the end of a long, dry era
I received an acceptance last night for a novella I wrote in 2019 and 2020. After many years of rejections and uncertainty, it finally has a home.
This novella is important to me because it is the first thing I wrote after deciding not to give in to my fears of inadequacy. It is something I wrote to prove to myself that I could. And it is incredibly validating and freeing to know that someone beyond myself can find value in it.
Many years ago, when I first started taking my writing seriously, I wrote science fiction. I was way more successful than most beginners, and sold several stories at professional rates in my first years of practice. But then, calamity struck. I began to read literature, and there was no turning back. I lost all interest in sci-fi, or any genre fiction at all. My goals and writing style completely changed, and I went from publishing sci-fi stories regularly to publishing literary stories never.
As the years went by, I knew that I was improving. I could look at my current writing and see that it was miles beyond the hack sci fi I’d been writing before. But there was no results to validate this belief. Year after year went by, and my stories sat unread on my hard drive. I began to think that if I’d stuck to sci fi I probably would have been a successful writer by now. But I knew there was no going back. I could only try to write what I loved to read, and I loved to read art.
Then, further calamity. In 2017 and 18 I read the books of W.G Sebald, and was so overwhelmed by their subtlety and beauty and power that I completely rethought my entire existence as a writer. Those books were to me, so incredibly out of reach, so impossibly good, that I knew I could never write anything like them. The mountain I’d thought I’d been climbing had just turned out to be a small hill at the base of Everest. This perspective shift was devastating.
And things began to add up. What was I doing? Why did I think I could write real literature? Why did I think I, who had no education, and no kind of life experiences to pull from, why did I think I could create art? No one wanted to publish any of my stories–wasn’t it clear? I had panic-filled, sickening days where I began to believe that my entire perception of myself was a hallucination, and that I was not talented, or skilled, but in fact was only completely mediocre and would never be anything more than average, that I was just another one of millions poking at a keyboard fancying myself a ‘writer.’ I began to suspect I was afflicted with delusions of grandeur and that everyone around me only humored me by praising my completely banal, average, and self-indulgent writing. I, for a moment, felt a cold emptiness, and a complete helplessness as if floating in a dead void. If I am not good at writing, I thought, then I am nothing.
After reading Sebald’s books, I did not write for nearly a year. Everything I had written and everything I tried to write seemed pointless, pathetic pretensions by comparison.
Then, in mid 2019 I read another book that changed my life. The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard.
The Loser is a 200 pages long stream of consciousness rant by a bitter pianist who has given up playing piano because he can not be the best. It is clear that he is skilled, but because he studied with Glenn Gould, and was completely blown away by Gould’s talent, which the narrator felt was beyond anything he himself could achieve, he gave up piano and over the course of the novel completely debased and humiliated his own talent in the face of his bitter frustration. He, the narrator, could have done just fine as a pianist, he was talented, even one of the best. But because he was not the best, he gave up.
As I read this book and shook my head at such ridiculous behavior, I realized I myself was behaving like that. Sebald was my Gould. I was giving up, for the same petulant reasons as the narrator of The Loser. Some missing piece clicked back into place then, and I decided that I would not be a loser. I decided that even if I could never reach the heights of Sebald’s perfection, I could still keep climbing up the mountain. I decided then, that I would attempt to write in a style inspired by Sebald’s books, just to see if I could.
And the result of that attempt is the novella which was just accepted at Writing Disorder.
Sebald killed me, but Bernhard brought me back to life. And an ironic coincidence is that the only reason I read Bernhard’s books in the first place is because Sebald had listed him as an important influence on his work. Even further irony is that lately I have been writing in a style inspired by Bernhard, and have had one of those stories accepted to a lit magazine as well, the first short story I’ve had accepted in my literary style. Shortly after that, 3 more were accepted, all forthcoming in the coming weeks.
It’s been ten years since I was publishing sci fi regularly. But, all that time I have been building up to this. I have not been waiting around, I have been sharpening my edges and pushing ever onward.
I may not be Sebald, but I’ve absorbed a piece of him, and I have absorbed a piece of Bernhard as well. As long as I can keep adding to myself, I see no reason to stop.
