The first rejection was exciting, she thought to herself. Here it was, written proof that she had sent a part of her soul out there into the world. Granted, it came back in a less than auspicious way. Her query letter returned intact with the words no thanks hand-scrawled in its upper margin. No matter. She had overcome her fear. She had sent something out. She had risked contact with the outside world and her soul was still in one piece! And besides, no one ever struck gold on the first try. This was the way it was for all serious artists, the dues that it was her turn to pay. In a way it was fun. She imagined herself Queen Isabella sending her fleet of ships off into the ocean, towards the end of all known maps to that place where the dragons dwell. Each week she would see them off into the mail slot marked “out of town” at the local Post Office, and a week or two later she would begin to scan the horizon for any sign of their return.
A familiar letter in the mailbox. Her own handwriting, her own name written down, addressed to herself. A quick glance at the return address: some agent in New York. (She thought she’d try the Big Apple first before she worked her way into middle-America and California.) The envelope felt conspicuously light in her hand. A quick tear of the corner uncovered a single slip of paper the size of a business card. Yet this was not thick-bond watermark but flimsy photo-copy paper, the cheapest available. And as an example of brevity it was exemplary: Dear Author: We regret this does not meet our present needs. Not a single word too many. Then again, perhaps they could have omitted the word “present”, but when she thought about it she realized this was their disclaimer (in case she became famous through another agent). “Yes, we remember your book. It didn’t meet our needs at the time, since we were so busy. We congratulate you on its success.” And it also implied that perhaps she could send something else to them at a later date that would meet their present needs. Talk about to a coy mistress!
She began to cherish the personal reply and started arranging her rejections in a kind of hierarchy accordingly. The no thanks scrawled at the top of the margin while impersonal and rude (since it didn’t even have an opening salutation) was nonetheless hand-written, implying a real live human being; that for at least as long as it took to scrawl no thanks in the upper margin an actual person sat behind her letter before the SASE was sealed up and sent back. The pre-printed form letter was a notch above the pre-printed business card. Dear Author was better than Dear Writer (although she would be the first to admit that this distinction was purely subjective. “Author” sounded more seasoned and professional to her, whereas “Writer” smacked of the novice and dilettante). The rejections that said “the agency was not taking on any new clients at this time” were counted as “non-rejection” rejections. After all, they’re not taking on any new clients! She can’t do anything about that, right? So these would be thrown into the wastebasket with equanimity, not the usual gnawing bitterness. And bitter it could be. After all, on their way out did not these letters hold the promise of the new world, much like that image of Queen Isabella and her ships, but they returned as 3x5 envelopes, sometimes with her 8 1/2 x 11 application for visa shrunk down to a flimsy scrap of paper—a kind of sign saying NO TRESPASSING! KEEP OUT! ACCESS DENIED!
And then, the rare day when a personal rejection appeared! An actual letter (typed by some secretary no doubt) but nevertheless addressed to her! Her name! Not the Dear Writer rejections received by the masses, but Dear Anne! A red-letter, banner day! We have read your query with interest, yet we are taking on so few new clients at this time that we must decline your kind offer of the manuscript of your new novel. Please keep us in mind in the future. Best regards… This calls for a celebration! Dinner! Drinks! They read her letter with interest, she muses, yet they had to decline because they take on so few new clients. Yes, this is understandable. So she was a part of the elite, the upper echelon of rejectees who just barely missed the brass ring (so she tells herself). A rejection like this will sustain her through a week’s worth of flimsy form letter business cards. Bring ‘em on! she says, buoyed with a revitalized confidence bordering on a swagger. It’s just a matter of time now. She can feel it.
At first she thought she would throw a party when she received her 100th rejection, but it appeared in the mailbox along with numbers 101 through 106, and by the time she finished opening the envelopes she was less than enthusiastic. She had had her small victories. Between rejections 25 and 30 she received a personal letter requesting the first 50 pages of the manuscript. At the time this was the news of all news. And then a week later a letter that wanted the entire thing! Surely the world was turning in her favor. But a month later and 15 more rejections she opened the mailbox to the singular most dreaded sight—the returned manuscript in the big padded envelope she had enclosed. At first she was hopeful. “Perhaps they want me to make a few changes and then send it back,” she thought. But not a chance. When it’s in the mailbox it’s a great big door slammed shut. And this isn’t your query letter being rejected, it’s the manuscript itself. Your hopes and dreams pinned on every page sent back shattered in this big padded self-addressed stamped envelope. After awhile these requests for the manuscript became bittersweet. For a moment they were a victory, but she began to see ahead a month or two when this same SASE would reappear in the mailbox. It became like a game of chess. She would take her opponent’s bishop at the outset, but in the endgame her king would fall, and each time she would hang her head a little lower, be a little more disappointed, unsure of herself, doubtful for the future, for herself, for her vocation, for writing in general and for her writing in particular. After all, there’re so many of them and there’s only one of her. They can’t all be wrong. Surely the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. And she smiled to herself, quoting Shakespeare in the face of doom like a kind of “damn the torpedoes” heroic last words. And gradually, like land at the edge of the sea, she was eroded, for the rejection letters were no longer returning ships but the ocean itself. She’d have to retreat inland where it was safe. Maybe she just expected too much. This was art, true enough, but it was also a business, subject to the vicissitudes that were still largely unknown to her.
