Tag Archives: creative writing

Abandoning the Mission

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I make my way on the orange line to the State Street train station in hopes of heading to my sacred writing space. I enter the quiet room and I immerse myself into my work in hopes of getting further along in my writing project. It sounds like the perfect set up yet when the moment arrives I find myself stopped. For awhile I thought I was experiencing writer’s block, but it hasn’t been about a lack of things to write, I’ve been trying to determine the right thing to write. Many people would call this “THE CRITIC.” The inner voice that yells “your writing is terrible” before you even get the words out. The internal editor that stops you before you even utter a word. The small voice encouraging you to put off writing until a “genius” or “beautiful” passage is created.

This constant state of paralysis while writing has made me think of my childhood. I used to read free books that my family got from shelters and donation bins. We were living beneath the poverty line so, interestingly enough, I found myself with a ton of classics portraying worlds incredibly far from my own. I was reading “David Copperfield” or “Little Women” and falling in love with books more and more each day. I was so in love with them I tried to make my own. I wrote without worry about whether my plot made sense, or if my characters were developed, or if my line breaks were in the right spot. Somehow as I got more information about literature and the world of writing, my ability to be free while writing dwindled away.

One of the reasons I’ve always loved creating, whether it was a book, a dance or my own theater play with my siblings as actors, was because it was free. And not free in the commercial sense of the word, free in the sense that what I created was mine. It wasn’t under the influence of my future inner critic, the world of publishing or a commissioner. I could create to express, explore and connect.

It’s probably impossible for me to recreate the type of freedom I had as a child, yet I am challenging myself to write whatever is in my head. I am challenging myself to let my thoughts avalanche onto a page and make absolutely no sense. I am abandoning the “project” or the “mission.” I am challenging myself to fall in love with the joy of creating something. I am allowing myself to revel in that space, if only for a moment. Until my inner critic learns what’s going on and tells me to stop, so I can start the process all over again.

-Tatiana M.R. Johnson, 2018 WROB Gish Jen Fellow 

The Shape of Stories: Diversity is as Much about Form as it is Subject Matter

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This summer, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend the Odyssey Writer’s Workshop in Manchester, New Hampshire, a six-week craft intensive for speculative fiction. The genre tends to evoke images of rocket ships and wizards in the popular imagination, but encompasses all kinds of stories with non-mimetic worlds, including literary fabulism, theological meditations, psychological horror and thriller, and hybrid motifs (rocket ships piloted by wizards, for example). My classmates have amused, horrified, intrigued and moved me with perspectives and ideas I never would have encountered otherwise.

The focus on craft and form at Odyssey is so powerful because the instructor, Jeanne Cavelos, is both deeply knowledgeable about the tools and theories but ultimately not prescriptive about what it is that makes an individual story and individual writer’s voice “work.” I was nervous about this going in: I wanted to know what I knew I didn’t know, to have what I expressed also be understood, but would I lose something about my own intuition in the process? My experience, nearing the final as I write this, has been the complete opposite of the fear; in recognition and practice of certain conventions, I’ve been more able to consciously put aside the ones that simply don’t work for the stories I want to tell, and strengthen my ideas when they do. So I wondered, where did I learn that fear in the first place?

Outside workshop, in the mercurial and sometimes brutal process of actually getting the words out into the world, there is a tension between many publishers increasingly visible and grandiose claims to want “diverse voices” and those same publishers’ actual behavior: getting more conservative and narrow in their selection about what is “marketable” (or its soft synonyms, “relatable” and “likable.”

“It didn’t quite come together for us.” What on earth could that mean? I t might mean, “this was excellent, but could use some clarification on sentence level, and we simply don’t have the resources to go through that process for a short story–sorry, good luck, try again please!” It can also mean, “look, I know we say we wanted diverse voices, but the very form of this text reflected a tangible expression of difference, and really what we want is conventional stories with a palette swap to make us look more progressive as a brand.”

