It Only Takes One “Yes”

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Image from Flickr by jepoirrier

Friday was the anniversary of a pretty special occasion for me. On that day, three years ago, I received my first acceptance letter, for a short story called “Eleven Seconds.”

I will never forget the moment I received that email. It was a cold December evening, and we were gathered around the fireplace. I remember when I saw the subject line I cried out, and Abbey, who was nine years old, thought something was wrong. Then I hugged her and I hugged my son and I hugged my husband. I would have hugged you too, had you been there.

SLAB email

I’d been writing stories since grade school, but it wasn’t until my thirties that I began seriously submitting my work. Sometime after my son was born I just decided to go for it. I decided my dream of turning the title “aspiring writer” into “published author” was a good dream, and it deserved to happen, and the only way it would happen was if I stopped hiding behind the idea of it and actually put my work out there.

So I did, and I spent years collecting rejection slips. They didn’t bother me as much as you’d think. Simply corresponding with editors made me feel as if I were moving forward. It put me in a different category of writers. There are those who think about submitting their work, and then there are those who submit their work. Only writers from the second category get their work published, and the rejections they collect along the way become a kind of badge of honor.

I’d heard that once a writer breaks through, the acceptance letters start coming in pretty regularly. And that was true for me–within a month I had another one, and more would soon follow.

But there will always be rejections. Nearly everything I’ve had published was rejected first.

For example, “Eleven Seconds” was rejected three times. The Fourth Wall was rejected twenty-two times. Don’t worry too much about how many times you hear “No,” because it only takes one “Yes.”

Don’t give up.

Here’s the text of my little story that could, which originally appeared in SLAB literary magazine in the spring of 2012. Read it, if you like, and then go submit one of yours.


ELEVEN SECONDS

It started in the kitchen. A clinking of porcelain, a delicate, dreadful trembling, cups and saucers and unused dinner plates jumping in the cupboards like those little beans from Mexico. What were those called?

Thunder ripped the ground and the old man jerked up from his chair, instinctively, but the fear passed through him like a bullet. His heart fluttered once. He sat back down.

From his seat in the living room, the old man watched his kitchen heave forward and burst apart. The world could shatter around you; he knew that. Bending forward, he plucked a fragment of china from the ground, like a flower. His wife, Winnifred, had painted this piece, before the cancer took her last year. He could see her clearly, her pale knotted hand curled around the thin brush, looping and twirling like a dancer. The old man pressed his hands together and folded them over the broken china, like a prayer.


Thanks for reading!

 

Just Enjoy It

Image from Flickr by jronaldlee

Image from Flickr by jronaldlee

Last week I finished reading a book that left my head spinning. From the first line to the last, I was held captive by the author’s voice. Every sentence felt right. The story was unique, and the characters stayed true. You could tell this writer worked hard, probably for years, to perfect her debut novel.

The book is Zazen by Vanessa Veselka. About a year ago I read her short story “Just before Elena” in Tin House and loved it. Later, I recognized her name in an issue of Poets & Writers, and I made a note to check out her novel. I am so glad that I did. I have several titles waiting on my TBR list, but I’ll probably read Zazen again first.

It’s important to have books like this—the ones we completely fall in love with. They’re the kind we’re told to read, as in “Read the books you want to write.” They’re the kind that made us want to become writers.

But when one is this good, it can be pretty humbling. At some point, all writers must accept the fact that there will always be someone better.

If the payoff is getting to enjoy a book like Zazen, that’s fine. It’s refreshing to read as a reader and not as a writer. I don’t want to dissect the prose and figure out why it works and try to analyze the way Veselka’s character stays sympathetic while she’s terrorizing her city with bomb threats—never mind. It works, that’s all. Let it stay magic.

What I did take away from Veselka’s writing is that I can never let myself become lazy. You can’t imitate talent, but you can embody other qualities of great artists—hard work and high standards—and come up with something fine. After finishing Zazen, I wanted to comb through my own novel and make absolutely sure that each sentence, if it had to stand on its own, was one I could be proud of. When you have the cushion of tens of thousands of words, it’s easy to let a lazy phrase slip through. Well, Veselka didn’t. And I know, as a reader, I appreciate that.