By the time she received rejection number 200 she had found an agent, had this agent say to her in a gushing personal email “what an incredible writer you are! You have the soul of a poet, and I’m sure that one of the major houses will appreciate this. I look forward to being the one to launch this fine book, first class all the way!” And for a week or two she danced on her life that had become the airy nothingness of dreams nearly realized. But then the rejections started coming back. After the first class publishers had turned it down it was sent off to the second division (with decidedly less fanfare). And in the meantime the emails from the agent became less gushing, more formal, until they were reduced to two words: “Another rejection.” By the time the second round of rejections was complete, she who had once been the “incredible writer-poet” was now the persona non grata, her once-enthusiastic agent no longer returning her emails; this same agent who cooed that “I would love to represent you in this and everything you’ll ever write” after two months of rejections gave her the pink slip. But she accompanied it with some soothing words: “Most clients”, she said, “I let go after ten rejections (these same clients she most likely promised to represent in ‘everything they would ever write’) but I kept you for over twenty.” So now she had come full circle. The only thing left to do was go back to the drawing board. Meanwhile she looked at her friends, the people she knew back in college. None of them were doing what they said they wanted to do, but all of them had good jobs and were making good money, with their own houses and cars and families. Anne still paid rent for a one bedroom next to the city motor pool. At all hours of the day and night she would hear the “beep-beep-beeping” of vehicles backing up, seemingly for an hour at a time. And her own car was the Toyota she’d picked up for 500 bucks, still going strong despite more rust than paint; her job, working at a bookstore, a clerk on just above minimum wage (with help from her parents, even though they secretly hoped she’d eventually come to her senses and get a real job, or else marry some nice rich guy who would let her stay home and write her books in between changing diapers). But so far, a now-and-then boyfriend with no kids or marriage on the horizon. After all, she was a writer. She had known this all her life. This was what she dreamed of being and now that’s what she was, only it wasn’t exactly as she had imagined.
The disappointment was the worst part. And the self-doubt. And each seemed to grow with each new rejection, each new returned manuscript that she took as a personal defeat, an emblem of the failure that was her life, and a verdict in plain and not uncertain terms that this so-called vocation, this “calling” of hers, may be nothing but a pipe dream. Perhaps it was time she grew up and became an adult like everyone else, and stopped living this childish game of make-believe.
By the time she got her 300th rejection she had gotten another agent (which was still cause for celebration, even though he was in Iowa, but beggars can’t be choosers) and this agent had sold her novel, albeit to a small and emerging publisher for a pittance of an advance. However they assured her, both the agent and the publisher, that she was in on the ground floor of something big. All she had to do was wait. And in the meantime they would treat her with tender loving care, unlike the large impersonal houses whose only concern was money. But after the book came out it quickly vanished from sight—this small house with no money for promotion and barely enough contacts for proper distribution. The good news was that anyone in the world could order her book and receive it. The bad news was that how would they find out about it in the first place?
A year later it was virtually forgotten. Except by her friends and family. “How’s the book doing?” they’d ask. “Is it selling?” The deep breath let out as a long sigh. The book became like this beautiful baby that six months later developed some horrible disfiguring disease like leprosy or elephantiasis, and now she barely wanted to look at it. But then at other times she wanted to take it to her breast and love it, give it all the love it deserved from the rest of the world but never got. And meanwhile she kept writing. After all, the book being published gave her a reprieve, that she would provisionally be granted the status of “author” for a little while longer as her friends and relations adopted a “wait and see” attitude. “How’s the book doing?” they’d ask again. “Is it selling?”
She began to view disappointment as the over-riding theme of her life. A slow gnawing despondency that moved like a glacier, so slowly as to be almost imperceptible, but yet she knew in the back of her mind that one day it would overtake her, overwhelm her and bury her alive. And this became her redefinition of failure, a kind of quiet fading of one person’s dream until it was either worn away like that last bit of land before the ocean, or was voluntarily relinquished when someone had simply had enough and could endure it no longer. But this was her curse. She would never give up. She knew this. And the more rejections she received the more her family raised its eyebrows the more she would write, the more query letters she’d send out, the more short stories she’d submit to those important-sounding magazines that nobody ever saw or read. After all, she had her will and her will was strong. At least strong enough to never go out with a whimper (for she had pictured herself going out with a bang more than once when the disappointment became too unbearable). That she was somehow a failure at the same time as others (arguably no more or less talented than she) were great successes. The feeling of being passed over, and this was what galled, the arbitrariness of it; that not by merit alone did one rise to the position of prince, to live in this lordly house upon whose door she had knocked so relentlessly for so many years. And what do you do when you approach this crossroads? Do you cut off your ear and go mad? Do you sell out and write that romance novel to finally get that foot in the door and pay off those debts? The true artists she decided were the ones who faced this dilemma and chose to press on.
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