When I dropped out of high school sophomore year, leaving school assignments behind for good, I discovered authors who spoke to me (Nelson Algren, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, Ken Kesey), and romanticized what a writer’s life was, what my life might be if I were a writer. Not an uncommon adolescent experience, I’m sure. Though in my case, I took the fantasy to an extreme.
Running away from home at fourteen and again at fifteen, I left my native Chicago and roamed the U.S., going for the adventure behind the writing, though not the writing itself. Throughout my teen years, crashing where I could — punk rock flophouses, girlfriends’ apartments, outdoors — and drinking to excess (like so many of my published heroes), I kept the dream alive that stories would magically work their way out of my mind and onto the page. But it wasn’t to be. Sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll — ready palliatives for my troubled and venturesome young soul — distanced me from realizing my creative dream.
In my early thirties, clean and sober, and still a wanna-be writer, I decided to try again. My “day job” at this point was performing music. Singing and playing guitar had been part of my life since teen years, and by now I had gotten good enough to make a meager living gigging around my latest hometown, L.A. Having few responsibilities at the time, and living alone, I felt ready to turn my solitary hours over to the creation of stories.
It was exciting at first. I wanted nothing other than to sit at my desk and write all day. But that drive, my obsession with creating stories, proved to be problematic. I’d be so overtaken by the world coming through me, the world on the page, that I’d spend up to sixteen hours straight attacking my keyboard. No sunshine, little food, infrequent bathing. It felt dangerously addictive, like the heroin habit I’d recently shaken. Prior to this time, I’d thought “the discipline of writing” meant carving out time to do it, not to not do it. In the end, it was too much for me. I gave up writing prose altogether.
Between my thirties and fifties, I stuck to writing songs. For me, they were like flash fictions set to melodies. Bite-sized. Less demanding than the composition of longer works. Moreover, they were meant to be performed for an audience, which meant leaving the house, overcoming a pull toward reclusivity that’d been developing in me since getting clean.
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Fast-forward to 2022 when my wife, Annika, became pregnant. It was all very exciting. I was going to be a stay-at-home dad, which sounded great to me. As it became clear that my previous job — writing songs, recording, and touring music — was no longer a viable way for me to earn a living, the idea of writing returned. It was, after all, an endeavor that could be accomplished at home.
I undertook writing a novel during the pregnancy. I did better with the work hours than I’d done in my thirties (not more than six a day), and meals (at least two a day), and bathing (twice a week?). I even got a little sunshine. Of course, I had fatherly duties as well, but at least half my time was spent spinning a very long yarn. Worried that I’d have no time to write after our daughter’s birth, I rushed doggedly to the finish line. As if competing with her creative act, the bigger my wife’s belly got, the fatter my book became. A first draft of the novel was completed just a week before the due date.
Up until this point, I hadn’t sought any feedback on my work. I had strictly moved forward, figuring that if I just kept writing, I’d eventually become a great writer. But now, with a baby in my lap and a “finished” book on my computer, it was time to get outside opinions. Accordingly, I made a list of writer friends and sent the novel around, asking for input, though secretly hoping to hear “wow, it’s so great!” along with offers of forwarding it to agents and publishers. But there was something funny about my actions, about sharing the book, that hadn’t occurred to me: I was emailing people a 100,000-word manuscript, expecting them not only to read it, but to give notes, too. And not even sending them paper, but a PDF. One friend replied, “It’s like you’re asking me to clean your garage.” Of the other responses, a portion were positive, but (lucky for me) there were enough notes about where the writing had gone off the track, where things didn’t add up, that I had to face reality. The book wasn’t great. Maybe not good at all. I had entered the beginning of the rejection and revision process.
Immediately bagging the novel, I decided to try writing within a smaller framework. Like, dude, you don’t have to go straight from three-minute song to three-hundred-page book. A few weeks later, having picked the carcass of my dead novel for anything worth anything, I had Frankenstein-ed a short story together. Foregoing the friend-feedback-loop this time, the “garage cleaning,” I instead sent it to literary journals. It seemed unlikely the piece would get printed in the New Yorker, but I thought, hey, why not start at the top? Submitting to magazines was a new game for me. Full of possibilities. Full of fantasy.
Weeks passed. The New Yorker didn’t contact me. No one else did either. Setting the story aside, I hammered out several new ones. Soon, I had a half-dozen short stories queued up in slush piles of lit mags both large and small. While awaiting responses, I wrote even more. The generic rejections that eventually came, one after another, didn’t slow me down either. I had invested too much time and effort to stop now. I plowed ahead, writing and sending, though rarely rereading (let alone rewriting) what I’d written.
A couple months into the writing/submitting process, an email came to my inbox that began with the word “Congratulations” instead of “Unfortunately.” It went on to say that a flash fiction of mine had been picked up by a little online lit mag, that they were going to publish it the following week. Someone out there actually liked my writing. Proof I was a real writer! Ecstatic with the news, I danced my then three-month-old daughter around the apartment. Once I caught my breath, I considered what it was about the story that made it worthy of acceptance. It was tighter than the others for sure. Said more with fewer words. Thinking this might be the key to success, I wrote new stories in a similar style and submitted more furiously than ever.
