|
||||||||||
|
Subscribe to the Absolute Write Newsletter and get the Agents! Agents! Agents! report free! Click here.
|
Win a 1-year subscription to Writer's Digest by subscribing to Absolute Markets-- all paying markets for your writing. Click here. |
|
| |||||||||||||
|
|
Hello? Is Anybody There? By Daphne Dykeman
I've discovered the worst thing that could happen to a writer, and it's not being rejected. It's being ignored. It happens when you send your precious offspring into an indifferent world and never hear from it again. "You'd think they'd have the common decency to at least use my SASE!" you grumble. Or was it lost in the mail? "Will they think I'm a pest if I ask? Or will they think that I'm implying that they're just too slow?" Those nameless, faceless, soulless editors seem to be toying with us, knowing that we can't do a darn thing about it.
I began my writing career with a dream editor who worked on the local paper. In truth, she was more of a cheerleader than an editor. She thought that everything I wrote was just fine-- not terribly good for a writer's craft, but very nice for the self-esteem. Everything I sent in, she printed. I had a good thing going, and I knew it.
Then she went on maternity leave. I sent the new editor an e-mail of congratulations and introduction. I never heard back. I waited for her response to the last essay I had submitted, one which the former editor had liked but couldn't manage to run before she left. Nothing. I sent in the last two book reviews that I had been assigned under the old regime. They never appeared in the paper, and I was never told why. I wish I could have believed that something was blocking my correspondence, but I did hear from her on one occasion when the check for my last review was half my usual compensation. I wrote her cautiously, choosing my words so they didn't imply that it was her fault. She responded that time, and she fixed the problem, but my manuscripts might just as well have been sent by smoke signal on a moonless night.
I wilted. My confidence, which rises and falls according to how much or how little I publish, nose-dived. My output slowed to a drip, and those few things I did send in nobody would take. Even my supportive husband saw that this was draining me and suggested I take a break and focus on other things for a while.
I didn't think I would ever write for the paper again, but I skimmed through it every Saturday. Mostly to complain that most of the book reviews came from the wire services and that the format had changed so dramatically that my style of essays no longer fit. Still, I couldn't stop looking, and after a couple of months, I realized that the editor didn't have a byline anymore. I thought I saw a second chance. What if I try again? If she's still there, I couldn't make things any worse by resubmitting a piece she first saw seven months ago. And if she's not there, well, I still had some shreds of faith in my little piece. I sent it in.
The next day, I heard back from a different editor, saying that he liked the piece and wanted to run it. The pure bliss of being noticed, of having a voice that someone appreciated, jerked me out of my rut.
I built on his friendly note and wrote back asking if they still needed local freelancers for book reviews. He wrote back "yes," and invited me to meet him and to pick out some books.
After the cold neglect of the former editor, I actually felt like a human and, more to the point, a writer again. I was revitalized, enabled, and affirmed. But with all these emotions came the dismay that the opinions of a person I had never met and hardly knew could affect my life and work so much. Writers, solitary creatures though we are, have to live and work under the constraints of other people's whims. Doing so without letting it destroy our confidence and other positive emotions-- well, that's the challenge. We at least need to keep a spark of hope alive during the times in the wilderness so that, when second chances come along, we have enough faith left in ourselves to grab them.
Daphne Dykeman is a full-time mother and part-time writer living in Saint John, NB, Canada. She has been and is now again a regular contributor to the New Brunswick Reader, and has a smattering of other publishing credits as well. Most notable are Chicken Soup for the Bride's Soul, Today's Parent: Pregnancy and Birth, babyzone.com, and, most gratifying of all, romantic fiction published in Woman's World.
|
Sponsored links 
Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer! How to find a book publisher |
Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007
Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
|
