Letting the Chips Fall

Photo courtesy of Ben Dodson.

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, in that far-off, dim era we now call 1987, all I knew was that I wanted to write. I didn’t think much about what writing would entail, or what good writing consisted of, or what I wanted to accomplish with my writing. I just wanted to write.

Well, I also wanted to “be a writer.” I knew even less about being a writer than I did about the writing itself. But being a writer constituted a separate—and perhaps even more important—goal.

So I came up with an idea for a story. I thought it was a great idea: interesting, exciting, rich with potential. A writer friend of mine asked me to tell him my idea, so I did, and in the silence afterward I realized that he had formed an opinion of it. I was scared to hear that opinion, but I summoned my courage and asked him what he thought.

He said, “Well, I like it, but it’s been done before. I think you need to come up with something more original.”

Bam! For the very first time, I ran smack into the wall of artistic judgment. You have your ideas, and you’re enamored of them; but are they any good?

I spent the next twenty years consumed with that question. I was trying to perform a sort of balancing act or compromise: I wanted to write about what I wanted to write about, in the way I wanted to write about it; but I also wanted it to be good. I felt like I was trying to be a matchmaker between two wonderful people who just couldn’t seem to get along.

As time went on, that uneasy marriage became a vexed ménage à trois: I wanted to write what I wanted to write and it had to be good and it had to be publishable. I was trying to get my work in print, which meant that I had to get some editor to agree to let his or her publication serve as a venue for my work. And let me tell you, in the Venn diagram of my writing career, those three circles (pleasing myself, being good, getting published) have overlapped very few times relative to all the writing I’ve done. Very few times.

But now I’m coming around to a different view of it all. This view can be summed up in a couple of quotations, the first of which comes from writer George Saunders:

I think the only defensible position is to sort of say to hell with making a living and put all your energy into making something new, that seems beautiful to you—that is, to try your best to push your work into a new/iconic place and let the chips fall where they may.

In other words, you have to quit worrying about whether the work is publishable and just try to push it to a deeper, more beautiful, newer place. Try to do work that has something iconic about it, which to me also calls to mind the mysterious and the mythic. That may sound like a recipe for never getting your work published, and maybe that’s exactly what it is. Maybe that is indeed exactly what it is. But I find that I’m okay with that. I mean, yes, I would still like for my work to be published, but nowadays it’s much more important to me for my work to inhabit that “new/iconic” place. That is, I want the work itself—the act of producing it, as well as the finished product—to have certain attributes that may or may not have anything to do with whether it ever sees the light of day.

The other quotation comes from poet Carolyn Forche:

Quit worrying about whether or not it’s good and worry about whether or not it’s true.

If I had to explicate what Forche means here, I would say she means that the writing should be true in the same sense that anything else is true: it’s true if it corresponds to something about the world that’s true. That’s all—but it’s deep. She’s talking about writing that is fundamentally interpenetrated with reality itself. Writing that is true in this way has a zing and a freshness you don’t find in writing that is self-consciously obsessed with whether it’s good, or whether it’s literary, or whether it’s observing the proper genre tropes, or whether it’s salable. It’s just trying to be true. When it succeeds, you know it, you feel it, you taste it.

So where does this leave me? I’m just trying to get to the new place, the iconic place, the true place. Letting the chips fall where they may. This doesn’t mean I’ll never submit my writing for publication or try to sell a screenplay, but those aims have now become secondary (at best) instead of primary.

If you’re a creative person, you’ve likely struggled with this yourself. Why am I doing what I’m doing? What is the point? What is the purpose? Or, as I’ve phrased it before: What is the basis of your work? The answers continue to change.

Travel Dispatch: Rejection at the Heart of the Labyrinth

After Angela and I left Vesuvio in San Francisco’s North Beach, we looked for a restaurant in Chinatown that (a) was veggie-friendly, and (b) looked navigable by the non-Chinese, and (c) looked like it wouldn’t suck. We passed very few restaurants, and none met our criteria until we found a sushi place—yes, a Japanese restaurant—on the edge of Chinatown. It looked like it would suck in the boring, Americanized way, instead of in the hyper-salty, mega-oily way, but we had to meet our friend Alison soon, so we chose the lesser of the evils and ducked inside.

One slight bonus was the free WiFi, so I checked my e-mail and found this delightful message:

Dear Sentence Supporter:

Thanks for allowing us to consider your work. As usual, we have received an overwhelming amount of excellent work recently.

