You know what’s better than a paradox? A pair of dachs(hunds). See also: A pair of Doc(Marten)s. Or even a pair of Jacques. I am thinking Cousteau and Derrida, mainly because those are the only Jacques I know of. They were both alive and living in Paris at the same time. Maybe they were friends, I don’t know. It seems like they had a lot in common. Like at least two things.
A paradox is a statement, situation, or circumstance (or even a person or thing) that contradicts itself. A paradox might have multiple premises that on their own make sense but combined contradict one another, or a paradox might have multiple premises that do not make sense on their own but combine in a logical or sound conclusion.
An example of the first type is the Grandfather Paradox of time travel which asserts that if (1) you have been born and exist; and (2) at some point during your existence, you travel backward in time to a date before the conception of one of your parents and kill or cause the death of your grandparent; (3) the death of that grandparent prevents the possibility of your later birth. Therefore, you cannot be born and cannot travel back in time and cause the death. All of the premises are correct (given the theoretical parameters of time travel) but if you put them all together they contradict each other.
An example of the second type is something like the statement “spend money to save money.” Spending money and saving money contradict each other because you can’t do both things with your money, but if you spend money now to buy something cheaply at volume that you would have needed eventually anyway, you save money over time because you avoid the higher per-unit price. Like when you buy an eighty-gallon drum of laundry detergent at Costco even though there’s only two of you in the household. The premises sound contradictory but they add up to a logical and sound statement.
That’s what a paradox is and I feel it is self-explanatory why a pair of dachshunds is much better in every way. Paradoxes are confusing and sometimes uncomfortable. Dachshunds are never uncomfortable and rarely confusing.
Today’s Shelf Life is about the paradox that creative people have to deal with if we want to keep creating and improving whatever it is we make. We must simultaneously believe (1) that the things we create have been made to the best of our ability and have a high intrinsic value, else we get discouraged and give up (this belief must be maintained even in the event of rejection); and (2) that the things we create do not represent the apex of our ability as creators, else we give up on trying to improve and grow.
Whenever I finish writing something (“writing” here includes revising and editing, not just drafting), I must believe it is the best of my work, comparable in quality to the work of the people I read in magazines, something people will want to and should have the opportunity to read, so I have the confidence to throw it into, for example, Neil Clarke’s slush pile—and everyone else’s slush pile after that. I also have to believe, at the same time, that I have so much more ability in me that the next thing I come up with will make this one look like garbage.
Holding both these things in my brain at one time is exhausting, but it’s hard to know how to give myself a break without feeling like I am giving up. We’re living in a place (many of us) and time where productivity for its own sake—beyond the productivity it takes to sustain us—is highly valued, and it’s a value I have internalized, so when I try to take time off from writing I feel like I am wasting time. This is why I have other creative hobbies (like making garments and accessories) for when I’m tired of writing, so I can still feel like I’m being productive even after I have productivitied myself into oblivion. Writing isn’t even my job. I have to first be a publisher forty hours a week before I do any of this, so I can have food and shelter.
Anyway the cult of productivity is a whole other thing that I’ll get into another time.
How are you supposed to internalize rejection heaped upon rejection—a normal phenomenon that I have written about before—and keep the confidence to go on creating more stuff? And if you can find that level of confidence in yourself to keep going, how do you keep your hubris in check? You have to cultivate the kind of self-confidence to look at your work and see it as eminently worthy of adoration and also the humility to look at your work and say, “I can improve my craft, I’m nowhere close to the top of this game.”
There’s three ways to take rejection—I mean, there’s infinite ways to take rejection, but I group them into three broad responses to rejection:
I’m terrible and I should give up. (That is, I was rejected because I’m too bad at this.)
I didn’t deserve this rejection, critics don’t understand my brilliance. (That is, I was rejected because I’m too good at this.)
Rejections are part of life, keep improving and keep submitting.
Responses 1 and 2 lead to giving up, both in their own way.
People give up on writing because they don’t have enough confidence and they think rejection means they will never write anything worthwhile.
People give up on improving their work because they don’t have enough humility and they believe consistent rejection indicates that the problem is “the gatekeepers” and not that their work could improve.
Response 3 is the way forward: Finding a balance between accepting that there’s room to improve while maintaining confidence that your existing work and the time you dedicated to it is still worthwhile—either in its own right as a publishable or salable creation, or as practice for creating something that is.
There’s another paradox that comes with the territory of being a creative person, or at least a peculiarity, I don’t know if you can call it a paradox exactly. But this is that sometimes the piece of creative work that you are least proud of, or that you consider less than your best work, will receive the greatest critical or popular response. This happens a lot with Shelf Life, to the extent that it is a joke my partner makes, where if I am tired and I phone in a Shelf Life article because I don’t have the time or energy to come up with something I’m proud of, then that is the article that will get the most views and engagement. And meanwhile the articles I think are the best of my work get less engagement and fewer views.
Likewise, anecdotally (or perhaps anecdatally) speaking (because I keep detailed records), when I have submitted fiction for consideration by various editors and publishers, I have received the most engaged responses on work that I consider less than my best—the things that I’ve written and then said “ah heck why not submit it, what could it hurt” instead of setting aside or sending to the trunk. The work that I’ve submitted that I feel is most representative of my ability is most often rejected without ceremony or comment.
I think it is worth noting that while I never comfort myself with the excuse that the editor probably just “didn’t get” my work or that it was “too erudite/complex/subtle” for them; but I do remind myself that writing may be perfectly good and competent and simply not quite right for that outlet or not to the editor’s taste. Even so, that doesn’t mean that a rejected piece can’t have another look.
My rejection routine is as follows:
Receive a rejection notice.
Wallow in despair for anywhere from 30 minutes to 6 hours.
Set the piece aside for a day or two to make sure I’m over step 2.
Re-read the piece as critically as possible to see how I can improve it over last time I revised or edited the piece.
Send it out to the next promising market for it.
Work on something else.
Step 6 is critical because working on something else generates more work for future submissions but also is writing practice that improves my skill with the craft (so that I will be primed for the next time step 4 comes around) and generates work that will need to be revised, critiqued, and edited before submission, which gives me practice on all those things, too. Now how much would you pay? But wait, there’s more: Step 6 also gives me distance from the piece that’s out doing the rejection tango and finally it generates a new piece against which I can compare my former work to see if I’m improving.
Always be working on new stuff, no matter what you write. This isn’t only advice for writers of shortform fiction or poems. This is true for novels, too. If you’ve got queries out and you’re twiddling thumbs, work on something else while you wait. That way if you decide to do a step 4—a re-read and revise—between rounds of queries, you’ll have improved skills to put to it. (You probably will not read and revise between each query or you’d never stop picking at that manuscript.)
There are two ways to get better at anything: Study and practice. To get better at writing, you can study the writing of others (a fun activity known as “reading”) or you can practice writing your own stuff. Nobody’s writing is so good that it can’t improve with study or practice. Nobody’s writing is so bad that it can’t improve with study or practice. No paradox there.
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