One day, amidst a slew of rejections, I received a personalized email from an editor containing suggestions of how I might improve upon a story. I was slightly annoyed at first (I was a published writer after all!), but soon saw the value in their perspective. They weren’t just offering opinions; they were giving genuine insight into what makes a story tick. What’s more, they wouldn’t have bothered sending a personalized note if they hadn’t thought the story could be published. After revising and resubmitting, the editor accepted the piece. I had gained a second publication, but more importantly, I had gained a new understanding of story structure.
I was still in a cycle of writing, submitting, and (mostly) rejection, but now with occasional editorial suggestions coming as well. When the advice made sense, and it generally did, I’d immediately set out to rewrite the piece in question. I probably rewrote half a dozen stories as a result of editor’s notes. Those stories, the ones I reworked, eventually gained acceptance somewhere. The editor’s perspectives, the generous notes they sent me, were helping me get a leg up, helping me understand various aspects of storytelling: setting, voice, character arc, point of view, and so on.
Once I had a handful of published stories under my belt, ones that I now assumed were my best work, I pasted them together along with other, unpublished stories, and began researching agents and publishers. For a week straight, I submitted my book to any (seemingly) legitimate entity seeking manuscripts. Two months later, and no replies — none whatsoever — I realized this wasn’t as simple as submitting to lit mags. It was a one-way street, and I was driving nowhere fast.
With no interest forthcoming from agents or publishers, I worried that the work I’d accomplished up to this point — writing a novel, picking apart the novel, writing stories, rewriting stories, gaining acceptance into journals — was all for naught, that I’d never publish a book. Though I continued to send my manuscript around, it was with ever-diminishing hope and vigor. It felt as though every time I clicked a send button, I was sending myself back to an earlier point in time, to an earlier me: younger and younger, until I was no more than a distraught child, screaming for a parent who never comes. When, eventually, a few replies did come — all rejections — they were like the rubber and glue kindergarten taunt: “Your book bounces off me and sticks to you!” I was stuck with a book no one wanted.
Reevaluating the situation, I considered how much was coming up emotionally around the rejections and lack of response — as if extremely wounded parts of me, younger parts that needed attention (parts that coincided exactly with my daughter’s age) were suddenly returning. It was all too perfect. It was, I realized, what my Buddhist teachers meant when they talked about “the arising of karma” — causes and conditions that trigger past traumatic events, making it possible to revisit them in a creative way. To learn from them, to heal them.
From then on, I worked more on the writing and less on the sending. Tinkering with my book, I revised and swapped out stories, eventually adding in a novella as well. At each interval, when the ‘script was in what I deemed to be better shape, I once again searched out agents and publishers. More tough teenager than helpless kid at this point, I was no longer harshly affected by rejection. The book really was getting better, and that mattered more than anything.
One day, out of the blue, a response from Ross Tangedal, director of Cornerstone Press, an academic imprint based out of the Univ. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, popped up in my inbox. Ross said that though he didn’t care for the novella (which made up half my manuscript), some of the stories contained within it, along with à la carte stories from the collection, intrigued him as a possible Cornerstone book. Excitedly, I conveyed my amenability to his suggestion of a resubmission.
As a back-and-forth with Cornerstone ensued, I submitted no less than three separate versions of the manuscript (including an entirely different novella) before being offered a contract. Once the contract was signed, I thought, that’s that, I’m going to have a book out! It wasn’t until an email arrived giving a due date for “the finished manuscript” that I realized there was more to the whole thing.
Returning to my book, the book they had accepted, I was appalled by how poorly written many portions were. I’d taken for granted that because the majority of stories had been previously published in journals, they were ready to go. Nope. If you’re a writer and you’ve ever reread your early, published stories, then you know what I’m talking about. I spent months revising and polishing, removing stories, adding new ones. At the due date, when my time was up, I sent the manuscript on to the Cornerstone editorial team. They wrote back with many helpful suggestions, the majority of which were grammatical (reminder: I dropped out of high school). Layout and design were completed shortly thereafter, and advance review copies soon came in the mail. Opening that package, I was over the moon. Finally, a real book in my hands!
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Fast-forward to now. I don’t send stories around as much as I used to but when I do, it’s without the hope and fear that once accompanied them. My concern these days isn’t whether a story gets published in a particular venue (I haven’t tried the New Yorker in ages), or even gets published at all, but whether it’s well told, whether it comes from an authentic place in me.
In my opinion, rejection and its accompanying pain are much-needed parts of one’s maturing process — not just as a writer, but as a human. All the rejections I’ve faced in my adult life — romantic, professional, you name it — come bearing gifts. For me, perseverance means the ability to make use of (so-called) obstacles. Not avoiding them, not pushing past them, not wallowing in the pain they may bring, but allowing them to disrupt my current version of reality, to learn from them, to show the world afresh.
Jake La Botz’s fiction has appeared in, among others, Mojo Journal, The Razor, and NUNUM. His music and acting have been featured in film and television, including True Detective, Ghost World, and Rambo (yes, Rambo). His debut collection of short fiction, Your Place In This World, is now available from the University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press. Oh, and he’s probably playing at a bar near you. More at www.jakelabotz.com
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 