Wednesday
To My Friend and Every Writer Who Has Been Told S/He Sucks,
I heard that you decided you're a shitty writer. I can't let that go. You so are not a shitty writer. I'm not sure who told you that, or how the idea got stuck there, but one person's opinion is just that--an opinion.
Do you remember the last flash of mine I workshopped? "On the Night South Africa was Effectively Eliminated from the World Cup"? You didn't "get" it, really. But the judge of the Sean o'Faolain contest did. She selected it as one of 830 for the short list of 22. It didn't win, but what a boost for my confidence!
Now, if I'd taken it personally that my friend didn't get my story, and extrapolated that I was a bad writer because of it, I'd never have entered that contest. Getting short-listed made me sit up and put my short story collection together. It has since been requested by a local publisher and we'll see what we see in regard to that in the fullness of time.
Do you get what I'm saying?
I strongly urge you to reconsider this notion of your worth as a writer, because there is so much joy you were having and giving in your writing. So much good reading of others' work you were doing too.
Sometimes those we admire and/or love don't get our story. It deeply sucks. But writers eat a little rejection most days. We are also are nourished by the words that yearn for their own existence. We are healed by the acceptances and encouraged by the praise.
There are a bunch of stories that only you can tell. Now, get back to work, dear heart, tears and all, and tell those stories.
With deep respect and very best wishes for the return of your pen!
Yours,
Liesl
About the Author
Liesl Jobson's flash fiction, poetry and short stories have appeared in South African journals Chimurenga, New Contrast, Carapace, Green Dragon, New Coin, Botsotso, Timbila, and Fidelities, and internationally in the Southern Review, Mississippi Review, Quick Fiction, LICHEN, Per Contra, Sleeping Fish, Rambler, Cezanne's Carrot, elimae, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Literary Mama, FRiGG, NOÖ Journal, Mad Hatters Review, Slush Pile, and Night Train. She is the author of 100 Papers, a collection of prose poems and flash fiction, which won the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award (2006) and a poetry collection, View from an Escalator, which was published with a grant from the Centre for the Book. She is the national editor of Poetry International Web, South Africa and a senior correspondent for BOOK SA. A keen single sculler, she's training to row around Robben Island in 2011.
(Photo by Monica Rorvik/ CCA).
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From Kenney Mencher
December 29, 2010 at 6:35 pm
I hope I don’t sound too Polly Anna, but, there are so many stories of great artists who were not acknowledges as great by their contemporary peers, Van Gogh, the guy who wrote “Confederacy of Dunces” etc. Also, the idea that greats like Babe Ruth and Tye Cobb struck out two thirds as many times as they made it home!
I think that a lot of people get attacked for their creative endeavors. It’s because people can be mean, envious, or just schmucks! I think that it’s just part of making art. I know that a lot of people think that I suck and hopefully just as many people think that my stuff is great or at the very least has merit. It’s really too bad that the people who don’t like something take so much joy in tearing down someone who is vulnerable and put themselves out there. I hope that whoever you are, you keep working! The only opinions that matter, are really the good ones.
From Liesl
December 30, 2010 at 2:25 am
We don’t know for sure that my friend was, indeed, attacked. And I realise that my heading lays blame at the person who expressed an opinion on my friend’s writing, but the recipient of the feedback may simply have found the encounter overwhelming.
I think it’s so often how one perceives feedback. It’s quite within the realms of likelhood that a sensitive soul is left feeling ghastly simply because one is critiqued. It’s important to me that we don’t turn this into a castigation session. There is merit in challenging our own response to criticism if it leaves us dispirited, wanting to quit.
I’ve had really excellent writers who are fine and kindly people as well as skilled teachers, but I was left feeling that I should take up dentistry or plumbing for fun. It wasn’t about them or their teaching. It was about me and my expectations of myself. I have unrealistic expectations. As a South African, I want to outshine JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer in my debut collection, while re-inventing the short form so that it will go down in history that I, and I alone, reinvented the course of literature. And part of this grandiose plan involves outselling JK Rowling while I’m about it.
Now, which teacher want to take on that kind of ambition?