Sometimes this is as plain as using language that is natural to you but considered “broken English” or “slang” that must be set off in italics, explained or outright removed. Sometimes its in the way people assert hard rules against things like second person point of view or lengthy flashbacks–“nobody actually experiences their body or their memory that way”–when, indeed, those of us intimate with dissociative states or post-traumatic stress very much do. Sometimes it’s as subtle and well-intentioned as narrative proportions and tension that don’t fit the three-act, arc-shaped mold (“slow to start”, “the ending didn’t quite land”)– as though Freytag’s Pyramid is a universal truth devoid of cultural context. For writers from marginalized perspectives, even the most polite and neutral rejection or omission can putrefy into fear and doubt within, because there is no way to know for sure “why.”

This kind of anxiety can manifest in complex and tragic ways even within the in-group. Portrayals of your own experiences approached with nuance, transgression, or self-satire might be considered too dangerous to air in the face of daily systemic oppression, airing the “dirty laundry,” perpetuating “bad representation.”

And sometimes a small, independent online magazine (for example) simply has a specific editorial vision (and likely a volunteer masthead), which is a kind of narrowness that, if part of a larger environment of many different cultural and aesthetic goals, can foster healthy artistic variety. But the key factor is that vast plentitude–too often the visions and personalities driving new or smaller publications seem a bit too much like more of what already exists, which means a finished story might have over a dozen possible appropriate markets to submit to… or none at all.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunities through my Fellowship at the Writers’ Room of Boston and admission to the Odyssey Writing Workshop this year to make my writing into a studied practice. Gaining time, space, and actionable techniques is an invaluable privilege. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned this year so far is that “good writing” depends so much on context, and being able to identify what is happening formally in my own work has made the choices more deliberate and the intentions clearer from the first draft. At the same time, concern about exclusion and homogeny are not mere sour grapes from the fringes. I would love to see publishers and editors committed to “diversity” consider and respond more seriously to formal expectations in whatever genre they’ve committed to. What is the shape of a “good story?” Who is the “average reader?” Are there expectations and norms that may be getting overripe in the desire to innovate?

-2018 WROB Fellow Julian K. Jarboe

Why Review Books? A Personal History

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Why review books? What’s the point? To what useful end is one reader’s take on someone else’s art beyond her own delight, neutrality, or regret for having engaged?

One might return a question: why review ANYTHING? Opinions, everybody’s got ‘em, right? So.

So. Memory . . .  

In the 80’s and 90’s, my brother and I rocked the summer reading club scene at both libraries we frequented. That’s right, we competed in reading against other, unseen children, jockeying for the coveted position of Most Books Read. My brother and I weren’t opponents –these races were more like track and field where one challenges his history: his past record, his younger self.

At summer’s end, we’d conclude with fistfuls of Pizza Hut personal pan pizza coupons and, for me at least, zero memory of what I’d read beyond titles listed on a colorful sheet of paper, forgotten ever more deeply as summer’s expansiveness compressed into rigidly structured fall.

Learning . . .

My brother has four years on me and, other than a few shared Spider-Man and Garfield comics, a Robotech novel or two, we didn’t have many cross-over reading interests. Despite this, I hold dear titles that I myself never read, such as Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. The book reports he wrote for school were as amazing and sophisticated sounding to me as what he was reading. I felt eager to compose my own reports–craft construction paper covers, hand-letter the titles, staple along the edges, and present proudly to a teacher one neat bundle.

Sadly, my schooling was not his; I didn’t score any grade school teachers who assigned book reports. By the time I was invited to commune with literature, I was in high school where the culture was less about connecting with written words and more about strategizing to achieve A’s. I loved and identified with novels and poetry but still removed myself from an Honor’s English class because I didn’t care to compete and had a growing dislike of lit-tret-ture.

Memory . . .

