Rejection’s Gift
Divine dissatisfaction.
WE WRITERS tend not to give rejection the love or respect it deserves. We speak ill of it, as if it’s a malevolent demon, a destructive force, an uninvited guest that ruins our party. We revile it. We curse it. We reject it. Because rejection is a damnable, despicable thing that seemingly aims to only hurt and hinder. It gives us no warmth, no love, and we writers need love; in fact we don’t just need love—we need love in bounteous, fulsome heaps. We want editors to gush over our words like a teenager with a crush. We want readers to slather us with adoration.
Or that’s what we might think. Love, the purest kind of acceptance, plays a vital, necessary, and nourishing role in creation because writers, not unlike children, become more secure in the threatening terrain of the world with the more love and support they receive. That trust in the world, in oneself, can lead to creative risk-taking and bold exploration, but it can also tip into a self-satisfaction that breeds a complacent, even slothful approach, which is one of the seven deadly sins not only in a religious sense, but in a creative sense as well.
Sloth grew out of the Latin term acedia, which means “without care.” Acedia initially referred to monks who became lazy in their duties to God because they had begun to lack wonder; they preferred idle distractions, selfindulgent pleasures, instead of working to cultivate the “seven gifts of grace” given by the Holy Ghost: wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude, and fear of the Lord. The implication is that those afflicted by acedia needed to feel God’s thunder and lightning—his rejection—to jolt them from their inert tendencies so that they would serve a higher purpose through a more diligent attention to their sacred tasks, no matter how uncomfortable or unpleasurable they might be. Overcoming acedia, according to Evagrius Ponticus, one of the most influential theologians in the late-fourth-century church, brought one closer to God.
The paradox is that the deepest faith, as with the deepest type of creativity, finds a strange comfort in the discomfort of serving a higher purpose. There’s a famous story, found in Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (Random
House, 1991), about an encounter between the two dancers and choreographers Agnes de Mille and Martha Graham. De Mille, who believed that much of her best work had been ignored by critics, was dispirited because the musical Oklahoma!, which she had choreographed, had become a popular sensation, whereas she thought it was only “fairly good” at best. At their first meeting, de Mille told Graham that when she viewed her own work, she saw only “its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities.”
“I am not pleased or satisfied,” said de Mille.
“No artist is pleased,” Graham replied.
“But then there is no satisfaction?” “No satisfaction whatever at any time,” Graham said. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
It is an odd, discordant concept to have a dissatisfaction that is divine in nature. This isn’t a dissatisfaction that is the result of typical artistic self-loathing or self-doubt. It is not a dissatisfaction created by a demanding perfectionism that aims to please others. Graham’s dissatisfaction is divine, the result of the artist’s drive to create something that reaches empyreal heights. Faith in a religion or belief in God isn’t the issue here but rather the notion of creating a work that is sublime. In aesthetics the word sublime refers to the conjunction of two opposed feelings, the pleasurable anxiety we experience when confronting things that inspire awe—“a feeling of respect or reverence mixed with dread and wonder, often inspired by something majestic or powerful,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.
Graham spoke of dance with such religiosity. She viewed the body as a “sacred garment” and dancers as “messengers of the gods.” In her striving to create a sublime work, a work that is elevated, exalted, lofty, beyond the mediocrity of the human realm, Graham’s state of “blessed unrest” propels and animates the artist—attuning her to life in a way that others cannot be if they reside in the more slothful contentedness of satisfaction.
Such “blessed unrest” is a powerful force that springs from deep within, but it is also a gift that rejection bestows on us because rejection teaches us to hone a sensibility of divine dissatisfaction. If handled properly, without knee-jerk chagrin or defensiveness, rejection can lift us beyond the childlike state of looking for approbation and allow us to see our work in a bigger sphere, from a multiplicity of perspectives. The “blessed unrest” that rejection gives us sparks a perpetual questioning, an expansion of our senses, and forces us to confront our resolve.
We have to ask what’s missing in a story or poem. We have to probe our work to see if it lives up to our vision. We have to question the vision itself. Are we willing to buck the opinion of others to realize our concept of a work? Do we compromise in order to find acceptance, or does rejection illuminate another path altogether? Does rejection weaken us and make us buckle under its weight, or does it motivate us to go deeper into our work and push harder?
