Feel Beaten? Be Like Turtle: Keep Moving.
Your story is garbage.
Well, that’s what you’re telling yourself anyway. 36 straight rejections have conditioned you to believe that the world just wants to bulldoze your house then poop in the rubble while you watch from the front lawn.
That’s not very professional, Jon. Well, here’s my hot take: nobody’s a professional at the start. Did your favorite author wake up one day, pour out 70,000 words, and say “Okay, I’m ready for my PEN Fiction Award”? Even a copy editor for a Big Five publishing house must edit their edits. Is it okay to feel discouraged? Yes, be human. Is your story garbage? Maybe, if you were inauthentic, but probably not.
I saw a Facebook ad for little turtle pendants and the ad was “Each pendant bought removes one pound of plastic trash from the ocean”. The math seems a little off for a pendant the size of a pebble, but let’s go with it. This is the analogy we’re using – the turtle trash art analogy.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
First drafts are raw. Your fifth draft might be raw. Evaluate the pieces of the draft that show elements of strength and let that electricity expand to the rest of the writing. Cut the flotsam words. Does that paragraph move the story forward or develop the depth of a character?
“No, but I like to talk about the way the smoke curls up to the midnight moon and swirls organically into a thick cloud milkshake”. Okay, bad example, because that’s beautiful. “I spent four paragraphs talking about the cat in the window because I like cats”.
Cut it.
Pull the trash out of your story —
turn it into a turtle pendant.
Move on.
The density and tedium of the struggle may feel like failure. Your rejection may look like tangible, evidence-based failure. It’s not. This applies to all artists, not just novel writing. Your painting, your drawing, your weird macaroni art splattered with animal blood which you have deemed “performance art”.
It’s a learning step. It’s nutrition. Eat the criticism, digest what works and what does not, and move forward ruthlessly.
I’ll take a dark turn here, but relevant. Survivors of trauma in therapy must learn to befriend their bodies again, through yoga or kickboxing, whatever pulls those fragmented trauma memories to the surface of the body, resolves them, and integrates them into safe memory (this is spoken about at length in Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score).
Befriend your trash.
All the text (or whatever your medium of expression) was a piece of you, but some of it was toxic to cohesive development. Recognize that there is growth there, bring it to the surface, then cut it. Dump those words out back by the fence and let them fertilize the wild mint tea. You’ve already taken all the nutrients you need to go on. Take the healthy pieces and integrate what you’ve evaluated into your next draft.
Like a real-life turtle, you have chosen a direction, or it chose you, and you’re moving towards it. Does a turtle curse its own feet for being slow? Not the turtles I’ve talked to. So don’t tear down your expression. Affirm yourself.
The bottom line is soon as you sit down and start typing or writing words, you’re moving forward. The rejection is like stretching muscles or the awkward eye contact on a first date. It’s all necessary.
Now don’t stop.
Photo by Ralph Olazo on Unsplash. Turtles persevere. Be like turtles.