I have a micro-myth, goes like this: I was reading The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, so into it, awww YEAH! This book is GREAT, this book is fantastic. Nearing the final pages, situations started to feel a tad . . . familiar, and then really familiar, and then. Oh, no. I’ve already read this book. I KNOW HOW IT ENDS. 🙁 🙁 🙁

Thus, I started keeping reading journals in high school, hardbound books usually gifted to me by my brother. Curiously, the practice failed to save me from accidentally reading The Hero and the Crown a third time (consistent, that kid), but it did help cement the awareness that I shouldn’t attempt to keep everything in my head. I quickly devised my own rating system consisting of smiley faces and frown-y faces and wavy lines. The journals doubled as a study of the writing field and I recorded authors, illustrators, publishing houses and imprints, and award-winners.

Learning . . .

The result of eight-straight-years of writing instruction in high school and college is that I’ve learned systems and strategies for analyzing the narrative arts. I peek behind and betwixt typeset words for clues about work and writer both. The why of it: to read deeper, write better, understand our lives and our world(s) in the moment of the narrative, and then again and again with each unique book-poem-play, even as those books-poems-(comics!)-plays sometimes meld together into a mash of ideas. They soak through, get integrated and because of my . . .

. . . Memory, or lack thereof, I review books and STILL forget them. Alternately, there are poems I’ve heard just once that stick with me. It’s unpredictable. It’s delicious.

When the Internet arrived (for me) in college, so too arrived ingenious applications like Goodreads. At current count, I’ve posted approximately 400 reviews. Sure, one such review (for Microcrafts: Tiny Treasures to Make and Share by Margaret McGuire) is a simple exclamation: “So cute! So tiny!” but that’s an honest reaction, yeah? It’s me talking back to the writer/artist as much as my six-paragraph rant about Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Sometimes other Goodreads users click the thumbs-up button, declaring their affinity with my analysis and I get a nice energy boost.

Aaaand learning . . .

As my world has expanded via the 0’s and 1’s, I’ve grown more careful with the reviews I pen. Words on a website are not the same as ideas on paper, bound by twin case covers, sitting on my shelf at home. I’m aware that the authors I watch from afar may one day be close-up peers. Taking care is a must. After all, care is the reason I’ve engaged, why I’m talking back to a writer or artist, explaining: this is how you reached me. See? Here’s how I’ve changed.

-Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

 

Imagining Empathy

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At the beginning of May, I had the opportunity to go to a talk with Clint Smith, writer and scholar, and Jesmyn Ward, author of “Sing Unburied Sing.” I hadn’t read Jesmyn Ward’s latest book yet, but I was excited to hear her talk about it. She‘s been heralded as the William Faulkner of our time and the reviews of her book have suggested that she truly crafts beautiful narratives, especially in characters that are heavily flawed.

Jesmyn Ward talked about how she read a Psychology Today article that expressed that those who read fiction are likely to have an increased sense of empathy. I was surprised by this stat because I would have imagined that perhaps non-fiction or memoir would have this effect on readers. But fiction, being entirely imagined, seems to be the genre of writing that contributes to a shift in empathy amongst readers. I wouldn’t, by any means, identify myself as a fiction writer, but I do have a strong desire to write fiction. I have pieces of fiction tucked away in my computer and in the crevices of my mind. There are stories brewing yet to be created, yet I’ve always had this urgency to write poetry and non-fiction as a way of truly talking about an issue, injustice, or conflict that needs an empathetic perspective.

Hearing Jesmyn Ward talk about how fiction can create a heightened sense of empathy, was for me, novel and exciting, but also a challenge. Perhaps this is the time for me to write a new world, that a reader can enter, develop their own relationship with, and construct their own sense of understanding. Maybe it’s time I stop talking about how true and real pain is and why it deserves empathy, and construct an experience for a reader where they feel the pain, or experience it with a character that hasn’t been written before.

I decided to do a little research on what Jesmyn Ward talked about, in relation to fiction. The Scientific American provided the following quote:

“Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves.”

