Today I received my first rejection letter. I tried to submit a very self-indulgent short story about my reaction to reading about Ray Bradbury's death to Asimov's Science Fiction thinking that if anyone would understand this kind of loneliness, it would be my people. Out there, there must exist at least a handful of awkward nerds who grew up falling in love with some little old man who saw everything with a sparkling brilliance.
No one can deny that there is a piece of the author in everything they write. Everything a person writes, even a tweet or a post-it note is a piece of them that oral conversation has a way of hiding. Speaking personally, if I'm writing, I'm verbalizing my inner monologue which is something very few people have access to. I can't say for sure that is the same for every writer, but you can feel it in their work. Bradbury, at least in my mind, is such a lovely, naive, innocent man who had the fortunate luck of being alive and writing when space adventure was still unexplored. When he wrote science fiction, he was pioneering. Like the astronauts in his story, he was colonizing a whole genre. He turned something childish into a habitable style of writing for many of his successors. but what does his style say about him? He's an adventurer! he knows it, and he's so damn excited about it!
When I read his works, I sort of became him. I would spend an hour or so of my day reading about Mars or distopian societies of the future and then spent the rest of that day with my head in the clouds. The world was suddenly new to me again. But what does that mean now that he's gone? When I first heard the news that Bradbury had passed, my first reaction was to read The Halloween Tree and cry my bitter tears. How can he still be talking to me, though? If he is gone, his voice should be gone with him, right? Here he is, plain as day in my hands. his voice hasn't muffled at all.
This is why I chose to write. Or, this is why I've chosen to try to write. As of yet it hasn't been my most successful endeavor. I am the type of person that I want to, have to, be immediately good at something or I don't want to do it anymore. I am a perfectionist and an over-achiever and to not be the best is the greatest sign of my own weakness. So why continue writing? I made my attempt and failed. The automaton rejection letter could not have made it any clearer that I didn't do well enough for them. I just can't give up on it. It isn't like learning guitar or trying to knit (both of which i have failed utterly at and tossed aside), this is a passion of mine and I can't accept failure. I need to write in the same way that i need to feel validated. My opinion must matter, even if it is just to myself.
Over time, my writing voice changes. Everyone's does. It is a fact of writing in the same way that your writing voice exists at all. It can cause a problem with bigger projects because your 'style' shall we say, changes from the beginning to the end which can produce an undesired effect on the story itself. But small things are important. Blog posts are important. Think of it as a breadcrumb trail of personal awareness that leads a writer back to who they once were.
So I failed. I knew in the back of my head as soon as I had finished the short story that I would, but I tried anyway. I don't think it was optimism that did it to me. In fact it may have even been a bit of self-loathing mixed with pessimism and masochism. I had to see myself fail at least once at it. What could possibly motivate me more to move forward? I talk and I talk and I talk about this story or that and about how harrrd it is to write and how harrrd it is to pretend to be a writer, but really i'm just a girl with a big imagination who works a shitty retail job. My failure is my own motivation. FOR ONCE.
No comments:
Post a Comment