I’m sorry to say that we have decided not to use the work that you sent us. . . .

Again, thank you for sending your work.

Despite my avowals to no longer complain about rejection, to no longer be attached to the outcome, to no longer be invested in a certain image of myself as a writer, that hurt. Perhaps it hurt even more because we had just come from City Lights Books and Vesuvio. I tried to shrug it off and let it go and just be, but for me right then, to “just be” meant to dully ache.

We met up with Alison and saw some very good art in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but with almost every piece I looked at, I thought: Not good enough. Meaning me. These artists had somehow managed to create artworks of significant value. I had tried to do the same, and failed. I was a spectator, a perennial apprentice, a wannabe. Not good enough. All my carefully constructed affirmations about attachment and intentionality were useless. Worse than useless: they were devices employed by those who weren’t good enough. The true artists, the ones whose works hung on the walls before me, had no need of such elaborate justifications for failure.

My favorite piece at San Francisco MOMA: The Oracle and the Green Bird, by Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam

We left the museum and went to Grace Cathedral, an Episcopal church known for its gorgeous Gothic architecture and its extensive service ministries among people with HIV and AIDS. One of the church’s salient features is its labyrinth, which is based on the labyrinth at the cathedral at Chartres in France. All who enter the church are welcome to walk the labyrinth, and when we entered, the hushed, reverent atmosphere encouraged us to do just that.

We took off our shoes and began padding silently along the twists and turns of the elaborate diagram. Alison went first, and then Angela; I went last because I wanted to go slow and take my time. As I walked, I did not feel that I had entered some sort of mystical state. I was distracted by people entering and leaving the sanctuary; by a harried-looking guy who was quickly striding along the labyrinth and sighing as he walked; by my own unruly thoughts and feelings. But as I neared the center, one thought did emerge into prominence: when I got to the center, I would pause, and there would be something for me to deal with. Perhaps I would achieve a realization, or perhaps I would just come to a new understanding of something I already knew. When I got there, I would wait and see.

The labyrinth at Grace Cathedral.

The labyrinth sprinter got to the finish line and hurried out. Alison got to the center and began winding her way back outward, exiting the way she had entered. Angela got to the middle and left. And then it was my turn.

I stood in the center and waited for about a second before I realized that I had placed far more importance on that Sentence submission than I had realized. I had done a good job of forgetting about the poems after I had submitted them; but once the rejection came, all the old attachment and anxiety came roaring back, strong as ever. And it wasn’t even about the poems themselves; it was about me as a writer. It was about me wanting to believe that I could still be some sort of literary writer. If I couldn’t be a short-story writer or an essayist, then maybe I could still be a poet. I’d already had a poem published; I should be able to do it again, right?

But so far, no. I haven’t been able to do it again. And as I go deeper into this screenplay and the strange places it’s taking me, and deeper into my freelance editing and writing, I find that I’m being invited—forcibly invited—to relinquish my image of myself as a literary writer. The day before I got the rejection from Sentence, I got an e-mail from a potential new freelance copyediting client to whom I had sent my résumé. She was writing back to say they liked my résumé very much and wanted to send me an editing test. This is the equivalent of getting an interview in the job world, except that it almost always leads to getting the gig. [And while I was writing this blog post, I got an e-mail from a likely new freelance writing client who wants me to write some copy for his Web site.]

The universe is speaking pretty clearly. It’s telling me that certain endeavors are succeeding, and others are not. It’s telling me to quit being attached to an idea of myself as a literary writer, or perhaps as any kind of writer. It’s telling me just to write. And I am.

But, apparently, I still have attachments to let go of. And sometimes it hurts to do that.

I padded out of the labyrinth on sock feet and put on my shoes, which felt good after the smooth, cold concrete floor.

The Editor Rejects Your Story; You Take Fourteen Points of Damage

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I first ran across this quote a long time ago, and I’ve always thought it was a good one; but today it became sharply poignant to me in a brand-new way.

I was innocently eating an apple and cruising through my blogroll when I saw this notice in Luna Digest, a weekly review of literary journals that appears on Fictionaut:

“The Dungeon Master has detention.” New RPG fiction from Sam Lipsyte in the latest New Yorker. Yep: New Yorker fiction with Dungeons & Dragons as the subject.

I stopped chewing and swallowed so I could focus on the complicated swirl of emotions boiling through me. I had once written a Dungeons and Dragons story. It was the first serious full-length story I’d written after a several-year period when I didn’t write a single word. For a while there, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a writer, so I just set the whole thing down and walked away from it and focused on other things in life.