There’s something inherently disruptive about constructing your own world within art. The very act of being a black woman writer and writing a story that is entirely yours is also disruptive. At the end of listening to Jesmyn Ward I found myself not only inspired, but challenged to go even further as a writer. Yes, I carry a responsibility to tell a story but perhaps I have a responsibility to craft a world that speaks to my experience and that challenges readers to enter that existence. Perhaps that is powerfully done within fiction, but maybe it can be tackled in poetry and non-fiction. Maybe empathy doesn’t just arise from a character but perhaps the readers’ understanding of a world, outside of themselves, and the injustices that can occur in those worlds. In turn, maybe this is how we gain more empathy as a society. It’s a challenge as a writer, who likes to stay true, but perhaps there’s a world that can be created where this truth shines, lives and begs to be heard.

–2018 WROB Gish Jen Fellow Tatiana M.R. Johnson

Revising and Rewriting as a Therapeutic Practice

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I wanted to declare something like “most writers pursue their craft as a means of self expression,” but I realized even the phrase “self expression” connotes interiority and poetics to the exclusion of other purposes. So let me establish, before anything else: that’s silly. Journalism, academia, drama, fiction, poetry, and automatic stream of consciousness diaries are all engaging the ideas and experiences of the author/s selves through literary mediums. They use different devices to different ends, but any writer who claims to like writing is relieving a tension which is, to some degree, personal.

I long thought of raw drafting as the only expressive part of the process. Like a lot of fledgling writers, I mistook the act of drafting as essentially the same thing as writing. As a teenager, I regarded my over-sharing, unfiltered LiveJournal (and MySpace, Facebook, and Tumblr) entries as catharsis, and resisted accepting any feedback that might corrupt their pure purpose of making me feel better. Criticism didn’t bruise my ego, it bounced off of it, because anything but immediate enthusiasm for my drafts was just yet another person misunderstanding my efforts.

Ridiculous as it all seems now, I’m glad my adolescent art had such a wide stubborn streak down the middle. A few influential teachers along the way knew to ask me “so what?” and made me explain my impulses and preciousness again and again or let them go altogether. At eighteen I observed a lecture and workshop with a monk who made intricate mandalas in sand and then threw them into a river when they were finished. I made peace with a few crashed hard drives and lost notebooks. I came to see drafting as gathering material, not even assembling it yet, much less polishing. All of this allowed me to shape and mature my process and my voice into something more resilient than stubborn, and more fluid than nebulous. Rejection does not make me feel like a misunderstood art martyr anymore, but it does make me ask where along the way my messages got lost, and to ask “so what?” until they actually do what I meant for them to do.

For the next decade or so, it seemed that revision, rewriting, and publication were about cleaning up nicely. Drafting a piece was the feral self and making it readable and publishable was socializing it, a necessary trade off, so I thought, of taming base antisocial impulses in exchange for more effective communication. But recently I was reading a behavioral therapy essay, “Grieving and Complex PTSD: Fear as Death of Safety,” and a great deal of what the author, Pete Walker, had to say about effective therapy reminded me of tips I’ve seen about creative practice. It also gave me an unexpected insight into what I was still missing in my attitudes.

Walker writes that in treatment for C-PTSD, venting through speech or writing is most useful when it engages both self expression as well as analytical search for the right language. “Verbal ventilation is only effective,” he says, “when it is liberated from the [inner] critic’s control. In early recovery, verbal ventilation can easily shift into verbal self flagellation.” Translated into writing advice, this is more or less “shush your inner critic and keep going,” the very spirit of NaNoWriMo and other tools to overcome the initial perfectionist fear of starting.

But Walker clarifies, “It is important to differentiate verbal ventilation from dissociative flights of fantasy or obsessive bouts of unproductive worrying.” And here I recognized that first, critical lesson that feeling strongly is not the same thing as a good idea, that a frantic and inspired draft is not the same thing as communicating effectively.

