Talya Jankovits
THE DENOUEMENT: HOW DOES IT END FOR REJECTED WRITERS?
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
I have been having a hard time with endings lately. Poems, short stories, dare I admit, essays. I’ve been considering this a lot, what this could mean, all these unfinished pieces going nowhere, stuck in a no man’s land of beginnings and middles that lack any satisfying resolution. I’ve been considering the possibility that this is a manifestation of coming to terms with my own personal ending. I am only thirty-eight, which might seem a little young to be having the cliché mid-life crisis, but for all I know, I am quite nearly at midlife or even already passed it. And I’ve been mulling over this quite a bit, mid-life and crisis, the way the two are inextricably connected, though it shamefully lacks originality, and decided that’s not it at all. It is not a crisis, well, maybe it is, but calling it that gives it such a bad rep when really, it’s an earned rite of passage. A declaration of having been alive long enough, a feat in itself. Because that’s really what it is, what is at the heart of it. Having enough years to reflect back on and nearly as many, or less than, years ahead to allow any more delusions of grandeur. And the passage itself, transitioning from one stage of life to another, the sheer unadulterated collision of fantasy and reality, well, who wouldn’t have a hard time with that!
When you are very young, time is endless, beginnings are boundless and the endings so distant that they are quite imaginary and, in that way, full of possibility. But then, with seemingly little warning and too often a poor transition, the beginning is abruptly the middle, and the end is not so far away anymore. You are forced to reckon with the development of your own timeline because you realize the middle of your story—your life, should be far more developed in order to make those now not-so-distant endings, a reality. And maybe you were really trying all this time. Maybe you were chasing dreams. Maybe you were chasing and running after them for so long, that when you took a moment to run in place you realized you hadn’t gotten anywhere at all. That all you had to show for it was a lot of collected and futile sweat.
What I am trying to say is that I haven’t published my novel. Any of them.
Oh dear, you are thinking, another self-pitying monologue of an unpublished writer. Well, maybe, but maybe there needs to be more acknowledgment of what happens to the writers who don’t make it so we can all stop wallowing so much and admit that this could be a very real path for some of us. We spend so much time counseling new writers on how to publish, where to publish, and what to publish. We never mention the possibility of not publishing. Where do those writers fit in? How do we include those writers in the broader conversation of the writing community? How do we legitimize the writing that is rejected, especially if that is the only writing we have?
Recently, I attended a reading of my former MFA mentor. After the completion of her reading, I mingled a bit with other attendees. During which I met another of her former students who casually mentioned deadlines and I learned she was working on finishing her second book that was contracted for publication. She then kindly returned the conversation to me asking after my own books. My own books! I stood there, heat rising up my turtleneck trapping me in the worst of myself, forced to verbally acknowledge I had no books. I left feeling, oh there it is, full of self-pity.
I guess it is another one of those essays.
After this seemingly innocuous interaction, I found myself carrying around an immense amount of dread and sadness. It was unlike me, but these feelings gained momentum. Everything around me reminded me of my endless bouts of failure and rejection.
I was turning into a bit of a Debbie-downer. I no longer welcomed encouraging words, like it will happen, or your time will come. It wasn’t. It didn’t. It isn’t. Over ten years and hundreds of rejections were proving very much the contrary, and either I am not a very good writer and still don’t know it, or I am not writing very marketable stories, but either way, I was feeling acutely unfulfilled, and facing a stark reality. At thirty-eight with no agent prospects in sight, I am likely to turn forty, the stereotypical halfway point of an average life where we take inventory and evaluate our existential place in the world, having not accomplished the one dream/goal I set out to chase thirty years ago. Now what?
A few days after the mentor reading debacle, I read an article in Poets & Writers, titled Letting Go, by Brenda Ferber. It was the first time I ever read someone write so honestly and unapologetically regarding rejection. I felt seen for the first time and I also made the personal discovery that what I was feeling, was not only real but felt by others and a valid reaction to years of failure in seeing my work come to any physical fruition; I am depressed. I am depressed over having no book. (there it is, that self-pity!). In Ferber’s article, she explores her own struggle with accepting that the work she had spent so many years doing might never have an audience and how as a writer, she was working towards making peace with that. This! I thought. This is me. This is what I am facing. This is what I am struggling with. For the first time, I saw someone publicly acknowledging this.
I graduated from my MFA program at age twenty-five. I worked another two years polishing my manuscript for submission. I spent years querying it, collecting over 120 rejections. I radically revised it, and sent it out again. Shelved it. I wrote a second novel but put it aside feeling it wasn’t right. Then I moved on to a third novel. Once again, it went through the rounds and also collected over 150 rejections. I started a fourth novel, then hired an editor for the third one. I spent 1.5 years revising it and am back in the query trenches, back to an inbox full of steady rejection. Somehow, during all that time, I went from being twenty-five to thirty-eight, at the beginning to right in the middle. I reached a point where I stopped running and someone asked me where my work was, where my worth was, where my value was. At least, that’s how it felt. And all I had to look back on was a lot of worthless sweat.
I’m no longer interested in the narrative that I’m one step closer to acceptance. That my daughters are watching me persevere. I am far more interested in where, as a, let’s face it, failed novelist, that puts me on the map. What do we do with the rejects? Is it just a matter of time until we all quit, as Brenda Ferber was readying to do in her article? Do we write stories that will have no readers? Can we participate in the broad dialogue of writing and trust we will be taken seriously without a book of our own? What becomes of the artists whose works cannot do what they are meant to; communicate. If no one is reading the work, how does the writer grapple with the empirical drive to create more work, if that too might not ever be read?
I feel like this is where I come full circle. Where I remind you that I am struggling with endings—that of this essay, of my career or lack thereof, and that of myself. I haven’t figured it out yet, any of it. Like how to complete this piece or whether I should give up or if writing that is never read, matters. If there is a way out of this rut without quitting (because if I were to be honest, I don’t know that I know how to quit writing). If there is a way out of this feeling that doesn’t involve success because there is a real possibility for many of us that it won’t. Perhaps the ending is to admit that sometimes we don’t get an ending. We just keep on enduring. We just keep on writing.
Talya Jankovits, a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, has been featured in numerous magazines, some of which she has received the Editor’s Choice Award and first place ranking. Her poetry collection, girl woman wife mother, is forthcoming from Keslay Books in 2024. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and resides in Chicago with her husband and four daughters. To read more of her work you can visit her at www.talyajankovits.com, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram @talyajankovits.
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