To be a writer is to face perpetual defeat and lingering self-doubt. The default in this profession is failure. Rejections come (I’ve had around 300 for short stories and novels) and they don’t stop coming. Agents are indifferent, and the major publishing houses will not even look at your novel if it doesn’t come through an agent. Agents are indifferent because they get thousands of manuscripts every year and can only take on one or two as new clients. They are passionate about writing, but cannot possibly be passionate about every piece of writing they come across,
primarily because they do not live to be ten thousand years old.
And yes, some agents are bastards and some editors are pricks. There’s that, too.
And you, dear writer, are at the bottom of the pile. You have to be stoic in the face of rejection, professional in the face of the callous and the rude.
I’m not here to talk about rejection, specifically (as you may have gathered from the title) but I will say, with respect to this mean inevitability, I quite like the advice of Saul Bellow: “I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.’“ And in the face of the bastardry often encountered, I’d reference one of the great stoic philosophers, Rocky Balboa: “It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.” (I should add that my current agent and my current publishers – both of my short story collection and my upcoming novel – have been fantastic. I got lucky, eventually).
I include this preamble in order to emphasise the following: you got to celebrate the wins. Seriously: an acceptance, a contract, getting an agent, writing END on a manuscript (always a rare and satisfying experience). Don’t glide on by the good times. Shimmy a dance of joy while you can, because it will be brief.
And yes, I decided on this topic for the Training Regime because something good happened to me recently.
A few months back, two new stories from my short story collection, Neon Leviathan, were nominated for the Aurealis Award in the SF Short story and SF novella categories. And then, a few weeks back, I went ahead and won the award for best novella. Fuck yeah.
These are Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards, and they matter. No, not as much as a Hugo, or any of the better-known international awards, like the World Fantasy, or the Locus, or the Arthur C Clarke – of course not. But they matter insofar as validation by one’s peers matters (and yes, while I think it is a bad idea to write a story aimed at pleasing your peers – inevitably such stories are compromised and spineless – I am nonetheless human and therefore appreciate recognition). The Aurealis Awards matter because they mark me out to editors and to some readers as someone worth reading. They matter because, as I say above and will keep saying: this is a bitch of a profession and the occasional hint I’m doing things right is like a cup of water in the middle of the desert. That is, awards won’t keep me alive for long, but they will give me the sustenance to keep walking for a while longer.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I myself am terrible at celebrating the wins. My self-evaluation as a writer has evolved roughly as such:
2012: I’ll never be published
2016: 1st Aurealis Award win: It was a fluke.
2020: 2nd Aurealis Award win: my best writing years are behind me.
Yes, that last thought really is what I was thinking the next day, while nursing a hangover.
No, I’m not suggesting winning awards are a necessary part of any writer’s life. Yes, it feels great when you do, but they shouldn’t be the goal. Maybe the goal is sales, maybe it is simply getting published (including self-publishing a novel), maybe it’s completing a manuscript. Hopefully, you have many. But setting goals and acknowledging those achievements matters, because a sense of progress matters.
To be a writer is to feel that you’re flailing in the darkness. You write each day into the void, not knowing whether the words you’re putting down will ever be read by an audience. You’ve chosen a career path that is at once the most precarious and the most competitive. It is precarious, because even when you succeed and get that novel published, your advance will be to the tune of 10 grand, on average (for something that could have taken a year, or five, or ten, to write). It’s hyper competitive because perhaps 1 in a 1000 manuscripts are published by a major (or second tier) publisher*.
All of which to say, it’s bloody hard, this business. So it isn’t just a question of setting goals: it is enjoying, if only for a moment, the completion of them.
Does this sound a little too ‘wellness’? Does this seem a bit: ‘revel in the glory that is you’? Well, we’ll get to this a little more in Part 9, but no, I’m not talking about that bullshit. I’m talking about finding meaning in a thankless and brutal profession. So brutal it is barely a ‘profession’ anymore – due to plummeting author incomes – but a side hustle. The financial rewards are so scant, the downs so outweigh the ups, that you got to appreciate the little things.
So: stop for a moment, pat yourself on the back, maybe eye that bottle of single malt sitting on the shelf and make a 5pm date with a glass, and then get back to fucking work. That novel ain’t going to write itself.
The Writer’s Training Regime
These articles go all the way back to 2014, so I wasn’t sure if they’d still hold up. In writing this piece, I looked over the old ones again, and found the advice was still all entirely reasonable – and occasionally even useful. The series is collated here, for your delectation:
Part 7: Dealing With Failure (and Success)
Part 6: Dungeons and Dragons
Part 5: The Convention, revisited
Part 4: Lessons From Poker
Part 3: 500/500
Part 2: The Short Story
Part 1: The Convention
And if – like me – you started writing a little later in life, or are considering becoming a writer after a career elsewhere, try: Late Bloomer (The Old Fart as New Writer)
*How do I get this number? Anecdotes, mainly. Hard data is difficult to come by. But I do know that my agent and several other agents have given these odds when discussing manuscripts they receive versus new authors they take on. Now remember: this is only what is received, not what goes on to be published. The first novel I had accepted by a (previous) literary agent did not go on to sell (making the odds worse than 1 in a 1000). On the other side of the ledger, if a submitted novel gets rejected 10 times, and published once, it success rate for being published is 100%, if you follow my meaning. Plus individual authors will have their third or four or tenth novel published (my fourth attempt is being published). I’m also not including in this ratio the self-published novel, many of which are worthy and do deserve to see the light of day.