For those terrified of critique altogether, who come away from groups and workshops crestfallen and discouraged from ever writing again, Walker acknowledges that “authentic and vulnerable sharing can be extremely triggering, and can easily flash the survivor back to experiences of being attacked, shamed or abandoned.” There’s a ton of great advice out there about how to give criticism constructively, without attacking the writer, but it may be productive as the one getting the day’s critique to reaffirm reality, and know you can’t get grounded or fired or excommunicated from writing just because you didn’t nail the ending or the extended metaphor this time.

Finally, Walker describes the best case scenario. “Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left brain cognition to intense right brain emotional activation.” Reading this, something clicked for me about how I understood self expression and my writing process. Editing was not in opposition to catharsis; it was necessary to complete the release. Do not view criticism as something you need to suck up and receive like a blow. The cycle of idea, draft, feedback, revision, rewriting, and even publishing was a unified whole; not acts of civilizing self expression, but a process of integrity with that self expression, and more effectively cathartic for it.

-Julian K. Jarboe, 2018 WROB Fellow

Nurturing Inspiration: From First Impulse to First Words

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I recently attended a craft talk given by writer Pam Houston at the Vermont Studio Center. Houston focused on her process and what she calls “glimmers”—moments, images, conversations, or snippets of life that resonate with her as a writer. A keen observer of the world around her, she said these moments call out to her from everyday experiences. She collects these glimmers, jotting them down or saving them as visuals on her computer. What she does not do is try to unpack or over-think their significance. Not yet, anyway. Instead, Houston revisits these glimmers only when it’s time to write. Their significance to her only gets revealed on the page as she writes and organically makes connections. Her Contents May Have Shifted, is a collection of 144 of these glimmer vignettes brought together as a novel, a term she admitted to using loosely given its autobiographical nature and nonstandard narrative structure. It’s precisely how these moments come together and form a whole that offers insight into Houston’s distinct voice and glimmer process.

At the end of her talk, Houston had each of us write down three glimmers—one from the distant past, one from very recently, and one from anytime. It was an illuminating exercise. It then came time for volunteers to share those glimmers. Many were eager to share, offering explanations of a particular glimmer’s significance within the context of their lives. Some even deftly connected their glimmers to those of fellow attendees. It was marvelous. I hesitated. I felt a strong pull to my glimmers, but something was off. My first impulse was to preserve rather than unpack them and risk losing their luster. Feeling somewhat selfish, in that moment, I realized something about my own process. (I didn’t even know I had one.) It wasn’t my time to share these particular glimmers.

Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about how I (and writers in general) find inspiration or moments of connection and what we do with those moments. What comes after the connection, the initial spark, the glimmer? How do we nurture these ideas and protect them so they flourish on the page instead of losing their spark?

A glimmer itself, Houston’s talk resonated with the writers in attendance, myself included. Sometimes it’s a turn of phrase I hear, a striking visual, an entire forgotten story, or a strange reference in a historic text. I jot something down about that moment or idea quickly either in my journal or in an email to myself. I’m far from organized. I could easily create a central library for these ideas, but instead I send hundreds of emails to myself, a sort correspondence with my subconscious. My main intuitive goal—I’ve now realized— is to do a quick free-write of a few lines or even a very rough, kitchen-sink-type draft before I’ve had a time to self-examine, research, or process my experience of resonance. The stronger the pull towards the glimmer, the greater my need to preserve them in this way. Then, like Houston, I leave them to revisit later.

I’m not seeking written perfection from these ideas before I share. I just need a sense that I’ve birthed some unfiltered, uninhibited version of them, before my brain has caught up with me. Feedback, dialoguing with other writers, work-shopping, even my own internal unpacking, are all essential parts of my process. But the timing matters. I need to document that initial moment of resonance first, in however many words feels right.

