Baby's First Rejection

The rest is just noise.

I received my first short story submission rejection, but I’m thrilled about it. I know that’s a weird statement to make, so let me explain.

I’ve spent my entire life writing. There are journals from when I was five, just learning to write, where I would scribble down little notes. In high school, I would write poems and lyrics in notebooks; I had a Livejournal where I would write maybe not-so-cryptic entries about falling in love and being heartbroken. In college, I kept a journal, but that’s about it. I started this Substack a few years ago and have treated it as a forum for creativity - there are posts where I can write longer book reviews, experiment with poetry, etc.

But I never wrote anything that was pure fiction. There are posts in this Substack that I’ve called “fiction” because they were inspired by a song, or a movie, or a book, but there were always threads of me woven into those stories: past heartbreaks, insecurities, a crush here or there, or some fragment of my life I’ve drawn on.

That short story though? It’s entirely invented, and that required a different kind of vulnerability. It required me to use my imagination, to build a character who wasn’t me and to create a story I’ve never experienced. Are there parts of me in the character in that short story? Maybe, but that’s only because even if we try to write something that stands apart from us, who we are will often (even if subconsciously) bleed into it. But crossing the threshold from writing something that draws on personal and lived experience into pure world building was terrifyingly new.

Is the story good or bad? I don’t know, and to be honest, I don’t care either way - who am I to judge any art with a label of good or bad, even my own? I truly believe every piece of art, from music to books, is meant for someone. I honored the story I wanted to tell, I completed it, and released it into the world.

I’m proud of myself for writing this story, and I’m proud of myself for putting it out in the world. As someone who stresses out every time I hit publish on this Substack or even post a review, it took a lot of courage for me to share my first piece of fiction and allow it to be judged and considered. That means something; it counts.

Where did I find the courage? A few places.

The first is my own passion for reading. I love words, and at the risk of sounding dramatic, I love words so much sometimes it makes me emotional. I love the feeling of reading a sentence and realizing that you’re not alone in how you’ve felt; it’s my favorite feeling. Kazuo Ishiguro says in his 2017 Nobel lecture, “But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?¹”, and it describes perfectly how I feel as both a reader and a writer.

There is a duality to being a reader and a writer; I’ve spent my entire life putting words down on a page to understand my own feelings, to try to be understood, and to hope that someone can relate. I’ve chased the same feeling as a reader; I’ve searched books, scripts, song lyrics, anything I could read to try and find a way to explain how something felt, to find a sense of understanding, and to realize it isn’t just me.

The other place my courage came from is through friends. I’m beyond fortunate to be surrounded by the most creative and uplifting people; people who radiate magic, and by simply being in their orbit, you want to create and be better. It isn’t false positivity; I do not doubt that my friends would gently tell me something needed work. But they will workshop with you and be your cheerleader, and you can trust them. That’s invaluable, and I’ll forever be thankful to the people in my life who encourage and inspire me daily.

The final thing I drew courage from is Josh Malerman’s WATCHING EVIL DEAD. Josh is one of the friends I mentioned above who radiate creativity and magic; everyone in Wow Town is. There’s a reason so many of us say reading that book feels like having a drink with Josh.

When I started doubting myself while writing my short story, I would hear Josh’s voice in my head reminding me: it’s a draft, it can be rewritten. The key is to keep going. And it’s true - it was a draft, I rewrote it, and I am proud of it. When the rejection arrived, I handled it the same way; I let it sting for a second, shrugged it off, and thought “who cares?” I did the scary part - I submitted something I worked on, and it didn’t work out. Maybe it will for another submission, maybe it won’t. This is a rite of passage for any creator, and now I can say I’m part of that club.

I’m certainly not going to let rejection stop me from writing new stories. If you need inspiration or a perspective shift on creating, I can’t recommend WATCHING EVIL DEAD enough. It helped me reframe why I create and taught me how to free myself from the weight of doubt because so many of the things I worry about or put in my own way when it comes to creating don’t matter as much as the weight I put into them.

This book will inspire you to take risks, step outside your comfort zone, and accept it’s okay to fail. If you don’t create the thing, you can’t fail, and you can’t succeed either. And I would also argue that there’s never any true “failure” in creating any art.

Admittedly, sometimes I had points while writing my short story where I thought “why am I spending time on this,” and I would think of WATCHING EVIL DEAD, and I pushed that thought aside because writing the short story is what I wanted to be doing, and really that thought was an insecurity popping up about the worth of my writing. As someone who constantly asks why and needs to understand the reasoning, I found that WATCHING EVIL DEAD shifted something in me and made me understand that so much of my questioning comes from fear and being afraid to start; there’s no judgment in that, but it’s something that without the book’s inspiration and encouragement, I wouldn’t be able to identify and work through.

I understand there’s a risk in this post coming across as flippant or dangerously optimistic, as though I’ve found some easy trick to not caring. I haven’t; I can still get in my own way and in my head about creating, and rejection still stings for a second. But I’m trying to take away the power that fear of rejection and failure has on me by embracing it. I want to create, to share, and to enjoy the process.

The rest is just noise that I’m learning to let be just that - noise.

1. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2017/ishiguro/lecture/