by Lavie Tidhar

Before I ever started publishing, I met a short story writer who opened my eyes to the process of submissions. It turned out, you see, that you could write a short story, and send it to a magazine. Someone at the magazine would then actually look at your story and then send you a rejection for it! I was so blown away by the very idea of it, that when I did start writing, it was not a desire for success that drove me, but simple excitement at getting my first rejection.

That one inevitably came and, like a fool, instead of being discouraged it just made my day. Thus a writer is born, a child of Sisyphus, forever doomed to roll a boulder up a hill.

Rejection is bound into the process of publishing. I still simply write and submit my short stories. Very few editors ever actually ask me to write to spec. When they do, it’s often because someone else dropped out of a project at the last minute and they need a quick replacement. I don’t mind (I had two of those last year). But usually, I’ll simply write what I want and send it out and wait. A couple of years ago, having heard nothing for a while, I was relieved to finally get a rejection in my inbox one morning. A rejection simply means you can now send your story elsewhere! Then a second rejection arrived, and I was even more pleased. More things to do!

Then a third arrived. And that one stung a little. Three in a day is a lot—

And then I got a fourth rejection.

No one, surely, should ever be subjected to a four-rejection day. That’s just cruel.

But short story writing is, on the whole, a low-stakes game. Science fiction and fantasy still have, miraculously, a lively ecosystem of anthologies and magazines. Editors can still take a chance on the odd and the unclassifiable, publish experimental next to traditional, and be no worse off for it. Compare that to crime fiction, which exists almost solely in novels; to literary fiction, where one is sometimes expected to pay just for the privilege of submitting!; or to horror, which exists mostly in the smallest of the small press – very few horror publications pay, compared to SF (though the novels are having a resurgence).

And even if you do reach the lofty heights of short fiction success – so what? You could publish a hundred stories or more, in every high-end magazine, and remain just as obscure. Awards may elude you forever. The only people to recognise your name may be your fellow short fiction writers, and they’re too busy to care anyway. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Writing for yourself, you must only satisfy yourself to be rewarded. Writing for potential publication inevitably becomes a social, collaborative enterprise. Other people must become involved, make decisions on your writing, edit it, proof it, promote it, believe in it. And if you make the transition to novels, the whole thing is magnified a thousandfold: the commercial pressure becomes extreme, the team of people working on your book expands to designers and publicists, accountants, sales people and marketing – not to mention readers and reviewers. And at the end of all that – you’ll probably be just where you started, pushing that rock up that hill only to watch it roll all the way back down.

Here’s the thing. There is no magical endpoint, no final boss to defeat at the end of the final level (go play Paul Jessup’s fantastic Bad Writer game to gain an understanding of the never-ending-ness of the process). And rejection and failure are built-in – they are features, not bugs.

There is also no guarantee that you will somehow become better with every new story. As Jeffrey Ford, a fantastic short story writer, once observed, all you can really hope for is that your batting average may improve over time. You can’t sit down and simply conjure up a classic. You can only hope that some stories will be better than others. The truth is that every writer has a folder of trunked, abandoned stories and novels. I have some 40+ completed stories in my trunk folder. They’re there because they, well, they are not very good. My miscellanea of abandoned projects runs to over 200 files. Some are a sentence long, others are thousands of words leading nowhere.

Then there are the novels…

One mistake writers make is to endlessly rewrite the same book or story in the hope it will get better over time. But sometimes the best thing to do is to admit defeat, set it aside and write something new that might work better. And, it is important to realise, nothing is wasted. Let me repeat that: nothing is wasted. The corpses of old works can and will be cannibalised – the good parts reused, the old parts thrown in the trash. As just one example, my novel The Circumference of the World is actually the product of not one but two failed novels, and took years to bring into completion in a way that felt it finally worked. It is, admittedly, a somewhat extreme example, but the principle stands. With one early novel, I had taken a wrong turn around the middle mark and doggedly followed it to the end. The result was that I had to trunk the entire second half of the book and write it again from scratch. That’s 45,000 words you have to press ‘delete’ on (or at least, cut and paste into a dump file for posterity). Never a pleasant experience.

All we can ever do is strive for the nebulous. To write something that will, somehow, be closest to the perfect vision in our minds. To hope that somewhere, somehow, it will be read by a stranger who may be moved by it the way we were when we first started reading. Most of us will never know if we had made an impact, sitting there in isolation, making stuff up and trying to put it on the page. Yet we beat on, boats against the current, to quote Fitzgerald, another writer who thought he’d failed miserably in his aspirations. He died convinced that The Great Gatsby was a bust. 

Embrace failure, and you can go anywhere.