Thanks but no thanks

On writing, rejection, fiction

I’ve gotten a few knockbacks that have stung a bit lately, so I thought I’d exercise my god-given right to whine about it on Substack.

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It’s been a little over a year since I published my first short story, which was in a perfect print-only journal called The End. It was about a young woman who goes to the Louisiana museum in Copenhagen, accompanied by her beautiful rich girlfriend, and who might be pregnant. I called it ‘Proof of provenance’, which to this day is the best title I’ve ever managed to think of. It’s also about Lauren Greenfield, a photographer I am bewildered by.

Honestly, I never really thought fiction would happen for me, because I’d been trying and failing for a long time — submitting to all the usual places, and piling up rejection letters in the process. I am a big proponent of cold-emailing and seeing what can happen, which probably makes me horrifically annoying to editors everywhere, so if you can think of a magazine, they have likely said no to me. Also residencies, grants, workshops… you name it. Jacob says it’s depressing that I keep all the ‘thanks but no thanks’ emails in a starred folder, so I can go back through them occasionally. I think it’s fun.

That first publication changed things for me. Not materially, of course, because not that many people read it. But internally, I now had incontrovertible proof that there was at least one other person in the world who didn’t think I was shit. This spurred me, and encouraged me; most importantly it made me take myself more seriously. Everyone likes to pretend their work appears out of thin air, yanked elegantly from their brain. The truth is that it’s a lot uglier than that, and more embarrassing — even now, I feel like I’m breaking a rule, that it’s cringe and undignified to talk like this — but if it’s ever going to work, you need to treat your ideas and process like they really, really matter. Basically, I think you need the ego and emotional resilience of a very dumb dog.

Since then, I’ve had a few more stories published, and a lot more declined. Writing them takes me a fair amount of time — I start with a few scenes or vague sketch of an arc, and it fills itself in more and more as I go. At the minute I’m turning continually back to South Africa, to the very small, rural corner of my experience, which seems like the most fertile ground for my imagination. Usually I have my opening and final lines nailed down early. Everything in between grows and mutates, like bacteria within the constraints of a petri dish. The longer I wait between redrafts and edits, the better and more complex it gets. That’s frustrating, because of course I would like it to be perfect off the bat, but ‘time’ ranks somewhere in between ‘skill’ and ‘practice’ in the necessary virtues that it takes to be a good writer. Unfair to those of us, myself included, who have full-time jobs or other commitments, but there’s just no way around that.

Suffice to say, I have spent a lot of effort on manuscripts that are sitting in my computer, and will probably never see the light of day (or at least the screen of somebody’s laptop). Most of these I think are just objectively bad. I needed to write them to get better, but there’s an element — shoddy narrative structure or undercooked character or immaturity of theme — that makes them kind of shit. A few are fine. They have nice turns of phrase, or a good overall conceit, but nothing really sets them apart from any other writer’s work. They lack a distinctive voice, or an urgent, obvious reason to exist. A rare one or two, though, I think are good, or certainly above my usual quality. These are the stories I feel driven to advocate for, and to bother people about, and maybe delusionally, the ones I believe will end up somewhere someday.

I like to think about writers I admire, and imagine their desktops and drawers, their wastepaper baskets and inboxes through the years. Envision all that failure, all the quiet humiliations and disappointments that never get hyperlinked on their chic websites. Isn’t it heartening?

It’s weird given my small resume, but I get emails sometimes asking me for advice, or how I got started. I think of myself as very untested, or maybe just invisible, so these surprise me, because, like… me too, babe! I would like advice! I would like to get started! I always try to answer them, though I don’t know if what I have to say is useful or particularly pertinent. Mostly it boils down to: find a personal email for someone, and attach a document. Also read, read, read — theory textbooks and small magazines and big collections. Academics will give you points of consideration that commercial critics and essayists (and authors themselves) can’t, and vice versa. And yeah, I really do think everyone should pick up that George Saunders book. I don’t care if you think you’re above it — when was the last time you close-read a Gogol story?

If I sound like a dummy, that’s because I grew up between Western Australia and KwaZulu Natal (no, not Durban). Do you know how parochial that makes me? I found out about autofiction like three years ago, and the list of words I have no idea how to pronounce include ‘niçoise’, ‘apropos’ and ‘onglet’. I don’t have a degree; I never graduated university (I failed three classes and gave up) or did an MFA; I don’t have a mentor as such. Someone once said, kindly, that watching me try to navigate the social conventions of the UK media class is like watching a cat try to swim. I don’t like it, I’m not good at it, and I really wish someone would lift me out of the strange and threatening situation I have somehow found myself in.

I did one online workshop last year, which was lovely, but that’s been the extent of my instruction. Otherwise I’m exclusively self-taught. I do work in publishing, which is obviously very useful, so I have that, but otherwise I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants. Also I’m a mess right now — awful at deadlines (sorry everyone), my mum has cancer, and sometimes I have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. I’m generally riddled with nerves and doubt, and I can’t hear very well so I tend to misjudge volume and just shout at people during professional meetings. (Please stop yelling, Jacob says exasperatedly, at least once a day). Whenever I’m really sad I look up the crazy amazing class syllabi at Yale, or Cambridge or whatever, and imagine studying there. I would be so smart and sophisticated, with my chic little backpack! I would know so many things, so many people! I would be such a better writer.

Maybe. Honestly, as I’ve been working on my novel and meeting agents, I can’t shake the suspicion that I’m really not good enough for any of it, which in turn has made me realise probably everyone feels like this all the time. We pick ourselves apart silently, and take others at their word, and devote ourselves to cultivating personas of ease and mystery because god forbid any of us acknowledge that writing is a job and not solely divine inspiration. The only difference between you and someone else is whether you’re willing to take a shot or not. Maybe it’ll pay off; maybe you’ll just have to put another email in the rejection folder. You never know until you try.

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• I’m reading Ayşegül Savaş’ short stories, most particularly the latest one in the New Yorker, Marseille. Such small stakes, but there’s a moment in the last third that made my stomach totally drop — I felt the characters’ moods plummet, and their embarrassment curdle. I am lucky enough to publish her books where I work, and can confirm she’s the rare combination of spectacularly talented and genuinely lovely.

• I’m listening to Bon Iver’s new album. Dad and I used to listen to his stuff on the long, early-morning drives to school, and this has imbued his voice with a special, nostalgic quality that endears me to whatever he puts out. I wish I was still in the passenger seat, stuck in rush-hour traffic on Stirling Highway, watching a passing magpie attack a cyclist to ‘Blood Bank’.

• I’m watching The Last of Us, because I like cool dumb TV shows with high production values. I love the functional post-apocalypse as a concept, and mushroom zombies even more. There’s something so satisfying about seeing a vision of the earth returned to itself; humans knocked back down to their rightful place. I’d be really good at living in a quarantine zone, I think.