Of course, my need to protect my initial idea often disappears once I begin the actual writing. I can’t predict where it leads. It’s like a game of telephone, where every time I revisit my initial topic of conversation, the dialogue has changed a little. The same is true for the literal sharing of this idea with others. With each articulation, I’ve added a new flourish or absorbed a bit of my listener’s or reader’s reaction. Sometimes it gets better; sometimes worse. It may evolve or it may fizzle out. With any luck, there’s still an expression of that initial spark and a roadmap for seeing how far it’s come. But that doesn’t need to happen. And that’s okay.

There is no one way to find inspiration, or to write what comes next. To nurture these ideas, writers might do best to follow their animal instincts.

Below are a few writers discussing their own inspiration and what comes after. They are taken from the second volume of The Paris Review’s The Writer’s Chapbook (excerpts from their interviews) that I’ve been reading recently.

“I don’t understand the process of imagination—though I know that I am very much at its mercy. I feel that these ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon. The ideas come to me; I don’t produce them at will. They come to me in the course of a sort of controlled daydream, a directed reverie.”—Joseph Heller

“I think the first impulse comes from some deep emotion. It may be anger, it may be some sort of excitement. I recognize in the real world around me something that triggers such an emotion, and then the emotion seems to cast up pictures in my mind that lead me towards a story.”—John Hersey

“Language is your medium. You can be talking or writing a letter, and out comes an observation, a ‘sentence-sound’ you rather like. It needn’t be your own. And it’s not going to make a poem, or even fit into one. But that twinge it gives you—and it’s this, I daresay, that distinguishes you from ‘the citizen’—reminds you you’ve got to be careful, that you’ve a condition that needs watching.”—James Merrill

“I have little pieces of writing that sit around collecting dust, or whatever they’re collecting. They are drawn to other bits of narrative like iron filings. I hate looking for something to write about.”—Louise Erdrich

“Watching, listening, remembering. A lot of them from my friends or people I meet. Sometimes from a general feeling or belief which is strong enough to make me invent characters and situations to state it.”—Irwin Shaw

-2018 WROB Fellow Gabriella Gage

 

Writers’ Math

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Some writer’s math:

The protagonist of my novel manuscript, Jonas Adams Abraham, is 12 going on 13. The manuscript itself is 12. When I started writing Jonas’s story, I was 26.

Liaa, the 15-year-old protagonist of a manuscript I put to bed in order to focus on a potentially more commercially viable book (see above) can be counted, in effort-years, as 7. I conceived of the novel while I was an undergrad at Emerson College, probably age 19.

A short graphic story featuring a 11-year-old (and later her 15 and 17-year-old selves) is approximately 7 years into endless-tiny-revisions. 3 or 4 years younger than Jonas in terms of sequence, the script represents hours rather than years of effort.

Other writing has similarly aged, as I have aged, moving further and further from our society’s specter of the overnight (and enviably young) author-sensation. As I stretch into my fourth decade of being an animal on this beautiful, awful, bizarre, heart-breaking planet, my gift of experience and dreams for what-might-be enter with me.

Together we are growing up.

[/end math!]

I attended a lecture by Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz where he described himself as a slow writer. In my memory of his self-depreciating story, Junot painted his peers as writing circles around him —his works requiring long years of incubation while theirs stacked like shiny red apples at a city grocer. It was the first time I’d heard a published author describe this phenomenon and the truth hit me with a spine-straightening zap of static electricity. I took notice.

I tried that idea on: slow writer.

Some pondering:

Slow writing. Manuscripts that catch up to and then out-age the characters who roam their pages. Words with enough history to manifest their own internal humor—self-referencing for the benefit of no one in particular (beyond the author.)

What does it mean to be slow now, when fast is culturally mandated? I pose this question while typing on a tiny, high speed iPod keypad, this mini computer that I slip into my pocket as I zip across a major city in our nation of nations —where many cultures move together at different paces, generally not peaceably.

