Whatever walk of faith you might be on
(if any)
Whatever wish you have for this season
(if any)
No matter where you go
Or who you are with
I pray for you to be happy
I pray for you to be at peace
I pray for you to know great love
And I pray for you to give love in return.
Merry Christmas.
Maybe you got a letter. It could be something you received electronically. One way or another, a submission or entry upon which you’ve spent time and energy has been rejected. Now, I’m not talking about receiving constructive criticism. That’s always a good thing to get. Iron sharpening iron and all that. What I’m on about is the cold shoulder, either in the form of a bland photocopy of a generic letter or a complete and total lack of recognition for your efforts. It’s like fancying yourself a comedian, telling a joke and waiting for the laughs which never come. It breaks the heart and erodes the soul.
If you’re anything like me… well, you might need a shave. But in terms of this sort of thing, after a few rejection letters or seeing a publication for which you wished to contribute which doesn’t include what you sent, you probably went back over your submission with a fine-toothed comb. What did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? The questions inevitably leave to negative emotions. Maybe you’ll feel put out by the rejection, thinking your work isn’t good enough. There could be some frustration at the difference that ended up existing between what you envision and what you submitted. And maybe getting rejected for whichever time you’ve just been brushed off just pisses you off.
Good.
Not to re-tread old ground, but I’ve said over and over that negative emotions do not need to lead to negative outcomes. There a lot of things you can do with your feelings. One thing you should not do, however, is sit on your ass. There’s work to be done.
Pop the hood on your work. Strip out parts that rattle or shake. In other words, take a look at your creation and figure out the parts that work. Maybe you have a character or two that really connect with readers, or you’ve gotten some feedback telling you that a particular passage really hammers home the good things about your writing. Maybe there’s that one shot in your portfolio that really jumps off the page.
What about it works? Why does it connect while the rest of the work falls away? Step back and examine the situation, the environment and the construction of the parts that work. Once you recognize what makes those portions successful, strip out everything else and rebuild the work around that core of goodness. This might mean you only need to make a couple small changes, or it might mean you need to all but start from scratch. Don’t fret, though: declaring a do-over could very well be a step in the right direction.
One thing you don’t want to do is rush. There’s no need. Take a deep breath. Make some cocoa. Instead of tearing down what you’ve done and smashing it around with a wrecking ball, lay it out and take a scalpel to it. In the course of doing so, you’ll find things that you’re proud of in spite of the rejection and you’ll also likely find something that makes you smile and shake your head in that “What the hell was I thinking?” sort of way.
It might also be the case that you can’t bear to look at the project that’s been so callously rejected. That’s understandable. But you still have a bunch of bad feelings that need to get vented. You have the old stand-by responses of games, movies, booze and cocoa but the best thing to do, in my opinion and experience, is to do something in the same creative vein to get you thinking about what your next step will be. It could be back to what caused you to feel this way or it could be in a new direction entirely. You won’t know, however, until you take that step.
Whatever you do, no matter how many things you find wrong with your work, no matter how much cocoa you drink, no matter how many rejections you’ll have to deal with in the future, don’t give up. You’re trying to do something new and different. Creative people are inevitably going to face a great deal of opposition because the environment out in the world is one where creativity is seen as a secondary concern to efficiency or profitability, if creativity is acknowledged at all. You want to be fast in your process, efficient in your use of energy, but it can be difficult to bang out work promptly if you’re wrestling with bad feelings or unsure of where to go next. Don’t worry about that. Worry about getting from bad to good first. Then worry about getting things out quickly.
Don’t quit. Especially if your ideas and the need to express them get you out of bed in the morning and motivate you to expend your time and energy of turning them into reality. Screw the rejection and the idea that your creativity doesn’t matter because it doesn’t help you file TPS reports more efficiently.
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Harold Whitman
Drinking your cocoa from a mug of Shakespearean insults doesn’t hurt, either.
My career path has been, to say the least, an odd one. I knew that published fiction was a tough field to enter, and that attempting to make a living from it directly out of university would be difficult, if not impossible. That knowledge, coupled with a challenge issued by a flatmate, pushed me in the direction of honing my nascent skills with computers into usable and marketable skills.
Things didn’t go so well in that regard. I worked for a few years in customer service, specifically tech support for a company in the wilds of Pittsburgh. I managed to squeeze in some freelance web work here and there, but never really found the time to truly develop my programming skills. A renewed search for the expansion of my knowledge and marketability lead me to a course in King of Prussia for Microsoft certifications.
It turns out the network administration environment and I don’t get along. There’s a great deal of stress and immediacy, no margin for error and no room for creativity. I struggled with the job daily until I lost it. Finally, after months of searching, I found my first true programming job. I’ve moved from there to another position and it’s come time to define what I want out of this particular branch of my working life. The more I work with PHP, the more I develop object-oriented solutions in Flash, the more I realize I need to be specific about my idea of a good career if I want to be happy to hop in a car or on a train to head to the office.
Don’t get me wrong. I consider myself a writer first and foremost. It’s the creation of new worlds, putting interesting characters into those worlds and setting events in motion that affect those characters that gets me up in the morning and makes me feel alive. Programming, however, is something of an extension of that. To that end, here’s something I’d like to call a ‘programmatic mission statement.’
The creative mind is like a thoroughbred horse – it requires a firm but flexible grip, one that does not allow the beast to run wild, but also one that permits some leeway, lest the creature rail against its control and fight to be free. Just the right balance of control and detachment puts new ideas on the path to greatness. You know what you want, but permitting your trajectory to follow its own course allows for growth, stays agile in the face of inevitable setbacks and lends a sense of adventure to the overall process.
