlantic Monthly
.)

Chris Offutt’s reframing strategy
.
In his essay “The Eleventh Draft,” from the book
The Eleventh Draft:
(Frank Conroy, ed.), Chris Offutt offers one of the most brilliant and delightful re-empowerment strategies I’ve seen:

The notion of submitting anything to a magazine filled me with terror. A stranger would read my precious words, judge them deficient, and reject them, which meant I was worthless
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... My goal, however, was not publication, which was still too scary a thought. My goal was a hundred rejections in a year.

I mailed my stories in multiple submissions and waited eagerly for their return, which they promptly did. Each rejection brought me that much closer to my goal—a cause for celebration, rather than depression. Eventually disaster struck. The
Coe Review
published my first story in spring 1990.

As discussed in Section 2.12, rejection (a.k.a. “failure”) is not only inevitable but a sign you’re operating at an ambitious level. Writers do have to endure levels of rejection that most people can’t tolerate—which is a big part of the reason so many people give up on their writing dream—so why not spend some time seeing if you can come up with a clever See-like or Offutt-like way of coping?

Or, even better, craft an empowered career for yourself that puts your acceptances and failures much more directly under your control (Chapter 8).

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Note the harsh punishment, dichotomization, overidentification with the work, and other perfectionist symptoms.

T
he strategies in the prior chapter are useful for dealing with the kinds of routine rejections that typically accompany a writing career—or life in general. These rejections sting, and they can wear you down, but they are mostly non-traumatic.

What about the traumatic ones that can foment a block? Here’s a process for coping:

(1)
Overcome your perfectionism and internalized oppression.
You’re probably sick of hearing me say that, but it’s fundamental. Don’t buy into the oppressor’s viewpoint or give away your power. Also, people with strong supportive communities and abundant resources tend to cope much better than those who are isolated and deprived.

(2)
Prioritize coping.
Don’t try to work through the pain, or minimize it, or pretend it’s “no big deal.” Stop your work and focus on healing. This will ensure that you’ll be able to resume your work as quickly as possible.

(3)
Cope lavishly.
We’re often in shock after a traumatic rejection, and so may not be conscious of the full extent of the hurt. And the tendency toward denial is strong. I find, in fact, that many rejections are like icebergs: small on the surface, but much larger underneath. I would therefore err on the side of caution and assume I’m hurting worse—and need more healing—than I may realize.

If you need a crying jag or a sulk, take it—you’re not hurting anyone. (If you need a bunch, take them.) When you’re done, move on to journaling, discussions, therapy, and other analytical/healing tools. Explore the situation as fully as possible, and with as much compassionate objectivity as possible. Yes, you want to take responsibility for whatever mistakes you made, but you also need to recognize the actions others took and the role of bad luck in the rejection—and to be sure not to blame yourself for those.

(4)
Avoid the temptation to isolate
.
As you know from Chapter 6, that only compounds the shame and deprives you of resources. You need your community now more than ever.

(5)
Take back your power.
You take your power back, mainly, by speaking your truth. If the person who rejected you is compassionate and ethical, call or visit and tell her how her action made you feel; if you’ve correctly assessed her character, she will probably take responsibility and apologize. Or she could bring up other aspects of the situation that fully or partly exonerate her. That’s fine, too. The main point is that she will seriously listen to and think about your statements.

If the person is not, to your knowledge, compassionately objective or ethical in their dealings, or if they are more powerful than you, or if you feel that there might be adverse consequences to speaking out, then you’ve got a tougher problem. Definitely consult with your mentors, and you may have to limit your re-empowerment to speaking your truth to yourself and your community, coping lavishly, and limiting your future interactions with the person. (Far better, I hope you see, to work with compassionately objective, ethical, and competent people in the first place.)

I
can’t emphasize enough how difficult writing on the Internet is—or at least how difficult
I
find it. I see bloggers and emailers who write piles each day without apparent hesitation or conflict, but that’s not me. I see the Internet as a place of almost constant rejection and perfectionism, and beyond that, numerous conflicts including:

Blurring between personal and public personae.
The Internet is a highly intimate medium that’s also highly public. How much should you divulge, and when, and to whom? These are bedeviling questions, particularly since once you do divulge the information can go anywhere.

Personae collision.
We all reveal different aspects of ourselves to different people and in different settings. I show one side of my character to my friends, another to my siblings, another to my mom, another to my young niece and nephew, and still another to my adult nephew.

These boundaries are much harder to maintain on the Web than in real life, and because the consequences of blurring can be severe, this adds to the difficulties of deciding what and when and where (and whether) to publish.

Collision between personal and professional personae.
Even harder to sort out than the conflicts among your personal personae.

Conflicts about fees, licenses, etc.
I struggle not just with the immediate practical questions of payments (or lack thereof) and contracts on the Internet, but the ethical implications of my choices.

My own newsletters and blog I of course write for free. But what about contributing articles to someone else’s site in exchange for publicity? I am less certain of the benefit of doing that than I once was, not just because some sites have profited spectacularly off the unpaid labor of writers—
The Huffington Post
, which its owner sold to AOL for $315 million, being the best known example—but also because the publicity value of some of the barters I’ve done was negligible. Should I spend a day or two writing an article for someone else’s site when doing so only yields a few hits on my own? (The smart thing, by the way, is not to write an article from scratch, but to quickly repurpose one that you’ve already written.)

Even more worrisome is that many sites have gotten rapacious in claiming the rights to contributed works. I’m not talking about the major social networking sites, most of which have terms of service explicitly claiming ownership of anything you post on them. (So don’t do it! Just link to the post on your site, and make sure your copyright or Creative Commons statement is prominent.) I’m talking about smaller venues. It used to be that when I donated an article to someone, it was taken for granted that they would use it just once. Now, many sites claim unlimited rights to reproduce contributed works in any format or venue—even commercially. They are even worse than the corporate publishers I worked with as a freelancer who were also rapacious, but who at least paid.

Unfortunately, all this is true of even organizations that should know better. Recently, I contributed an article to an animal rights blog (get that?
Rights
) and received a long email back claiming unlimited rights except for the right to be sued for the material, which they considerately left exclusive to me. When I pointed out that the terms were unfair, the editor threw a tantrum (a control tactic, by the way), saying she was “horrifically offended.”

This is a complex and constantly changing topic, so I don’t have definitive advice except (a) read the fine print, (b) stay informed, and (c) trust your gut.

Writing on the Web often utilizes a different process than writing offline.
After a gig filling in for blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates, novelist Michael Chabon had this interesting observation:
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Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. ... Getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets.

There’s often not just a difference in pacing but in how you perceive the finished product. As a self-identified “writer,” I place a high value on the polish of my finished works—an attitude that’s somewhat antithetical to blogging and other quick-deadline Web publishing.