I write this understanding that time is a construct by which my body must abide. But time doesn’t truly exist in my manuscripts. And the manuscripts exist without relation to time. They are or they are not. On my good days, I do not blame my works for being what they are. I can neither stop them nor speed them up. Nothing I do has much impact except for my resolve to arrive again and again, twirling time fluffily onto a white paper cone, or maybe creating an elastic loop as I build on ideas and cultivate the gifts of my characters’ laughter and heartbreak, their triumphs, mistakes, and revelations.

It seems this could go on forever, but it won’t because I cannot. My physical self is limited in a way art will never be. Really, which one of us is slow? Which of us just is?

[/end pondering!]

Pretty words, huh? Existential thoughts even as I, in the more practical sense, park my butt on a chair, or stand leaning over a laptop, and plant a hand on the keyboard, typing in that curious one-handed way I do where the craft spools out —my right hand magically comporting itself through the middle-school-taught positions, keyboard-left and keyboard-right, without having to peek. Slow going. Real slow.

Real and slow.

-Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

On Roxane Gay, Mentorship and Confidence

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“The most important thing any writer can do is take themselves seriously.”        -Roxane Gay

Last week I had the opportunity to attend Boston University’s Power of Narrative Conference. The conference, although focused heavily on journalism, provided workshops focused on powerful storytelling. It was no wonder that the headliner for the conference was Roxane Gay, a writer of comic books, fiction and non-fiction. A writer humble, confident and genuinely funny. She was a joy to experience, to say the least.

The most inspiring part of her talk was the Q&A section where students and younger writers, like myself, took the opportunity to get advice about their own writing journeys. I ended up asking her about mentorship, especially as a black woman. I told her about being accepted into MFA programs with the plan of attending one in the fall, and about my fears about the often white literary infrastructure I am writing in and against. To this, Roxane Gay mentioned how sometimes old white men can be our mentors and to be open to that. She also talked about the possibility that my writing cohort won’t understand the blackness I exhibit in myself and my writing. She noted that with that understanding (for myself), I could learn to negotiate my craft and the stories I am telling with the feedback I might get in the workshop setting.

Roxane Gay also mentioned that as black women we should seek mentorship outside of academia as well. Find writers and ask them politely to mentor us and understand that sometimes the answer could be “no.” But, know that black women writers should mentor other black women and that seeking that out can make the writing journey less exhausting.

Besides Roxane Gay’s advice, I was inspired by her ability to not only call herself a writer but to state that she is a good writer, with confidence. That is something I am hoping to carry in my life as a writer. She talked about how as a black woman writer, she had to write exponentially more than white men to be recognized. In doing that she knows that she has grown as a writer and is indeed good at what she does. This is the idea of “taking yourself seriously as a writer” in practice. It’s projecting the version of the writer you know you are and want to be, publicly, even if you’re not sure about that projection on the inside. Often times that’s what we have to do as black women: exhibit ourselves with the same regal intensity that we know we have within us, when the world often views us much, much less.

-Tatiana M.R. Johnson, 2018 WROB Gish Jen Fellow

The Gap

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I’ll always remember when I sent my first query letters. It was two Winter Olympics ago, Vancouver 2010 – I distracted myself from my inbox by watching Johnny Weir and Evgeni Plushenko, and watched my first rejections roll in a few minutes before alpine skiing.

(I took a shot of vodka for each rejection. I realized a couple of weeks later that 1 shot per rejection was quickly becoming unrealistic.)

It was my third manuscript, but the first one I deigned may be good enough to take that next step. I got five requests for more material out of 79 queries. The first full manuscript rejection was maybe one of the kindest I’ve ever gotten to this day, the first time an industry professional ever called me ‘talented.’ And I remember how excited I was that I’d worked hard enough to trick someone into using the t-word.

Because I was, by this point, painfully aware of the gap that existed between the story in my head and the story I was putting down. I knew I wasn’t naturally talented, but I was going to make it up by wanting this more than anyone else, and hopefully that would be enough.

Eight years later, I sent another round of queries. This was my seventh manuscript. My last agent search had taken three years.

