Rejection is a test a beginning writer
must pass. He must learn to take it in
his stride and not become preoccupied with it.
Crabby and hung-up about it. As
John Clellon Holmes said to Kerouac when seven years of rejection began to
weigh on his mind.
Then there’s the indifference. Your success as a writer doesn’t impress
people very much. Unless you are a
runaway success, a succès fou.
There is a certain hostility towards a
writer when he does succeed. Who do you
think you are? The man of hubris is
punished by the gods. You mustn’t
gloat. You shouldn’t even be happy for
yourself—it’s unseemly.
You tempt fate by succeeding. Other writers are jealous, and they stab you
in the back.
Writers are quarrelsome and it’s not a
group of mutual supporters. Your success
is seen as coming at their expense.
If you don’t succeed, or your success is
modest, private, and hard to express in terms anybody will agree with, you are
ridiculed for wasting your life on a self-indulgent lark, on tomfoolery, on
childish pipedreams.
Probably you are a bad provider and feel
bad about that.
A writer deals with fear, envy, anger, and
depression as his daily fare, but shame and guilt are in there, too. You feel like a rotten bastard. For doing something you can’t stop yourself
from doing.
There aren’t any support groups for
writers. Unless it’s AA and NA.
One tends to overcompensate, to say you’re
not the last, you’re the first, success is failure and failure is success, this
sounds ridiculous.
It is ridiculous. All you can do is write a book called WE’RE
NO. 2!