moving on from rejection
thanks to the good earth
There’s a story from the very good book Art & Fear, which I think about all the time:
A pottery teacher divides his class into two groups. The first group will be graded on quality. In order to get an A, they have to make a perfect pot—technically ideal, aesthetically perfect, demonstrating their individual sensibility and vision. A single perfect pot will do.
The second group will be graded on quantity. If they finish 50 pounds of pots, they get an A. For a B, 40 pounds. A C, 30 pounds. And so on. There will be absolutely no criterion related to the quality or aesthetic merits of their pots. Once their efforts are weighed, the grading is over.
The great irony, of course, is that the best work of the semester comes from the second group, not the first.
The students being graded on perfection spent their time waffling and debating, trying to figure out what would make a perfect pot before they even began to approach the doing of it. They research. They mull. They don’t make a lot of work in the end, and what they did make has an overworked, anxious quality.
Meanwhile, the students being graded on sheer quantity had no choice but to experiment. If your goal is to produce so much work, you won’t discard an imperfect bowl or wire off the clay and dry it out to try again, hoping to make a perfect vessel out of it. You’ll move it along—even if it breaks in the bisque kiln, you can use it to test a glaze combination. Maybe you experiment with cutting divots into it while it’s still wet. Maybe you get really good at trimming because you’re rescuing so many wonky things. You learn a lot working on imperfect pieces because it’s so much harder, and it demands a greater degree of attention and precision to pull them into shape.
Also: If your goal is to produce as much work as possible, your hopes don’t hang on any individual piece. You’ll be glad if they turn out well, and unbothered if they don’t. If a few things break, so what? You’re being graded on weight, and a broken bowl weighs the same as a perfect one.
So the students in the second group end up developing much keener skills, experimenting fearlessly. And everything they make has a sense of ease and stability. Nothing grasping about it. Nothing too special. (Just special in the ordinary way a nice, colorful, lustrous object is special, which is plenty.)
I’ve been thinking about this especially lately because my second novel has been on submission for the last few months. After a few close-ish calls, there’s no buyer.
For a few weeks, this was excruciatingly painful to me. I put everything I had in that book. I had given it so much of myself. I started it in 2018, and almost immediately I had made up a story in my head: This book was going to be raw. It was going to be the real me. It was going to have the unacceptable parts of me in it. When Marilou Is Everywhere came out, I got to see for the first time that even if you write a book that is incredibly weird, people will sometimes just miss those parts, as if they were written in fainter ink than the rest. Whenever my prose was described as poetic, even in a praising way, I felt a rush of tremendous rage. That energy was the beginning of Kerosene. I listened to the Big Black song “Kerosene” on repeat, for hours and hours, while writing the first draft.
I also had invested in the idea that some writers can get away with being dark, not making sense. And that the writers who can get away with not making sense are the ones who are cool. So, if I was cool enough, interesting enough, or whatever, the book would succeed. And if it didn’t, the conclusions were pretty obvious.
When my first book went on submission, six editors expressed interest the very next day. This time, weeks went by with no news. Then months. An occasional encouraging rejection. There are a few pending responses, but we’ve officially done the post-mortem on round one. I’ve read the rejections. 18 of them, I think.
This is a totally normal part of being a writer. There is an opportunity for rejection at every stage of everything. If you think about it too much, you won’t write anything at all. I mentioned last time that writers need skills of disposition in the same way they need skills of craft. Reading a long list of rejections is the kind of event that calls upon those skills.
It should be pretty obvious which paradigm I had invested in here—the novel was my attempt at a single, perfect pot which would get me an A. I didn’t have many other creative projects during that time, although I did (thank god) start really writing poems again in 2020. The novel was everything to me, and I had to get it right. It was a horribly stressful way to work. If I were the protagonist of my own story in a fiction workshop, I don’t think anyone would complain that the stakes were lacking.
As I’ve said here many times—ah, wouldn’t it be great to be the sort of spiritual person who writes because they love writing and not because they want to win some amorphous form of self-love and money and confetti and tiaras, like the cover of Live Through This if nobody was crying? I have always mentally understood the advantages of such an attitude. I just haven’t been able to feel it.
I believe people can change for lots of reasons other than pain. There was always this weirdly prideful attitude in AA that went something like “everything I let go had claw marks on it” or “I’m a pain-based learner.” Like you could only change because you exhausted yourself with your own shittiness. Move away from a bad thing instead of moving toward a good thing. I don’t agree with that anymore, if I ever did.
But I do think that some ideas hurt, and you can only put them down when they hurt too much to go on thinking that way.
“Anyone in here who’s never touched clay?” the instructor asked. I raised my hand, along with maybe three others. Everyone else in Wheel Throwing I had already taken Wheel Throwing I. I was already intimidated enough before I found out that one girl was taking the beginner class for the third time.