This time, it took three weeks. Responses came fast. Rejections still came faster, but form rejections were few and far-between – they were personal, they were complimentary, and the t-word was used over and over again. It was incredible. It was like all of my most self-indulgent daydreams rolled into a one-month period.

And it was weird as hell. I’d spent so much of my career feeling like I needed to catch up, and suddenly, like a switch had flipped, people were treating me like I was there already. I still kind of felt like I was tricking people. But it occurred to me, an entire eight years after that first rejection, that the people reading it couldn’t tell what was natural talent and what was hard work. On the page, it looks the same.

Progress isn’t always a thing you can track, especially not when you’re so close to it. But sometimes after a particularly good session, when I look at the scene in my head and the scene I just typed, I don’t feel the shortfall quite so keenly. Sometimes it even feels close.

Now, I’m watching a new set of figure skaters and alpine skiers dominate the Olympics. I’m working through an edit letter I’m thrilled about. And I’m catching up to the story in my head, bit by bit. I’m not watching my inbox, not yet. That comes, with any luck, later this spring.
I haven’t completely bridged the gap yet. But now I’m not sure anyone ever does.

That is, however, what revisions are for.

It’s been such a pleasure contributing to this blog over the past year. Congratulations to our new 2018-19 fellows, and happy writing!
-Rebecca Mahoney, 2017 WROB Fellow

You Came Close–What to Do With Your Personal Rejections

advice for writers, Posts by WROB Fellows, , , ,

My writer friends and I have been talking a lot lately about the nature of submissions, and more specifically about personal rejections and how much encouragement we take from them. Where academics expect feedback on the papers they send out for publication and often get the chance to revise their work based on their peers’ recommendations, the creative writer sending out unsolicited work rarely gets either.

I recently went through my “personal rejections” folder and found encouraging messages, and even some helpful revision advice, that I’ve received over the last decade, from which I assembled the following collage. This one goes out to all of the editors out there doing the good/ hard/ important work, and especially to those who (every once in a while) make time to add an encouraging note to an otherwise canned response.

                                     you came so close

and

                      Although

                         I really enjoyed what I read

and

                                         This is excellent work.

and

You have command of your audience.

and

                                                      Your story is a powerful one

                     we have decided against using

your work

            this piece

                                                your recent submission.

Although we’re passing on this group of work

and

                We regret that we are unable to publish it.

I’d like you to keep me posted as your writing career develops.

Though

                we found your work engaging,

we appreciated the theme

we found the work to be strong

              we were interested

                                         We enjoyed your story

We’re going to have to pass

                                   your piece

didn’t fit the narrative voice that has developed for this anthology

and

         does not meet our current needs

and

we couldn’t find a place for it in this issue

and

                                                                     the story may be longer than it need be

Though

we wanted to let you know that we read it with more than the casual amount of interest,

that your work in some way caught our eye.

We admired many aspects of your piece

and

                                     We appreciate the hard work

and

                                    We appreciate the efforts

and

           several of us read it and remarked that we felt that it was deftly written

and

                                  we’re intrigued by the writing,

and

                                 we enjoyed reading your story

Though

                      we’re going to pass on it

Unfortunately

and would like to encourage you to send us more writing soon

and

                   would be glad to see more of it.

While

                                                          in the end we have decided against publishing

you

                                                                  we

regret that.

submit again.

                given the volume of submissions we receive,

even quality work often has to be declined.

Unfortunately

          submit again.

                         I wanted you to know that out of

             649 applications

                              nearly 800 entries,

                                                                more than one thousand entries,

Your writing has surpassed hundreds

         that yours was one of thirty-one manuscripts

was one of the eight finalists.

and

                                                                           it made our final round for this volume.

I hope you will be encouraged

Our readers and judge thought very highly of your work,

and it was not an easy decision

You

             came close.

                                Please submit to us again.

 

-Jonathan Escoffery, 2017 Ivan Gold Fellow