In this Monday’s Rejecting Rejection, author Shawn K. Stout transports us back to her adolescence and the first time she came face-to-face with rejection.
Christian Slater, Annie Hall, Rejection, and Me
(Not Necessarily in That Order)
By Shawn K. Stout
Me and rejection? We’re pretty chummy. I mean, the thing has been hanging around me for ages and never strays too far. A master of disguise, rejection shows its hideous face in many forms—a disappointing email from an editor or agent, a disapproving look, a sharp tone, a red pen, a closed door. But its bite—those teeth! —always feels the same.
In the tenth grade, I was in the Kiwanis Key Club. There are only three things I remember about this experience: 1) car wash fundraisers, 2) making a hat for Willard Scott to wear on the Today Show (he never wore it), and 3) cute boy named Christian something. I don’t know his last name, but let’s pretend it was Slater. You know, just for kicks.
So, I met Christian Slater at the annual Kiwanis Youth Leadership conference. “Conference.” It was a weekend party in which a billion teenagers overtook a Marriott hotel under the guise of learning about service leadership. But in truth, it was about riding the elevators until 3 a.m. and trying to get enough moxie to talk to boys. I was particularly ill-equipped for the latter. But, I was quite good at getting my nervy friend to do the heavy lifting and ask if this one cute boy would dance with me.
Did I mention there was a dance? Oh, there was. There was totally a dance.
It was on the last night of the conference and was kind of a big deal, as I remember.
I also remember that vests were big back then, and I was wearing one that I had bought at the Salvation Army thrift store. It had gold buttons even. I might’ve also been wearing a slouchy bolero, just saying. This was the peak of my Annie Hall fixation.
Apparently Christian Slater was no fan of me. Or Annie Hall. La-di-da, la-di-da, la la. Anyway, my friend with gumption had talked to Mr. Slater and asked him if he would dance with me, and he supposedly said he would. The scene was set, and when the DJ finally played something from Electric Light Orchestra, my friend from across the room, alongside Mr. Slater, pointed to me at the edge of the dance floor. He squinted and leaned forward, that boy did, and I remember this next part with vivid and painful detail: upon seeing me, he shook his head and abruptly reversed course.
That feeling, right there. Do you know the one? That crushing ache? The one right there in the middle of my chest that tells me in that moment I’m unloved by the universe? That’s what rejection feels like to me. Every. Single. Time.
Which is why I can’t figure out how I ended up wanting to be a writer, to take my little made-up notions that cling like spider webs inside my head and put them out there in the big, wide world for people to read, or not read, or hate. Or reject.
Showing someone what you’ve written can feel like turning your heart inside out and presenting it to a stranger on a dinner plate. It’s not for sissies, let me tell you. It takes immense courage. It takes a steel cage around the heart. It takes belief in yourself.
Things that, for me, have at times been in short supply.
For more than a decade, I denied to myself that I wanted to be a writer. I kept it hidden away beneath layers of insecurity blankets, where I could forget about it and where no one else would see. Because admitting that truth meant I had to actually do something, like, you know, write. Words. And if I did that, if I wrote words, then someone else would eventually have to read the words. And what if the words weren’t any good? What if I was a big fat failure? Wouldn’t it be easier to just not try and go on pretending? Answer: Yes, it most certainly would.
But one evening, after a plate of fried wontons, I found some wise advice.
So, eventually I tried. I wrote. Lots of words. Which I nervously showed to a couple of people. Publishing-type people. And got enough rejections to fill a schooner. They Christian-Slater-hurt. Honestly. I mean I might as well have still been wearing that slouchy bolero.
But the surprising thing about those rejections was that they had little staying power—the sting from their bite didn’t last. Whether the hurt was offset by the joy of my newfound creative self, I don’t know. Or maybe hearing writers, whom I greatly admire, talk about their own rejections along the journey to getting published acted as a kind of anesthetic. Group failure is slightly more comforting than solitary failure, by my account.
This was part of the process, they told me. Get used to it. One well-meaning friend quoted T.S. Eliot: “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
Well, there you go.
So I kept writing, just as they had. And they were right, as it turned out. Because I eventually got one of my books published, and then a couple more followed.
And yet, amid successes, rejection inevitably reappears as hideous as ever. It lurks behind the draperies, ready to take a bite. It will not go away; no matter how many affirmations I receive. And it hurts. Still, it hurts.
This is part of the process. Get used to it. Yeah, well, my first instinct is still to pull down that bolero over my eyes and retreat from the dance floor, like I did back in tenth grade. But then again, if I did, I’d miss the dance—a mistake that I am not about to repeat.
Shawn K. Stout is the author of the Penelope Crumb series (Philomel/Penguin) for young readers as well as the Not-So-Ordinary Girl series (Aladdin/Simon & Schuster). She has a MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Maryland with her family and more dirty dishes than you would believe.
Brilliantly said!