Then I decided I wanted to finish my bachelor’s degree, so I went to community college and took a literature course where we read For Whom the Bell Tolls, and that, my friends, that book blew my mind. That was the book that grabbed me by the lapels and shook me until my teeth clicked and woke me the hell up. That was the book that made me want to be a writer again.

So I transferred to a four-year school and started taking creative writing classes, and in one of those classes the teacher had us do an exercise where we wrote a close physical description of doing something that we knew well how to do. I wrote two descriptions: what it was like to work as a restaurant line cook in the middle of a serious slam, and what it was like to play Dungeons and Dragons. The idea was to use one of these descriptions as a grain of sand around which the pearl of a narrative could accrete. Something about the D&D scenario lodged in my brain, and that little exercise became the basis of a story titled “Dungeon.” (The line-cook scenario eventually fostered its own story, too, called “The White Horse.”)

“Dungeon” was not an unqualified success, but it marked a major turning point in my development as a writer. It was my most serious attempt yet to plumb the “mystery of human personality,” as Flannery O’Connor said all fiction should do. It drew on autobiographical material that was difficult to write about, teaching me just how painful it can be to excavate the very substance of your life and put it on the page, reshaped. It was another chapter in my long and ongoing love/hate relationship with the fantasy/sci-fi/horror genres. And, most important, it was the first time I had ever felt really vulnerable in showing a story to others, not least because it dealt fairly extensively with D&D—that acme of the pyramid of nerdhood.

I submitted the story as my fiction sample to get into MFA programs, and I did successfully get into one, and a professor in the program praised the story in very strong terms. Thus emboldened, I submitted “Dungeon” to a number of literary journals and magazines, all of whom rejected it. One of those magazines was The New Yorker.

That’s why I thought of Emerson’s quote when I read the notice in Fictionaut about the new story. Emerson was talking about when you reject your own thoughts, not when others reject them; but I think the quote still applies.

So, angst, memories, hoopla, strange emotions, etc.: how’s the story? The one that got published? It’s titled “The Dungeon Master,” by Sam Lipsyte, and it’s damn good, of course, like nearly all fiction in The New Yorker. It’s better than my story, that’s for sure. There are a number of interesting similarities between the two stories, and some interesting differences; overall, it’s just better, and well worth a read. I recommend it.

The Agony of Yet Another Defeat

Regular readers of Nine Long Nights can already guess what the title above portends. I recently submitted a group of three poems to four literary journals. A couple of weeks ago, one of the journals sent me a polite, if brief, automatically generated rejection e-mail. The whole experience was so impersonal, so dadgum computerized, that the rejection actually stung less. Bless your little ones and zeroes, I know you didn’t want to reject my poems!

The same dynamic was at play when I got my next rejection, last week, from the second of the four literary journals. Read it and weep:

Thank you for giving us the chance to consider your poetry for publication in The Missouri Review. Though it does not fit our current needs, we appreciate your interest in our magazine and your commitment to quality writing.

So far, so good. I like this rejection a little better than the one from A Public Space because it acknowledges my “commitment to quality writing.” This statement really does apply to me, which makes it easier for me to forget that the whole thing is a form letter.

But then came the part that brought the sting back home again:

We especially liked “Sixty-Six Pets” [that’s the title of one of the three poems I sent them]. We wish you the best of luck publishing your work and hope you’ll consider sending us more in the future.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Ah, yes, the encouraging rejection: the personalized note lauding your work and asking for more, even though they didn’t care for this last batch. Makes me think back to the days when I first started submitting my work to journals and magazines. Sure, they rejected me, but did they really care? It was hard to tell; a fifteenth-generation photocopy addressed to “Dear Author” can only reveal so much. Since then I’ve worked long and hard to get my work rejected by name. And now they want more of my work to reject by name! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

In case you couldn’t tell, I have a hard time feeling encouraged by this encouraging rejection. It’s encouraging in a purely factual, cognitive sense, but not in the emotional sense that usually accompanies our use of the word “encouragement.” Perhaps I should remind myself that I’ve written a lot less poetry than fiction (the genre most of my rejections have been in), so maybe I’m ahead of the game in getting an encouraging rejection so early in my poetry-submitting career. That won’t matter if I never get beyond the rejection stage; but it’s probably a good place to start.