"Buy a Ticket"

Been thinking today about my continuing good luck in life, and with a little bit of awe and a little bit of realism. I had a happy childhood, was reasonably good in school, had lots of friends, gave birth to two healthy children, finally met my soulmate when I was 54, and have succeeded in almost everything I tried, except I never could learn to play the guitar well and have always envied people with a musical talent. I get along with most people I meet; I'm adaptable. I never won any big important awards, or hit a gambling jackpot, but I never have shied from sticking my neck out. There have even been times when I've been a little audacious.

When I started seriously writing I had no idea what I was charging headlong into. My 8 to 5 job had nearly ground to a halt. My kids needed less but they liked for me to be home. I liked being at home. We were thinking of moving. So I quit my job. I wanted to write. All my life I'd been a heavy reader, and I had grown disgruntled with fiction I selected. I remember clearly thinking one day at the end of an atrocious paperback novel, "I know I can write better than this." And so I decided to try it.

What I quickly found out was this -- it was hard! Everything I put down on paper sounded like a third grade creative exercise. It was not easy to say what I wanted to say, to say it clearly, to make sense of anything. I wasn't even sure what the hell it was I was trying to say, or meant to say. But it challenged me. I wrote my first novel, from start to finish, in four weeks. I gave it to my brother. He'd come to stay a weekend with us. He had a degree in screenwriting. He was the perfect first reader. He made it through about 10 pages, and said, "Well, it's not ready for publication."

I was crushed. I threw out that manuscript and started a new one. This time I took a whole three months, start to finish, and gave it to my best friend to read. She was so patient, sat there reading with me staring at her, waiting to see her reactions, and they disappointed me. She didn't laugh when I thought she would, and she didn't cry at the end like she was supposed to. She smiled at me as she turned over the last page. "It's good," she said.

What?! Good! That's it? Just good? Well, that was not enough, hardly the words I was longing to hear. I chunked that novel in the back of the closet with the other one, and decided to write short stories. I wrote. And wrote. I sent them off with SASE's inside manila envelopes. I got back form rejection letters. I pasted up corkboard squares in my office, and thumbtacked the rejections up there as they came in. I nearly covered the whole room with rejection letters. And then, one day, a little handwritten note was at the bottom of one of the rejections. It said, "Try us again."

Wow! I stared at the words. A thrill went through me. Somebody had actually read the story. I could even sort of tell that the corners of the pages were bent. And they liked it enough to tell me to try again. This was real progress!

One thing that was happening as I created this storm of stories and their accompanying rejection letters is that I was beginning to reread each one as it came back, imagining myself as the first reader. And each time I did that, I changed a little something, tweeked a word or two, moved a paragraph around, cut a sentence. Slowly, so so slowly, I was learning to rewrite. And what began also to happen was more and more of those rejection letters started coming back with little handwritten notes: "Too slow to develop." "Character lacks motivation." "The ending is too abrupt." All of these little bits of feedback helped me find my way to the story that finally, after I had already almost forgotten about it, convinced an editor to publish it, and to pay for the privilege. A whole $40. For days I walked on air.

After that first story acceptance, things began to happen a little faster. I was still awash in rejection letters, but every now and then, just often enough to keep my level of encouragement high, an editor would find something of merit in a story I had sent, and it would be published. These were obscure publications, with names like "High Plains Literary Review," "The Gettysburg Review," "Crosscurrents Magazine," what is called, grouping them all in a category, Quarterlies.

When I finally wrote a novel worthy of publication, it was these Quarterly publications listed in my cover letter that got my manuscript out of the slush pile. My editor was familiar with some of them through her work editing the Best American Short Story series for Norton. She told me this later, after she had offered me a contract for the novel that would eventually be called LILY.

So is that luck? In some ways, I think yes. But I also do believe that we make our own luck. I believe if a person sits on a chair out in the middle of a field wishing for luck to strike them they will go through life disappointed. It's like the old joke about the man who prays for God to let him win the lottery, week after week, prays again and again to win the lottery until finally God speaks from on high and says, "Buy a ticket."

You've got to buy that ticket. And you've got to keep on buying.

Onward ....