I decided not to do it.
In short, I’d worked on that novel tirelessly for four years, had given it a tremendous amount of effort, love, and faith, and basically I liked it the way it was. Yes, there was some crookedness, but the walls were essentially strong, the roof held, and the windows functioned, and anyhow, I don’t entirely mind living in a crooked house. (I grew up in a crooked house; they aren’t such bad places.) I felt that my novel was an interesting finished product—maybe even more interesting for its slightly wonky angles—so I let it go.
And do you know what happened when I released my admittedly imperfect book into the world?
Not much.
The earth stayed on its axis. Rivers did not run backward. Birds didn’t drop dead out of the air. I got some good reviews, some bad reviews, some indifferent reviews. Some people loved The Signature of All Things, some people didn’t. A plumber who came over one day to repair my kitchen sink noticed the book sitting on the table and said, “I can tell you right now, lady, that book ain’t gonna sell—not with that title.” Some people wished the novel had been shorter; others wished it were longer. Some readers wished the story had more dogs in it and less masturbation. A few critics made note of that one underdeveloped character, but nobody seemed overly bothered by her.
In conclusion: A whole bunch of people had some opinions about my novel for a short while, and then everyone moved on, because people are busy and they have their own lives to think about. But I’d had a thrilling intellectual and emotional experience writing The Signature of All Things—and the merits of that creative adventure were mine to keep forever. Those four years of my life had been wonderfully well spent. When I finished that novel, it was not a perfect thing, but I still felt it was the best work I’d ever done, and I believed I was a far better writer than I’d been before I began it. I would not trade a minute of that encounter for anything.
But now that work was finished, and it was time for me to shift my attention to something new—something that would also, someday, be released as good enough. This is how I’ve always done it, and this is how I will keep doing it, so long as I am able.
Because that is the anthem of my people.
That is the Song of the Disciplined Half-Ass.
Success
All those years when I was diligently laboring away at both my day jobs and my writing practice, I knew there was never any promise that any of this would work out.
I always knew that I might not get what I wished for—that I might never become a published writer. Not everybody makes it to a place of comfortable success in the arts. Most people don’t. And while I’ve always believed in magical thinking, I wasn’t a child, either; I knew that wishing would not make it so. Talent might not make it so, either. Dedication might not make it so. Even amazing professional contacts—which I didn’t have, in any case—might not make it so.
Creative living is stranger than other, more worldly pursuits. The usual rules do not apply. In normal life, if you’re good at something and you work hard at it, you will likely succeed. In creative endeavors, maybe not. Or maybe you will succeed for a spell, and then never succeed again. You might be offered rewards on a silver platter, even as a rug is being simultaneously pulled out from under you. You might be adored for a while, then go out of fashion. Other, dumber people might take your place as critical darlings.
The patron goddess of creative success can sometimes seem like a rich, capricious old lady who lives in a giant mansion on a distant hill and who makes really weird decisions about who gets her fortune. She sometimes rewards charlatans and ignores the gifted. She cuts people out of her will who loyally served her for their entire lives, and then gives a Mercedes to that cute boy who cut her lawn once. She changes her mind about things. We try to divine her motives, but they remain occult. She is never obliged to explain herself to us. In short, the goddess of creative success may show up for you, or she may not. Probably best, then, if you don’t count on her, or attach your definition of personal happiness to her whims.
Maybe better to reconsider your definition of success, period.
For my own part, I decided early on to focus on my devotion to the work above all. That would be how I measured my worth. I knew that conventional success would depend upon three factors—talent, luck, and discipline—and I knew that two of those three things would never be under my control. Genetic randomness had already determined how much talent I’d been allotted, and destiny’s randomness would account for my share of luck. The only piece I had any control over was my discipline. Recognizing that, it seemed like the best plan would be to work my ass off. That was the only card I had to play, so I played it hard.
Mind you, hard work guarantees nothing in realms of creativity. (Nothing guarantees anything in realms of creativity.) But I cannot help but think that devotional discipline is the best approach. Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that—whatever the outcome—you have traveled a noble path.
I have a friend, an aspiring musician, whose sister said to her one day, quite reasonably, “What happens if you never get anything out of this? What happens if you pursue your passion forever, but success never comes? How will you feel then, having wasted your entire life for nothing?”
My friend, with equal reason, replied, “If you can’t see what I’m already getting out of this, then I’ll never be able to explain it to you.”
When it’s for love, you will always do it anyhow.
Career vs. Vocation
It is for these reasons (the difficulty, the unpredictability) that I have always discouraged people from approaching creativity as a career move, and I always will—because, with rare exceptions, creative fields make for crap careers. (They make for crap careers, that is, if you define a “career” as something that provides for you financially in a fair and foreseeable manner, which is a pretty reasonable definition of a career.)
