Reflections on Rejection

you can't get rejected if you don't ask

I've accumulated a lot of rejections over the course of my life. I go through rejection phases. Seasons of rejection. I think I'm in one at the moment.

The first and by far the worst of these phases was the struggle from adolescence to adulthood, where it is the lot of many boys to be rejected by almost everyone in almost everything: jobs, school, romance, you-name-it. If those boys are not given support in that process they have a good chance of becoming the "incels" of recent notoriety, and roundly blamed by upright pricks of both sexes and all genders for how they turned out after our modern society failed them.

While I had no emotional support from my parents during that process, I at least did have some financial support. And I had a few friends who gave me just enough human connection to tide me over until I started to know enough and be able to do enough stuff that I started to be of use to some people, which didn't happen until my early 20s. Being of use is important.

One thing I've been reflecting on lately is how in that time I reached out for help to the various services and institutions, both religious and secular, that were supposed to be there to support struggling young people, and none of them were of any use. None of them seemed to understand that there was anything wrong with me, that I was struggling, that I was failing, that I was obviously not competent at life. I was told, effectively, to man up and stop bothering them.

This has coloured my perceptions of the so-called helping professions ever since. The social services so beloved of the left were as useless as the religious institutions belonging to the right, which means I have a lamentable tendency to roll my eyes when either group promotes their failures as the One True Way to solve the problems of humanity.

Ten or fifteen years after I thought I'd put those youthful struggles behind me, the cracks baked into my structure in the process of growing up as an undiagnosed autistic in an unforgiving environment broke open under various pressures, including the failure of my academic career and multiple deaths of people close to me, one of which I felt responsible for. My life collapsed around me, and this was also during the dot-com crash, so two employers went bankrupt one after another, precisely a year apart. I spent five years or so putting the pieces back together again, and in a way, it's a process that's still going on. We are all works in progress, some of us more polished than others.

The reason I survived those years was because I had kids, and would do anything necessary to be a good--or at least adequate--father to them. To do that, I had to survive. So I did.

There was a lot of rejections in those years, some of which were quite comprehensive. There are rejections that are rejections of a person's whole being.

Then there are the good rejections, the kind rejections. I've been turned down for roles, had writing bounced, not gotten jobs, even been dumped by lovers, and not felt any kind of assault on my being, despite the sadness such events inevitably entail. They were rejections delivered with humanity and honesty by decent people who acknowledged our common struggles with the human condition. It's not that hard. Or maybe it is. I've certainly not always managed it myself.

My rejections these days are entirely poetry-related, where I am a man out of step with the onward march of time.

I write formal poetry: mostly novels and novellas and stories in formal verse. To say there is very little audience for this is like saying the surface of the sun is somewhat warm. Any serious training in formal poetry fell out of fashion in my parent's generation, which makes it an uphill climb, particularly as my own work tends to riff on the motifs of the past.

I had a story in verse rejected once by a poetry editor who had never encountered the word "moil" before, which occurs in the opening lines of Robert Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee, one of the most famous poems in the English language:

There are strange things done 'neath the midnight sun
by the men who moil for gold...

It means "to dig in the earth." And I kind of expected anyone with a serious interest in English poetry to have happened upon it.

Some of my recent rejections have been practically comical. Any artist trying something genuinely new is going to get that, I think, although it doesn't mean that the new thing is any good. It just means it's new.

The trick to rejection--either the good kind or the bad kind--is to find a way forward. Just surviving and moving past the bad rejections is enough. The good rejections are an opportunity to learn.

If you're getting good rejections it's because you're not offering anything of sufficient use to the target audience at a price--in both time and money--that they think makes it worthwhile.

If you have the right target audience, and they don't get it, you probably can't change that. "We have to educate the customer" is something I've heard a lot in my work with startups doing new technology development, and my free advice to anyone in a startup who hears that from the marketing team or CEO is: you probably want to polish up your CV.

In a world where almost everyone has very low cost access to entertainment that is universally accessible, narrative poetry is a tough sell. It's only of use to people who have a certain kind of education that is rare today. This is especially true if it's restricted to writing, which has to be translated into living verse by the mind of the reader. That's a lot of work, and most people don't have the experience to do it.

Which makes me think that way forward for me as a poet is probably via audio-books. Poetry is speech in which the metrical structure over-rides the grammatical structure, and translating the written word into poetry is becoming something of a lost art. Audio-books bridge that gap.

I have an audio-book of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham ready to go, but having suffered through, well, everything, I struggle with putting my voice out there. This is what pervasive rejection in our formative years does to us. My voice is the only aspect of my physical being that strangers have ever complimented me on--and the thing I've put the most time into training professionally--and yet I'm hesitant to put it out there. Doing the voice-overs for these things is a weekly struggle for me, even though I know people listen and enjoy.

So this is my marketing plan for the new year: first, pitch Capuleft and Montaright--the novel-in-formal-verse that I have ready to go--to a few small presses, as I think there are some that might be interested and I'm still human enough to want the validation that comes with commercial publication. Second, publish an audio book of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham.

The latter will not be going up on Audible, because I'm a stiff-necked bastard who does not play well with our capitalist overlords. There are various indie alternatives, which I've dug into enough to know I can deal with. I'm pretty sure one of them will suit.