THERE’S an old saying: “The strongest fish is the one that swims upstream.” Rejection’s gift is that it gives us something to push against, a necessary pressure that can help a writer sharpen focus, define vision, and accept (and perhaps even relish) the discomforts required to make a work better.
Literary history is, of course, filled with authors who have persisted in the face of rejection. One of the editors who rejected Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick asked if the whale could be deleted and if the captain could instead be “struggling with a depravity toward young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens.” Madeleine L’Engle faced a crisis as a midlife, struggling writer when A Wrinkle in Time was repeatedly rejected because it dealt with the problem of evil and was thought to be too difficult for children. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was rebuffed for its “frenetic and scrambled prose.” Marlon James received seventy-eight rejections for his novel John Crow’s Devil (Akashic Books, 2005). He even went so far as to destroy the manuscript but was able to retrieve it from his e-mail archives. “There was a time I actually thought I was writing the kind of stories people didn’t want to read,” James said, and he briefly abandoned writing.
Rejection can lacerate the soul like few other things, and at its worst it can lead to self-rejection, especially if you have not yet been published and you don’t consider yourself part of the publishing world’s “in-crowd.” Rejection can feel like not just one person rejecting you, but an entire conspiracy of all the universe’s forces. Fear of rejection is in our cells—we don’t want to be expelled from our tribe. We want to belong. Evolutionary psychologists assume the brain developed an early warning system to alert us when we were at risk of ostracism, which is why rejection can feel like physical pain. But at its best, rejection can give you a more rigorous stringency so that not even the smallest piece of dreck can sneak into a sentence.
Ernest Hemingway said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” Rejection is the hammer that builds a good shit detector and the screwdriver that tightens the screws when it falls out of maintenance. The urge of the child who creates something and then runs to a parent seeking praise never truly leaves us, and that urge explains submitting a story before it has been properly churned through a good shit detector. When I read stories for my literary journal, 100 Word Story, most of the stories that get rejected aren’t necessarily bad ideas or horribly written; they just need further revision. In other words they’ve been written with too much satisfaction. I can feel the writer’s complacency, the writer’s acedia, the writer’s inability to
face the uncomfortableness necessary to take the story to the next level.
I confess that I am susceptible to submitting a story before its time as well, even when I think I’ve thoroughly and diligently revised it. After I receive a round of rejections, I’ll reread my story, and I almost always spot areas that need improvement, if not reimagining. I chastise myself for submitting such flabby, subpar work. I’m disturbed that my shit detector worked so poorly. Yet, at the same time, I’m grateful that rejection served to intensify my efforts and open a door for me to go deeper into the story. Rejection is my best revision tool in the end.
Zadie Smith advises writers to resign themselves “to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.” Perhaps “never” is an overstatement, for we need satisfaction to put our work, ourselves, into the world. Or maybe it’s that “divine dissatisfaction” leads to a different type of satisfaction.
Martha Graham found her truest satisfaction in the assiduousness of practice, which for her was akin to religious observance. Practice meant “to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire” in an effort to overcome the primary sin she knew: mediocrity. For Graham, practice was “a means of inviting the perfection desired.” This type of practice doesn’t serve to shape your work into a form that pleases others so that it will get published. This type of practice serves a higher calling, one that has no concerns with whether a work finds acceptance or leads to ostracization because it speaks to an a more elevated, even sacred truth.
Graham faced many kinds of rejection because of the revolutionary nature of her productions. She said, in the 1994 documentary Martha
Graham: The Dancer Revealed, “I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless, it is inevitable.”
The same thing can be said of being a writer. We permit life to use us in a very intense way. It’s a strange pleasure, this essentially masochistic pursuit, this endurance test, this endless reaching for perfection. But it is inevitable, or it certainly feels that way.
“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try,” said Sylvia Plath.
Many writers are cosseted by a world in which rejection hasn’t been risked, or they’ve taken the comfortable approach of disregarding rejection’s lessons. A rejection is an invitation—a peculiar invitation, a cold invitation, but still an invitation—to keep trying, to keep serving the higher purpose of your story.