Even if things work out for you in the arts, parts of your career will likely always remain crap. You might not like your publisher, or your gallerist, or your drummer, or your cinematographer. You might hate your tour schedule, or your more aggressive fans, or your critics. You might resent answering the same questions over and over again in interviews. You might be constantly annoyed at yourself for always falling short of your own aspirations. Trust me, if you want to complain, you’ll always find plenty to complain about, even when fortune appears to be shining her favor upon you.
But creative living can be an amazing vocation, if you have the love and courage and persistence to see it that way. I suggest that this may be the only sanity-preserving way to approach creativity. Because nobody ever told us it would be easy, and uncertainty is what we sign up for when we say that we want to live creative lives.
Everyone is panicking these days, for instance, about how much the Internet and digital technology are changing the creative world. Everyone is fretting over whether there will still be jobs and money available for artists going forward into this volatile new age. But allow me to point out that—long before the Internet and digital technology ever existed—the arts were still a crap career. It’s not like back in 1989 anybody was saying to me, “You know where the money is, kid? Writing!” They weren’t saying that to anyone back in 1889, either, or in 1789, and they won’t be saying it in 2089. But people will still try to be writers, because they love the vocation. People will keep being painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, poets, directors, quilters, knitters, potters, glassblowers, metalworkers, ceramicists, calligraphers, collagists, nail artists, clog dancers, and Celtic harpists, as well. Against all sound advice, people will stubbornly keep trying to make pleasing things for no particularly good reason, as we always have done.
Is it sometimes a difficult path? Sure.
Does it make for an interesting life? The most.
Will th
e inevitable difficulties and obstacles associated with creativity make you suffer? That part—cross my heart—is entirely up to you.
Elk Talk
Let me tell you a story about persistence and patience.
Back in my early twenties, I wrote a short story called “Elk Talk.” The tale had grown out of an experience I’d had back when I was working as a cook on a ranch in Wyoming. One evening, I had stayed up late telling jokes and drinking beer with a few of the cowboys. These guys were all hunters, and we got to talking about elk calls—the various techniques for imitating a bull elk’s mating call in order to draw the animals near. One of the cowboys, Hank, admitted that he had recently purchased a tape recording of some elk calls made by the greatest master of elk-calling in elk-hunting history, a guy named (and I will never forget this) Larry D. Jones.
For some reason—it might have been the beer—I thought this was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I loved that there was somebody in the world named Larry D. Jones who made a living by recording himself imitating mating calls of elks, and I loved that people like my friend Hank bought these tapes in order to practice their own mating calls. I persuaded Hank to go find the Larry D. Jones instructional mating-call tape, and I made him play it for me again and again while I laughed myself dizzy. It wasn’t just the sound of the elk call that I found hilarious (it’s an eardrum-shredding Styrofoam-against-Styrofoam screech); I also loved the earnest twang of Larry D. Jones droning on and on about how to do it correctly. I found the whole thing to be comedy gold.
Then somehow (again, the beer may have played a role) I got this idea that Hank and I should go try it out—that we should stumble into the woods in the middle of the night with a boom box and the Larry D. Jones tape, just to see what would happen. So we did. We were drunk and giddy and loud as we thrashed through the Wyoming mountains. Hank carried the boom box on his shoulder and turned up the volume as high as he could, while I kept falling over laughing at the loud, artificial sound of a bull elk in rut—interspersed with Larry D. Jones’s droning voice—blasting through our surroundings.
We could not have been less in tune with nature at that moment, but nature found us anyway. All at once there was a thunder of hooves (I’d never heard an actual thunder of hooves before; it’s terrifying) and then a crashing of branches, and then the biggest elk you ever saw exploded into our clearing and stood there in the moonlight, just a few short yards from us, snorting and pawing at the ground and tossing his antlered head in fury: What rival male has dared to bugle a mating call on my turf?
Suddenly, Larry D. Jones didn’t seem so funny anymore.
Never have two people sobered up as fast as Hank and I sobered up right then. We’d been kidding, but this seven-hundred-pound beast was decidedly not kidding. He was ready for war. It was as if we’d been conducting a harmless little séance, but had inadvertently summoned forth an actual dangerous spirit. We’d been messing around with forces that should not be messed with, and we were not worthy.
My impulse was to bow down before the elk, trembling, and to beg for mercy. Hank’s impulse was smarter—to throw the boom box as far away from us as he could, as if it were about to detonate (anything to distance ourselves from the bogus voice that we had dragged into this all-too-real forest). We cowered behind a boulder. We gawped at the elk in wonder while it blew clouds of frosty breath, furiously looking for its rival, tearing up the earth beneath its hooves. When you see the face of God, it is meant to frighten you, and this magnificent creature had frightened us in exactly that manner.
When the elk finally departed, we inched our way back to the ranch, feeling humbled and shaken and very mortal. It was awesome—in the classical definition of the word.