In the meantime, here is a rejected story-in-verse of precisely six hundred words that was written in a few days for a writing contest last month. The contest provided a theme, a genre, and an emotion. Contestants had six days to write a story of less than six hundred words. In my case the theme was "law abiding", the genre was "rom-com" and the emotion was "speechless".

This version is the same length as the original, but has five words changed to make the names of various characters clearer, as some of the feedback I got suggested people were having trouble keeping them straight, which was a fair criticism. There was also concern about the abruptness of transitions, and the lack of character backstory, which to me is the nature of the short form as practiced by people like Poe and Kipling, who were masters of it. We never do learn the "thousand injuries of Fortunato" that Montresor thinks he's guilty of in The Cask of Amontillado, and that's OK. The reader can fill in those gaps themselves, which is part of the joy of the experience.

On this theory of the short story, the author gives us everything they think we need to know about the characters in the actions they show us in the present, and leave it to us to understand from those actions alone what kind of people the various characters are, without further explanation as to why. This is very different from the modern notion that we have to show the readers what made the characters they way they are, understanding them through their past rather than their present.

At the very least, this experience has given me some food for thought on this dichotomy, which is what our rejections should do, if they're good ones: give us information that we can reflect on to be more useful in future.

The story is written mostly in what are called "heroic couplets", the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, not free verse, although I jazz around with the rhyme scheme here and there because that's what poets do.

This was one of three stories I wrote in the time period of the contest, just to explore the process. They were fun to write, so in that regard they were of use to me, at least.

It is the nature of rejection that "rejection begets rejection": a winner in the past is more likely to succeed in future because they have "social proof" that they are a good bet. A loser in the past has "social proof" that they are a loser, which is why most people don't talk about their rejections very much. You don't want to bring anyone's attention to them. This can lead people to think they're the only ones being rejected, which is never the case: anyone who tries anything interesting is going to get rejected a lot. As the meme says, this is also true of anyone who tries anything stupid, which is why life is hard.

I'm talking about rejection here because I think it's wrong that we hide it. And I'm not particularly looking for sympathy. Avoiding that appearance is another reason why people, especially men, don't talk about rejection: the modern world has given us an unfortunate concept of manhood in which being a man means not asking for help or solace. This is wrong. Manhood involves both asking for, and offering, assistance, to each other, as men. As Sir Terry Pratchett said in Nation: "Men help other men."

There are a lot of ways we can do that. One is by sharing our art, both our successes and our failures, and helping each other learn from them.

My Best Ex's Wedding
a poem of preciesely 600 words by TJ Radcliffe

"Just pretend you're dating her, OK?"
Fran said it in that condescending way
that used to drive me nuts. "Turn on your charm,
and Deb will look terrific on your arm."

A little voice had said, "Don't take this call."
I should've listened. "Look, do you recall
the last time that we saw each other?"

"I'm sorry what I said about your mother!"

I didn't say, "I'm homeless. I'm a mess."

The wedding was a destination: free
accommodation, food, a chance to breathe.

"I'll be at the airport on the dot,"
I said to her, before I could say not.

The island was a beautiful resort
and so before I'd met my faux consort
I headed to the beach and took a dip,
and couldn't help but let my best smile rip
when I saw a girl in full array:
bikini and mimosa, what display
of... everything. She glared. I went away,
only to encounter her again
when it came time to meet my fake girlfriend.

"I hate all men," Deb said, "but this is true:
right now of all the world, I most hate you."

"That isn't fair! Whatever did I do?"

"Looked at me and thought 'I'd like to screw
that piece of meat'," Deb said. 
						"Well, I might rue
that thought," I lied. "But we're the only crew
who'll make this wedding work for you-know-who."

"Fran told me all about you. 'He's a brew
of poison, egotism, and a few
still less endearing traits. For now: adieu."

I watched her go, admiring the view.

Like a man condemned I ate and drank.
I bowed, and danced with Deb: she was so swank...
She even smiled. 
			My ex said I looked awful,
as if I'd been engaged in things unlawful,
when she saw me in the morning light,
asking, "So, did you get in a fight?"

"Just with a whisky bottle," though I felt
the barbs of all the needling Deb dealt.
No way I'd let her know she made me melt.

"I need you to escort me to the church,"
and so I lurched through sunshine by her side,
wondering what woe this would betide.

"My fiance' has just run away,"
Fran told me in the cloisters, cool and dark.

I barely managed to choke back a bark,
a laugh. She looked forlorn and I was torn
by the urge to reach out for a hug
that no-doubt would be greeted with a slug.

"You've got to marry Deb," were her next words.
"Otherwise it would be just absurd:
all these people here, no wedding for
their entertainment. Such a dreadful bore!"

I stared at her in speechless wonderment.
My brain had set like ancient Rome's cement.
I thought a word that might mean "excrement."
I found myself confessing my lament:

"She's way too good for me. I'm done. I'm spent.
I have no job. I'm broke. I'm surfing on
a couch or two, and when they are gone...
the lonely, empty, endless street for me. 

"I blew the whistle on the company
over tests they faked. I couldn't take
all that they were hiding.
I've never really been a law-abiding
citizen... but their new drug would kill
as often as it cured. If I sat still
I would just be a putz, a useless shill." 

Deb came out of shadow, "Truly, Will,
I think I wouldn't hate a man like that,
if he was more than just an alley cat."

"Woof," I said. "I am a dog. And yet
for you I'd put away my ways, long set."

It was a choice I never would regret.