It’s crazy how scary it can feel in the body to do something new that you’re not good at. How much of adulthood is just like … not having to do things for the first time anymore? My heart was beating like crazy every time I went to practice in the beautiful high-ceilinged studio alongside the truly incredible artisans who have studio memberships. But I went with discipline and regularity because that is one of my personal talents of disposition: If something needs to get done every day no matter what, I’m your huckleberry. If a musical phrase is hard to play, you just slow it down as much as possible. And then you play it again, again, again, again. The sticky rhythms dissolve. The brain connects all the notes. The arm learns how to just put them where they need to be put. That’s all. Eventually you can play “Donna Lee” for your jury, even though some jagoff was telling you trombone players can’t really play Charlie Parker. (That’s you told, bruv.)
Because there were so many things to try to remember (cone up like this, press down like this, do this when the clay feels too rough, use this much water, but not that much, measure the depth with a needle now, open the center like this, pull this finger like that, fast wheel, slow hands, compress the rim, etc!) I found it sometimes impossible to say why I could suddenly center the clay. What had I done differently? No clue. Out of nowhere, I would have incredibly serene and capable turns at the wheel. Then, the next day, I would go in and ruin everything I touched. No clue. Of course you can watch YouTube videos for hints, but thinking doesn’t actually help the process.
The first time I actually managed to center the clay and make a symmetrical pot, I was amazed. I had stopped looking at the edges and just paid attention to the still center. I could feel where the center was because it was quiet.
“That’s the thing,” my teacher said. “I see it all the time. Strong people get pushed around by the clay all the time. But it’s always the meditators and yoga teachers who can go right in and find the center.”
(How many sagacious things did my teacher say during class which applied perfectly to writing, aye, and life? Many thousands. Maybe I’ll go over the rest someday. I definitely talked about them in therapy.)
Something funny seems to happen overnight: The bowls (they’re supposed to be cylinders, but for now, they are bowls) improve when I’m not looking at them. When I go in for my next class and set up to trim the things I made the last time, I find a bunch of surprisingly tidy, nice-looking little vessels. And once they’re glazed, some rogue form of magic takes place. Kind of like when you put your poem in Garamond and it suddenly has a gravitas and wit which it lacked in Times New Roman (or, if you’re clinically depressed, Calibri).
I made it my goal to get through my entire 25-pound bag of clay during the class, and I did it. We have a few weeks left to finish glazing everything. I don’t even remember how many pieces I put in for bisque firing. 13 more, I think? Enough that when I can’t sleep, I entertain myself by thinking about glaze experiments I can try. Enough that if one of them comes out broken or gets dropped in the driveway, I won’t be too sad. Enough that I might be mailing you a tiny pot soon. (Seriously!) Enough that every so often, I pick one up and realize that it’s actually pretty good, and I don’t even remember making it.
It’s made me realize that if I’m going to keep writing, I need to change up my expectations. I need to find a way to write that doesn’t allow for so much mulling and self-analysis. I need to make 50 pounds of pots and fuck some of them up, learn on them, and feel not too precious about any. (Funny enough, I realize this is the way that I write poems already, and it’s always been a pretty happy discipline for me.)
For the last few weeks, I’ve been on a red-hot tear with this quantity-over-quality concept. I write at least 2,000 words a day. (I took some days off when we had friends and family visiting, and to compile a poetry manuscript for a contest deadline, but otherwise, it’s 2k every day.) I’m adapting a short story from a few years ago which always felt like it had room to expand. I’m finding that the only activity I have to cut loose if I’m going to make my word count is WORRYING lol about whether it’s worth writing the book/maybe it’s dumb/what would editor X think about it/what if it’s too sentimental. I just have to find a little pocket of excitement and write. And it’s been reminding me how much fun it is, to be the first person who gets to read a book.
This round of rejections is certainly not the end for Kerosene. I still love it. It has a vision that I stand behind and I’m still proud of it. But I do think it might have some of that anxious, I-tried-to-make-this-perfect-so-you-better-like-it-or-else energy. Which I trust will brush off in time. I would rather write something that needs to make room for itself in the world, and I did that. Hearing “no” hurts. But the book is just as valuable as it will be when someone says “yes.” Rejection is just one frame in a three-panel comic. It doesn’t have to mean anything else.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the company. <3
There are a lot of new subscribers all of a sudden—hi! welcome! I hope you stay awhile. It took me longer to write this than I had planned because it’s sort of weird in writer world to admit to failings and rejection, it being such a perception-based business. But, idk. I’m sure I’m not alone. Anyway, some fun stuff has been piling up in the drafts while I’ve been taking my time with this missive, so you might hear more from me sooner than later.
So good- thank you for sharing.
❤️ "the book is just as valuable as it will be when someone says “yes"." exactly!