So I wrote about it. I didn’t tell this exact story, but I wanted to catch hold of that sensation (“callow humans humbled by divine natural visitation”) and use it as the basis for writing something serious and intense about man and nature. I wanted to take that electrifying personal experience and work it into a piece of short fiction using imagined characters. It took me many months to get that story right—or at least to get it as close to right as I possibly could, for my age and abilities. When I finished writing the story, I called it “Elk Talk.” Then I started sending it out to magazines, hoping somebody would publish it.
One of the publications that I sent “Elk Talk” to was the late, great fiction journal Story. Many of my literary heroes—Cheever, Caldwell, Salinger, Heller—had been published there over the decades, and I wanted to be in those pages, too. A few weeks later, my inevitable rejection letter arrived in the post. But this was a really special rejection letter.
You have to understand that rejection letters come in varying degrees, ranging across the full spectrum of the word no. There is not only the boilerplate form rejection letter; there is also the boilerplate rejection letter with a tiny personal note scrawled on the bottom, in an actual human’s handwriting, which might say something like, Interesting, but not for us! It can be exhilarating to receive even such a sparse crumb of recognition, and many times in my youth I’d been known to run around crowing to my friends, “I just got the most amazing rejection note!”
But this particular rejection letter was from Story’s well-respected editor in chief, Lois Rosenthal herself. Her response was thoughtful and encouraging. Ms. Rosenthal liked the story, she wrote. She tended to like stories about animals better than stories about people. Ultimately, however, she felt that the ending fell short. Therefore, she would not be publishing it. But she wished me good luck.
To an unpublished writer, getting rejected as nicely as that—from the editor in chief herself!—is almost like winning the Pulitzer. I was elated. It was by far the most fantastic rejection I’d ever received. And then I did what I used to do all the time back then: I took that rejected short story out of its self-addressed stamped envelope and sent it off to another magazine to collect yet another rejection letter—maybe an even better one. Because that is how you play the game. Onward ever, backward never.
A few years passed. I kept working at my day jobs and writing on the side. I finally did get published—with a different short story, in a different magazine. Because of that lucky break, I was now able to get a professional literary agent. Now it was my agent, Sarah, who sent my work out to publishers on my behalf. (No more photocopying for me; my agent had her own photocopier!) A few months into our relationship, Sarah called me with lovely news: My old short story “Elk Talk” was going to be published.
“Wonderful,” I said. “Who bought it?”
“Story magazine,” she reported. “Lois Rosenthal loved it.”
Huh.
Interesting.
A few days later, I had a phone conversation with Lois herself, who could not have been kinder. She told me that she thought “Elk Talk” was perfect, and that she couldn’t wait to publish it.
“You even liked the ending?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “I adore the ending.”
As we spoke, I was holding in my hands the very rejection letter she had written me just a few years earlier about this same story. Clearly, she had no recollection of ever having read “Elk Talk” before. I didn’t bring it up. I was delighted that she was embracing my work, and I didn’t want to seem disrespectful, snarky, or ungrateful. But I certainly was curious, so I asked, “What is it that you like about my story, if you don’t mind telling me?”
She said, “It’s so evocative. It feels mythical. It reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on what . . .”
I knew better than to say, “It reminds you of itself.”
The Beautiful Beast
So how do we interpret this tale?
The cynical interpretation would be “This is unequivocal evidence that the world is a place of deep unfairness.”
Because look at the facts: Lois Rosenthal didn’t want “Elk Talk” when
it was submitted to her by an unknown author, but she did want it when it was submitted to her by a famous literary agent. Therefore: It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Talent means nothing, and connections mean everything, and the world of creativity—like the greater world itself—is a mean and unfair place.
If you want to see it that way, go right ahead.
But I didn’t see it that way. On the contrary, I saw it as another example of Big Magic—and, again, a witty one. I saw it as proof that you must never surrender, that no doesn’t always mean no, and that miraculous turns of fate can happen to those who persist in showing up.
Also, just try to imagine how many short stories a day Lois Rosenthal was reading back in the early 1990s. (I’ve seen slush piles at magazines; picture a tower of manila envelopes stacked up to the sky.) We all like to think that our work is original and unforgettable, but surely it must all run together after a certain point—even the animal-themed stories. Moreover, I don’t know what kind of mood Lois was in when she read “Elk Talk” the first time. She might have read it at the end of a long day, or after an argument with a colleague, or just before she had to drive to the airport to pick up a relative she wasn’t looking forward to seeing. I don’t know what sort of mood she was in when she read it for the second time, either. Maybe she’d just come back from a restorative vacation. Maybe she’d just received elating news: A loved one didn’t have cancer, after all! Who knows? All I do know is that, when Lois Rosenthal read my short story for the second time, it echoed in her consciousness and sang out to her. But that echo was only in her mind because I had planted it there, several years earlier, by sending her my story in the first place. And also because I had stayed in the game, even after the initial rejection.
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