You can learn from everything

Continuing on my series about the life of a struggling amateur author, the other day I got a rejection letter from a competition. Another one, I should point out. I keep them in a folder on my computer, and the day I get an acceptance letter I’ll count how many rejections it took me to get there. I hope I do so before my computer crashes under the sheer weight of the rejections.

Of course, this isn’t fun. Some days it stings more than others. I was half expecting this one, so it’s OK, but I still would have loved to have been surprised. It’s a bit like being disappointed when your lottery ticket hasn’t got the right numbers for the jackpot. You were sure this time they’d be right, they just had to be!

All sorts of images tend to come to mind at this point. One of them is Sisyphus, a character in Greek mythology who was condemned for all eternity by the gods to roll a rock up a mountain, only to have it roll down the other side when he got to the top. Another Greek torture that comes to mind is that of Prometheus, who was also tied to a rock but he had his liver chewed up by an eagle every day (on a side note, who was the god in charge of coming up with these punishments? Seriously, they’re all really, really sick).

I’m trying to give this bad news a positive spin by thinking that you can learn from everything. That’s it: I just found another way that doesn’t work. I can keep on working on my craft to get better until I find a way that does work.

Whenever this happens, I inevitably think of a book I read some time ago. It was a gothic mystery story that had all the clichés you’d expect from a book of that kind: the setting was a dark abandoned house with a garden full of crumbling statues; the bad guy didn’t have a single redeeming feature, he was just pure evil. He probably didn’t even like kittens; the book wound aimlessly for 150 pages, only to have an information dump that solved the whole mystery in a 40‑page letter from one character to another (on another side note, who writes 40-page letters anyway? Even Jane Austen would have said ‘whoa, mate, easy on the literature, I’ve got chores to do, you know’); to top it all off, we got the shocking news that the protagonist was going to die, only to realise that he didn’t really die in the way we all understand that word, but instead just had a life-changing experience. Whatever.

Suffice it to say, I didn’t really enjoy this book, but it did teach me a lot of things that should not be done in literature: avoid clichés; careful with the pacing; three-dimensional characters, please. The bottom line is that you can learn from everything, even from things you don’t like or things that are hard to swallow. I try to keep that in mind to put up with the next time the eagle comes to pick at my liver, I mean, the next time I get a rejection. It’s also important to keep in mind that even the greats had bad days. I’m sure even someone like Gandhi farted and blamed someone else at some point.

I will end this post on a beautiful note with a poem that sometimes comes to my mind whenever my rock rolls down the hill again. It’s by the amazing Mary Kennelly and it’s called Today, from the book From the Stones. For some reason, I feel a strange sense of community when I read it, because it’s a poem we can all relate to. I’m sure she’s got her own drawerful of rejection letters.

Today is hard.
I don’t know why.
Today I cannot
climb out from underneath
a thousand little slights.
Today there is no colour
and no music in my world.
Today is hard,
laughter is a million
miles away or yet to come.
Today a tear is just
too hard to find.
Today I am too tired,
today I am used up.
Today is hard.