Dealing with rejection.

This is from "Tiny Buddha." They send daily emails full of inspiration and wisdom. Today's is perfect for all my artist friends who struggle with rejection. (Or maybe that's just me?) I'm also filthy guilty of putting tons of weight in other people's opinions, especially people who've been published.

Tiny Wisdom: Not Taking No for an Answer

Aug 24, 2011 10:25 pm | Lori Deschene

“Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

Many times in life we ask questions of people and then put way too much weight on their answers.
We ask people we admire if they think we have what it takes, and then consider their opinions fact. We ask people we respect if they think we should take a chance, and then follow their advice as law. We ask people if they’ll take a chance on us, and then interpret their response to be a reflection of our potential.
Other people can’t tell us how far we can go. They can’t tell us how our talents could evolve. They can’t tell us if our risks will pay off. Other people’s “nos” aren’t what limit our future–it’s our own “nos” that do that.
The other day, I read an interview with television producer and former American Idol judge Simon Cowell. He admitted that if Lady Gaga had auditioned for the show, he would have instantly rejected her because of her over-the-top persona. Like her or not, Lady Gaga has emerged as a force to be reckoned within the music industry–a bona fide record-breaking pop icon, who likely isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Odds are she heard her fair share of “nos,” as does anyone with a dream.
Sometimes we hear “no” before we even get a chance to contact the person we really want to reach. We hear “no” from assistants, and publicists, and agents, and associates, and a number of other gatekeepers. Those “nos” are rarely final since a gate is made to be opened.
We can take all these “nos” and use them as proof that we shouldn’t move forward with our goals. Or we can learn from them, release them, and then keep moving ahead, driven by a deep internal yes that refuses to be ignored.
Today if you come up against rejection, remember: This does not mean “no.” It just means “not this way.”

Down days.

Getting older and sober I realize that there are days when it's best not to read anything I've written. Whether it's a lack of protein, sleep, endorphins, or serotonin, I'm stuck wearing a pair of shit goggles today. The last two stories I opened to revise literally made me gag and convulse in horror at the shitty, navel-gazing prose. I'm sure that better writing can be found in a 15-year-old girl's diary. I couldn't press command "q" fast enough.

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for what to do instead. Eat candy and hope tomorrow is better.

It's all about anticipation.

I recently read somewhere--Lucky magazine or some other fine literary journal--that for most people the anticipation and planning of a vacation is more rewarding than the actual vacation.

There have been times in my sober life when I have missed the anticipation of going out for drinks or to a party more than I think I've missed the actual drinking. That's not true; I'm a liar. Alcohol and opiates were excellent lovers and I miss them, but I did get a special thrill leaving work on a Friday evening to meet people at a bar, or putting on a new dress and heels to wear to a wedding reception. The anticipation of what I was going to drink--icy martini or fragrant goblet of red wine or BOTH!--was delicious. Caroline Knapp describes it well in her memoir, Drinking: A Love Story. I recommend it. I suppose these moments are nice to remember because they are the befores. You know, before I started stumbling around, singing too loudly, repeating myself, or thinking I was really funny or looking super sexy on the dance floor. Let me just say, yuck. Not a great look for a middle-aged mom.


I still get a thrill leaving work on Fridays and heading to a party but now I'm mostly excited about the cake.

Other people's musings on the creative life.

Ira's cute, isn't he?

I'm reposting this from a trail of links I followed like breadcrumbs: "via" which was posted "via" and who knows where it originally was printed. Fer sure we know that it originated in the mind of the always insightful Ira Glass. All my writer/artist friends will surely relate. Some were successful at a youngish age, other gave up and took steady, lucrative jobs. I wasn't officially published until I was almost 40. Take it away, Ira.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

— Ira Glass

Woody Allen said it another way:

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Thomas Edison: 

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

This morning on the radio, I heard Garrison Keiller talk about Andre Dubus II, who had this to say about the writing life:

"A first book is a treasure, and all these truths and quasi-truths I have written about publishing are finally ephemeral. An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them which becomes a sentence. When a writer does that, day after day, working alone with little encouragement, often with discouragement flowing in the writer's own blood, and with the occasional rush of excitement that empties oneself, so that the self is for minutes or longer in harmony with eternal astonishments and visions of truth, right there on the page on the desk; and when a writer does this work steadily enough to complete a manuscript long enough to be a book, the treasure is on the desk. If the manuscript itself, mailed out to the world where other truths prevail, is never published, the writer will suffer bitterness, sorrow, anger, and, more dangerously, despair, convinced that the work was not worthy, so not worth those days at the desk. But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul. If the work is not published, or is published for little money and less public attention, it remains a spiritual, mental, and physical achievement; and if, in public, it is the widow's mite, it is also, like the widow, more blessed."

That is why, even as the rejections pile up and the novel gets re-written again and again and I spend more money on my craft than I'll ever make, I continue to do it. Because there is nothing as worthy of my time and, besides, what else am I going to do? Jog? I often wonder what gets non-writers out of bed in the morning?

Stop for beauty.

You have to read this.
I think of all the people I know, my mother would have stopped and listened. (Maybe my aunts, too.) She pays attention and doesn't let context cloud her perceptions.