They’ve called it “the information superhighway.” If you want to travel on it, you’ll need a good vehicle. ‘Good’ is a subjective term – maybe you want something you don’t have to worry about, or perhaps you’re looking for a high-precision machine stuffed with power and bursting with cool gizmos. Either way, you need someone who understands both the beating heart of an Internet vehicle and how the paint’s going to look to visitors after everything is said and done.
That’s where I come in.
I take the ideas that float around the subconscious mind and make them manifest. I find new ways to get things working. I get my hands dirty. It’s messy and magical all at once. I turn dreams into gold – one jot & scribble, one line of code at a time.
I think that makes things pretty clear. It’s a shame it took me the better part of a decade to finally put this notion together. I’ll still be pitching to the Escapist, working on stories and columns and chipping away at the latest iteration of my first novel. But in the meantime, I have bills to pay and mouths to feed and, unfortunately, I haven’t quite earned the writing stripes to leave the day job behind. Until I do, I’d still rather do something I enjoy than flip burgers or stand on a street corner.
Storytellers are creative folk. They create something out of nothing. The entire world of Middle-Earth, for example, sprang from the notes jotted down by J.R.R. Tolkien in the trenches of the first World War. The magical world parallel to our own that seems to have a school called Hogwart’s at its center would not exist save for the imagination of J.K. Rowling. People who tell stories, from the most successful and lucrative of novelists to the humble Dungeon Master creating obstacles for a party of adventurers, make the attempt to be creative and innovative in some small way. Even if a dungeon or story is based in part on something the storyteller’s seen or read recently, it’s still their prerogative to take that notion in a new direction. After all, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. These creative people can be very attractive to an employer.
For business people looking to leverage the profitability of creative people, here is some advice.
I picked up Dragon Age: Origins because I’m a sucker for both fantasy role-playing games and BioWare’s writing. Sure, they’ll dump extensive write-ups into your journal (or Codex in this case) at the slightest provocation and some of the conversations can be a little long-winded, but the writing is so good and the character stories so interesting that I take those things in stride. However, sometimes the game system can be a little weird. The first major hang-up I’ve encountered, however, is entirely my fault. It’s something of a case of Did Not Do The Research, but I’ve been building my mage character wrong. I’m 7 levels in, and some of the time I spent on the first attempt can get shaved since I know my way around the system a bit better. But the point of me bringing up this little bit of geekery is so I can discuss something we’ve all indulged in since childhood: the do-over.
You remember do-overs, right? Someone would throw the dodge ball incorrectly, or you’d forget to fill your water pistol before shooting at a sibling. “Do-over!” would be the cry. “Do-over!” The previous attempts would be wiped away in the nascent young minds and play would begin again as if the last block of time never happened. It’s something that’s found its way into gaming in general. If a title has “replay value,” you can basically leave one save-game alone and start over, making different choices and experiencing the game in a different way.
You can pull do-overs in your writing, as well. I’ve done it on more than one occasion, most notably with my first novel, and every time I’ve declared a do-over, the resulting writing has been a marked improvement. I’m not saying you should always wipe out what you’ve written if a better idea comes along. I’m merely suggesting that you should never feel restricted by your previous efforts. If you want to try something new, try it. Nothing’s stopping you.
And it goes beyond that, as well. I’m going to wax philosophical/religious for a minute, so if you’d rather not think about it you can jump ship now.
Still with me? Fantastic.
A lot of people in authority, from conservative pundits to religious leaders to your boss, might tell you that everything in your past defines who you are now. You need to pick a career and stick with it, says the prevailing capitalist sentiment. It doesn’t matter how much pigeon crap is in the hole, this is where you belong. Credit scores and employment histories are just a couple of examples of how we like to track where people go in their lives to show that they don’t change.
But people are not generic, hot-swappable modules. The only thing all people in the world have in common is that they’re all different, and all of them are capable of change. You’ll be called a failure or a quitter if you try to change, but I only really see someone quitting if they either commit suicide or convince themselves that what they want in life is impossible to attain or not worth pursuing.
Guess what? You are the only You in existence. In all of Creation, only you can do the things you dream of doing. Your stories haven’t been told by others and they won’t get told if you don’t tell them. Sure, other people have climbed Everest or swam the English channel or split the atom. That doesn’t make what you want to do, what makes you passionate, what gets you out of bed in the morning and propels you through a generic hot-swappable day job any less unique than the things that do that for me. If you change jobs, or pursue a dream, people may think you’re a quitter. I tend to think you’re just the opposite – you’re starting something wonderful and you can’t really fail at it. You might fall short of the ultimate goal, but you made the attempt, and probably learned a few things about yourself and your place in this world along the way, which is more than a lot of people can say.
It’s one of the things that maintains my faith in Christ. Outside of the rhetoric of televangelists or the stoic zealotry of pro-life clinic bombers or the “God bless us and nobody else” isolationist tendencies of some congregations, the message of Christ is really pretty simple.
You weren’t meant to suffer. You shouldn’t have to bear the burdens of a daily life plagued by self-doubt and self-recrimination. And you don’t have to. I’m more than willing to help you with your struggles. All you have to do is ask. If you have the courage to admit that you can’t make it on your own, and the open-mindedness to appreciate this world and acknowledge that there’s more to it than what you can see, I’ll let you in on a secret. Your entire life is a do-over. Pick up the dreams you thought were shattered. Mend the heart you felt was broken. I can’t guarantee you’ll get everything you desire, but in following Me, you might just find something you were seeking without ever knowing you needed it.
I know, I know. I’m a dew-eyed optimist and the cynicism of the world is going to try and grind me into a fine powder for an unfeeling corporate master to snort off a hooker’s cleavage while sitting in traffic contained in a luxury car on his way to a meeting on the greatness of his company.
But until that day, I’ll keep believing and keep writing. Even if I have to call a do-over now and again.
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