In this week’s Rejecting Rejection, YA writer Shellie Faught shares her story about rejection coming from one of the most important places in your life: your family. Read on to see how Faught not only dealt with that rejection, but was able to find her voice in her writing because of it.
Accept Yourself and Reject the Rest.
by Shellie Faught
Rejection can come from anywhere. I learned this early in my writing career. My first rejection came when I naïvely applied to a graduate-level writing workshop and was told my work was not ready. I was rejected from all but one of the MFA programs I applied to. I kept a file folder stuffed with tiny slips of paper all saying no to the short stories I relentlessly sent to literary magazines. So by the summer of 2003, I had accepted that rejection was going to be part of the writing life, but I never imagined that rejection could come from my family.
When I packed my bags for my family’s annual reunion that year, I carried with me the embodiment of my dream – a leather-bound copy of the six best stories I’d written for my MFA thesis. Sure, there were only two copies in existence – one with me, one deep in the stacks of the school library where it was unlikely anyone would ever check it out – but my name was on the spine and my words were inside. Not only did I have something to show for all my hard work, it was also the closest I had come to being published.
I waited until my parents, my sister, and I were alone in the house before I revealed my prized possession. My mother and sister thumbed through the book and politely congratulated me. Then my father got it. He flipped to the back of the book, then stopped, read a few lines, and peered over the top of his glasses
“Page 102,” he said.
That’s all he needed to say. The last story in the collection featured a foul-mouthed protagonist and Dad had just stumbled across one or (more likely) many of his f-bombs. I’d written that story during my final workshop. Many of my classmates liked it because it was gritty. The workshop leader, a prominent author who had criticized my first year’s work as being overly sentimental, declared me the most improved in my class. Apparently, my father didn’t agree.
I took the book back and thought that would be the end of it, but my mother approached me, as I was packing to leave. She was concerned about the kind of stories I wrote. “These stories aren’t you,” she said. “Why don’t you write a nice story? Something your father would like.”
My mother probably didn’t mean for her words to sting, but they did. She didn’t say so overtly, but what I heard was that my writing embarrassed her. I hadn’t thought of my stories as not nice. They weren’t exactly Chicken Soup For the Soul material, but they weren’t unpleasant. Or were they?
That summer I was going to make a push to get my stories published, but my family’s rejection haunted me even after I left. I stared at a blank page and didn’t write a word. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Eventually I submitted a few of them to magazines, but that last story – the one my teacher and classmates liked – I couldn’t bring myself to send it off. What if my family read it? Would I embarrass them?
Four years went by before I wrote again. A friend invited me to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I was skeptical, but the rules seemed simple enough – commit to writing 50,000 words in 30 days – and I took them literally. On November 1, I faced a blank page. I had no outline or plot. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull off a thousand words, let alone fifty thousand. But I dove in anyway, my mother’s question still echoing in my head: didn’t I want to write something nice? Something my family would like?
NaNoWriMo is a wonderful thing for wounded writers because when you’re trying to write a novel in a month, there is no time for doubts or second-guessing, or wondering whether other people will like your work. Yet, somehow over that month, I managed to answer my mother’s question.
There was a kernel of truth in her statement. The stories in my thesis weren’t me. They’d been carefully crafted to the standards and tastes of my workshop peers, teachers, and editors of the literary magazines I dreamed of being published in. Writing them hadn’t excited me the way my peers’ reception of them did. In writing to win their acceptance, I lost my voice. NaNoWriMo helped me find it again.
I still look back on that month as the most fun I ever had writing. Whenever I sat down at my computer, I didn’t try to imitate the fiction I read and I didn’t think of anyone’s taste but my own. I wrote for myself. I wrote the book I wanted to read. The result wasn’t the “nice” story my mother envisioned, nor was it profanity-free for my father. I certainly wouldn’t have put it up for a workshop or sent it to an agent at that stage, but that no longer mattered. I had unlocked my voice. I’d regained my confidence in telling the stories I wanted to tell.
Since that first NaNoWriMo, I’ve gone on to write four more novels. Some of them have been revised, workshopped, and queried. Others are sitting in a drawer and will likely never see the light of day, but that’s okay, too. Those books are me. They are the stories that only I could write.
It’s been more than ten years, and I still cringe when I think about my family’s reaction to my thesis and my four-year hiatus from writing. I wish things had gone differently, but I know I had to hear that message – and hear it from someone I love – so that I could answer it.
Shellie Faught writes fiction for young adults and not-so-young adults. She has an MFA from Texas State University and her work has been published in Black Fox Literary Magazine. She is currently working on a novel.